How Conservatives Betrayed Jesus To Create a Corrupt Plutocratic Economy

How Conservatives Betrayed Jesus To Create a Corrupt Plutocratic Economy

In recent weeks Mitt Romney has become the poster child for unchecked capitalism, a role he seems to embrace with relish. Concerns about economic equality, he told Matt Lauer of NBC, were really about class warfare.

“When you have a president encouraging the idea of dividing America based on the 99 percent versus 1 percent,” he said, “you have opened up a whole new wave of approach in this country which is entirely inconsistent with the concept of one nation under God.”

Mr. Romney was on to something, though perhaps not what he intended. [ Holly Gressley)] (Photo: Holly Gressley)

The concept of “one nation under God” has a noble lineage, originating in Abraham Lincoln’s hope at Gettysburg that “this nation, under God, shall not perish from the earth.” After Lincoln, however, the phrase disappeared from political discourse for decades. But it re-emerged in the mid-20th century, under a much different guise: corporate leaders and conservative clergymen deployed it to discredit Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal.

During the Great Depression, the prestige of big business sank along with stock prices. Corporate leaders worked frantically to restore their public image and simultaneously roll back the “creeping socialism” of the welfare state. Notably, the American Liberty League, financed by corporations like DuPont and General Motors, made an aggressive case for capitalism. Most, however, dismissed its efforts as self-interested propaganda. (A Democratic Party official joked that the organization should have been called “the American Cellophane League” because “first, it’s a DuPont product and, second, you can see right through it.”)

Realizing that they needed to rely on others, these businessmen took a new tack: using generous financing to enlist sympathetic clergymen as their champions. After all, according to one tycoon, polls showed that, “of all the groups in America, ministers had more to do with molding public opinion” than any other.

The Rev. James W. Fifield, pastor of the elite First Congregational Church of Los Angeles, led the way in championing a new union of faith and free enterprise. “The blessings of capitalism come from God,” he wrote. “A system that provides so much for the common good and happiness must flourish under the favor of the Almighty.”

Christianity, in Mr. Fifield’s interpretation, closely resembled capitalism, as both were systems in which individuals rose or fell on their own. The welfare state, meanwhile, violated most of the Ten Commandments. It made a “false idol” of the federal government, encouraged Americans to covet their neighbors’ possessions, stole from the wealthy and, ultimately, bore false witness by promising what it could never deliver.

Throughout the 1930s and ’40s, Mr. Fifield and his allies advanced a new blend of conservative religion, economics and politics that one observer aptly anointed “Christian libertarianism.” Mr. Fifield distilled his ideology into a simple but powerful phrase — “freedom under God.” With ample support from corporate patrons and business lobbies like the United States Chamber of Commerce, his gospel of godly capitalism soon spread across the country through personal lectures, weekly radio broadcasts and a monthly magazine.

In 1951, the campaign culminated in a huge Fourth of July celebration of the theme. Former President Herbert C. Hoover and Gen. Douglas MacArthur headlined an organizing committee of conservative all-stars, including celebrities like Walt Disney and Ronald Reagan, but largely comprising business titans like Conrad Hilton, J. C. Penney, Harvey Firestone Jr. and J. Howard Pew.

In an extensive public relations campaign, they encouraged communities to commemorate Independence Day with “freedom under God” ceremonies, using full-page newspaper ads trumpeting the connection between faith and free enterprise. They also held a nationwide sermon contest on the theme, with clergymen competing for cash. Countless local events were promoted by a national “Freedom Under God” radio program, produced with the help of the filmmaker Cecil B. DeMille, hosted by Jimmy Stewart and broadcast on CBS.

Ultimately, these organizers believed that they had made a lasting impression. “The very words ‘freedom under God’ have added to the vocabulary of freedom a new term,” they boasted. Soon the entire nation would think of itself as “under God.” Indeed, in 1953, President Dwight D. Eisenhower presided over the first presidential prayer breakfast on a “government under God” theme and worked to promote public religiosity in a variety of ways. In 1954, as this “under-God consciousness” swept the nation, Congress formally added the phrase to the Pledge of Allegiance.

In the end, Mr. Romney is correct to claim that complaints about economic inequality are inconsistent with the concept of “one nation under God.” But that’s only because the “1 percent” of an earlier era intended it that way.

What did these purveyors of the plutocracy, the people who got rich off the labor of millions accomplish? They have killed the American dream of upward mobility -  Harder for Americans to Rise From Lower Rungs

How Anti-American Conservatives Hijacked Rage Over the Economic Collapse and Swindled America

How Anti-American Conservatives Hijacked Rage Over the Economic Collapse and Swindled America

In his new book, “Pity the Billionaire,” Tom Frank turns his mordant eye on the unlikeliest political development of the Obama presidency: how the crash of 2008 served to strengthen the political right. The deregulation of Wall Street, championed for 30 years by right-wing leaders, had led to an economic catastrophe so frightening that the country elected a liberal Democrat to the presidency. Yet two years later, the most conservative faction of the Republican Party, the Tea Party, had taken effective control of the House of Representatives, the regulation of Wall Street had stalled, and the champions of economic deregulation in Washington had emerged stronger than ever.

Frank, author of the bestselling book “What’s the Matter With Kansas?” provides a pithy and nuanced explanation of what he calls the “hard-times swindle.” He spoke with Salon from his father’s home in Kansas City, Mo.

Early in the book, you describe the moment in the spring of 2009 when free-market economics had been so thoroughly discredited that Newsweek could run a cover story proclaiming, “We’re all socialists now.” What happened? Why did that moment dissipate?

I saw that cover so many times [at Tea Party events]. For these people, that rang the alarm bell. I think the AIG moment [when the bailed-out insurance behemoth used taxpayer relief to dole out huge bonuses to its executives] was in some ways the high point of the crisis, when [the politics] could have gone either way. There was this amazing public outrage, and that for me was the turning point. Newsweek had another cover, “Thinking Man’s Guide to Populism,” and I remember this feeling around the country, that people were just furious. Somehow the right captured the sense of anger. They completely captured it. You could say they had no right to it, but they did. And one of the reasons they were able to do it was because the liberals were not interested in that anger.

I’m speaking here of the liberal culture in Washington, D.C. There was no Occupy Wall Street movement [at that time] and there was only people like me on the fringes talking about it. The liberals had their leader in Barack Obama … they had their various people in Congress. But these people are completely unfamiliar with populist anger. It’s an alien thing to them. They don’t trust it, and they have trouble speaking to it. I like Barack Obama, but at the end of the day he’s a very professorial kind of guy. The liberals totally missed the opportunity, and the right was able to grab it.

Looking back on it, I feel like people like myself were part of the problem. We sort of assumed with the Democrats in power, the system would correct itself.

One of the problems with liberalism in this country is that it’s headquartered in Washington and its leaders are a very comfortable class of people. Washington is one of the richest cities in the country, maybe the richest. It’s not a place that feels the crisis, that feels the economic downturn. By and large, the real estate market stayed OK. The city continued to boom. The contracts continued to flow. What we’re talking about here is the failure of modern liberalism. At one time it was a movement of working-class people. The idea that liberals wouldn’t feel economic pain was ridiculous. That’s who liberals were. No more.

You write that after Obama took office, “market populism was the only utopian scheme available to disgruntled Americans.” There was no liberal utopian scheme that said, “Here’s how we get out of this.”

There wasn’t even a Rooseveltian scheme, which was not utopian but very practical. Just to talk about Roosevelt would have been fantastic. One of the research points in the book that I thought was really interesting … was the history of the bailouts in 1932 and 1933 — when the Hoover administration did a lot of bailouts. We don’t remember that. [These bailouts] were massively unpopular for the same reason they were unpopular this time around: really blatant cronyism. We don’t remember that a big part of Franklin Roosevelt’s campaign [in 1932] was to be against these bailouts. There were maybe five newspaper articles in 2008 that mentioned this pre-history of the bailouts. It just never came up.

It was like the party’s muscle memory of the New Deal was lost. With Obama the muscle memory of the Democratic Party is the Clintonian technocracy of the 1990s.

That’s exactly right. Their message was: The technocratic way is going to solve our problems. Just leave it up to the experts who are going to figure a way out. [Obama and the Democrats]  seemed to think they didn’t need to dirty their hands by making a populist appeal. They did a lot of good things — the stimulus package of 2008 was good thing — but they didn’t realize you have to sell something like that. They were like, “We know what the answer is: Keynesian stimulus. So let’s just do it.” They didn’t understand that this nation only adopted Keynesian stimulus spending back in the 1930s amidst this terrible wrenching experience, the Depression, and an enormous campaign [by FDR] to tell the nation why this was necessary.

If you don’t sell it — if you just do this spending — well, people have a lot of suspicion of government handouts. Government debt bothers people for very obvious reasons. [Obama] didn’t make any effort to make the argument. It was just “listen to the experts.” I have a quote from [Obama economic advisor] Christy Roemer where she says, “Things would be better if we listened to the experts.” And she’s one of the good guys, one of the best people in the Obama administration. That’s their view.

You have an interesting discussion about how the Tea Party movement mimics what was once the left-wing style. This seems to be the dominant mode: The right is saying, “We’re the revolutionaries. We’re taking on the powers that be.”

At first I thought it was a peculiarity of Glenn Beck, and then I noticed it across the board. They picked up this 1930s style and language, complete with utopianism, with this intense faith in an economic system that will solve all your problems and that represents you perfectly, this miraculous economic system … So [the right] is constantly talking about this infernal elite that controls  government, controls corporations, and controls the academy, and that we have to wrench ourselves free.

So maybe it is true that the Obama technocracy is the infernal elite. Maybe not in the hellish way it is portrayed on the right, but in the sense that these are the defenders of bailouts, the defenders of the system.

I wouldn’t go too far with that, because I don’t think that is a way of understanding our modern world that can bear a lot of the weight. It is true that the Democrats completely imagine themselves as being the party of the professional class, and that is an elite. It’s not the elite, but it is an elite. The Democrats very definitely identify with academia. That’s the home of the professions, where they come from.

Still, I think that the conservative idea of revolting against the ruling class by holding up the market as an ideal is completely backwards. There is a ruling class in this country. But the notion that the free market is an act of rebellion against it seems pretty fanciful.  I can say it stronger than that. It is absolutely preposterous.

At one point you talk about “a cognitive withdrawal from the shared world.” It seems like the modern digital communication revolution encourages this. “A cognitive withdrawal from the shared world” — that sounds like a description of the Internet.

This is where we’re going. You can now believe things that are demonstrably false and never be challenged, directly or indirectly. You can withdraw. That’s the end that the Internet is constantly pushing us toward. That’s what modern marketing is all about.

So it’s a technological phenomenon, but it’s also an ideological phenomenon, a product of the times we’re in. You saw this in the ’30s, especially on the left. People would be so committed to this economic utopia [communism]. They believed in it, and their faith in it was so great … It is a product of economic collapse. People are desperate. They think their entire way of life is crumbling around them, and they reach for … a utopian system where everything is explained.

This is the genius of Fox News. It is fun to watch, and if you agree with them, it’s very gratifying to watch — and on a level deeper than most TV entertainment. The message is “You’ve worked really hard. You played by the rules and now they’re disrespecting you. They won’t let you say the word ‘Christmas.’”

You finished this book around the time Occupy Wall Street started. Were you surprised by the emergence of the movement?

I was surprised. I thought the left’s moment had passed. That was almost exactly three years after the crash of September 2008, and it seemed like the expiration date had come and gone. I’m very pleased, but in a lot of ways the horse has already left the barn.

Is it possible for the Occupy movement to reverse the gains of the right?

I hope so, but I honestly don’t know. At the end of the day I doubt it. My liberal friends have been doubting the right for decades. They’re always saying, “There’s no way these guys can recover now after this screw-up. People will never come back to them after this.” But they keep coming back.

The right does seems to be a little bit on the defensive at the moment. The dominant narrative of last summer — government spending is the problem — has been lost. Occupy Wall Street has injected a change in discourse. People aren’t defensive when they talk about inequality.

Tell me about it. When I started writing about inequality 10 years ago, it … was not something for NPR Book Talk. It was not quite within the bounds of the acceptable. Now it is. And that’s a huge change.

The main thing that has to change is that Democrats and liberals have to be able to speak to the outrage, and that requires a complete change in the way they look at the world. The problem is that they’ve been going the other direction for 30 years. Ever since the right-wing backlash began, liberals have been making their own move to professionalism. [To voice outrage] would require them to reverse course. I would like to see that happen, but I don’t know how it’s going to happen.

I think one thing has happened: Middle-class or upper-middle-class liberals in Washington, all of a sudden we realize we are insecure. The system is not just screwed up for people out there who we sympathize with. It’s screwed up for us. Economic insecurity is now pervasive even in the professional class.

To be fair the economic stimulus did work - it stopped the economy from hemorrhaging the loss of 700,000 jobs a month. One third of it was tax cuts. It was Keynes-lite. It should have been bigger. We might have as much as a one or two percent improvement in unemployment if Conservatives stopped blocking every job creation measure.

To Protect and Serve? Occupy Wall Street and the hijacking of the First Amendment.

To Protect and Serve? Occupy Wall Street and the hijacking of the First Amendment.

A funny thing happened to the First Amendment on its way to the public forum. According to the Supreme Court, money is now speech and corporations are now people. But when real people without money assemble to express their dissatisfaction with the political consequences of this, they’re treated as public nuisances and evicted.

First things first. The Supreme Court’s rulings that money is speech and corporations are people have now opened the floodgates to unlimited (and often secret) political contributions from millionaires and billionaires. Consider the Koch brothers (worth $25 billion each), who are bankrolling the Tea Party and already running millions of dollars worth of ads against Democrats.

Such millionaires and billionaires aren’t contributing their money out of sheer love of country. They have a more self-interested motive. Their political spending is analogous to their other investments. Mostly they want low tax rates and friendly regulations.

Wall Street is punishing Democrats for enacting the Dodd-Frank financial reform legislation (weak as it is) by shifting its money to Republicans. The Koch brothers’ petrochemical empire has financed, among many other things, candidates who will vote against environmental protection.

This tsunami of big money into politics is the real public nuisance. It’s making it almost impossible for the voices of average Americans to be heard because most of us don’t have the dough to break through. By granting First Amendment rights to money and corporations, the First Amendment rights of the rest of us are being trampled on.

This is where the Occupiers come in. If there’s a core message to the Occupier movement it’s that the increasing concentration of income and wealth poses a grave danger to our democracy.

Yet when Occupiers seek to make their voices heard—in one of the few ways average people can still be heard—they’re told their First Amendment rights are limited.

The New York State Court of Appeals along with many mayors and other officials say Occupiers can picket—but they can’t encamp. Yet it’s the encampments themselves that have drawn media attention (along with the police efforts to remove them).

A bunch of people carrying pickets isn’t news. When it comes to making views known, picketing is no competition for big money .

Yet if Occupiers now shift tactics from passive resistance to violence, it would spell the end of the movement. The vast American middle class that now empathizes with the Occupiers would promptly desert them.

But there’s another alternative. If Occupiers are expelled from specific geographic locations the Occupier movement can shift to broad-based organizing around the simple idea at the core of the movement: It’s time to occupy our democracy.

This post originally appeared at RobertReich.org. Reprinted here for educational purposes.

Robert Reich is Professor of Public Policy at the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley.

I am afraid because of a few bad apples and the hyping of those bad apples by far Right extremists in the media like the anti-American Fox News, it might be best for OWS to move on to less public demonstrations. They have a great message, like this - The Average Bush Tax Cut For The 1 Percent This Year Will Be Greater Than The Average Income Of The Other 99 Percent. They should not let that message get lost in all the unhinged attacks against them.

Teacher Assessments? Fine, But Let's have Some Assessment of Corporate America As Well

Teacher Assessments? Fine, But Let's have Some Assessment of Corporate America As Well

It has been more than a week ago since I stood in Times Square penned in behind barricaded fences in a sea of tens of thousands protesters at the Occupy Wall Street rally. As an education blogger, I was on the lookout for teachers when I saw a man with a large yellow sign that read, “Teachers Want Corporate America Assessed.”   [ Schools Matter)] In the past year, three newly established grassroots education movements have been organized as parents, teachers, and citizens begin to focus on ending the reign of terror in schools. The fight, however, is just beginning.

The message was loud and clear -- it is time for educators to turn the table on the corporations and politicians and begin evaluating, measuring and assessing their performance. Here are some well-known statistics: 25 million people are out of work or underemployed, 50 million people have no access to health insurance and one in five children in the U.S. is living in poverty, with four of every ten black children living in poverty. Everyone but the wealthy has become part of corporate America's collateral damage, and the country appears poised on the brink of calamity. So far the protests have been relatively peaceful, but unless the deep and widespread concerns jar loose some real change, if history is any guide, the anger and outrage will not remained contained.

Despite the potential consequences of joining in the protests (like being fired), teachers are also standing up and participating in the OWS movement. Teachers have finally had enough. After years of blame for students’ low test scores in a country that has no accountability for the perpetrators of endless wars and the economic meltdown that make teaching evermore challenging, teachers are beginning to loudly call out those in power and to reclaim their voices that have been muffled by years of threats and sanctions.

Since its inception in 2002, teachers have known that No Child Left Behind was bad policy, but no one was listening or even cared. In fact, anyone who voiced opposition was accused of engaging the “bigotry of low expectations,” even though today’s officialdom now acknowledges the criticism of impossible testing targets was, in fact, true.  

Four years ago, Richard Rothstein of the Economic Policy Institute summarized his findings on NCLB. Research showed the damage to American education by NCLB included

    Conversion of struggling elementary schools into test-prep factories;
    Narrowing of curriculum so that disadvantaged children who most need enrichment would be denied lessons in social studies, the sciences, the arts and music, even recess and exercise, so that every available minute of the school day could be devoted to drill for tests of basic skills in math and reading;
    Demoralization of the best teachers, now prohibited from engaging children in discovery and instead required to follow pre-set instructional scripts aligned with low-quality tests;
    Boredom and terror among young children who no longer looked forward to school but instead anticipated another day of rote exercises and practice testing designed to increase scores by a point or two.

What a difference a few years makes. OWS has catalyzed a long overdue conversation about the abuses of corporate power and, it is the spark that has also ignited the pent-up anger and frustration brewing in the education community for a decade. The pushback against corporate abuse in all areas of our lives, including education, is well underway and gaining momentum. ( continued at link).

Teachers do not seem to be as intractable about making changes as corporate America or the conservative apologists who play fake populist games while they protect the lazy financial elite. The Founders invested the power in the people not the country club set.

Herman Cain Plantation Master Would Reduce Women to Slave Status

Herman Cain Plantation Master Would Reduce Women to Slave Status

Today on Face The Nation, GOP presidential hopeful Herman Cain claimed that Planned Parenthood wants to “kill black babies” and is part of an organized effort to commit “genocide” against the black community:

    BOB SCHIEFFER: Okay. I want to ask you, since we’re on the subject of abortion, it was at one point back there when the question of Planned Parenthood came up and you said that it was not Planned Parenthood, it was really planned genocide. Because you said Planned Parenthood was trying to put all these centers into the Black communities because they wanted to kill Black babies–

    CAIN (overlapping): Yes.

    SCHIEFFER: –before they were born. You still stand by that?

    CAIN: I still stand by that.

    SCHIEFFER: Do you have any proof that that was the objective of Planned Parenthood?

    CAIN: If people go back and look at the history and look at Margaret Sanger’s own words, that’s exactly where that came from. Look– look up the history. So if you go back and look up the history– secondly, look at where most of them were built. Seventy-five percent of those facilities were built in the Black community.



Both of Cain’s proof points are demonstrably false.

Cain’s statement about the location of Planned Parenthood clinics is wildly inaccuate. According to a study by the Guttmacher Institute from January, “Fewer than one in 10 abortion clinics are located in predominantly African-American neighborhoods, or those in which the majority of residents are black.”

Politifact previously evaluated the Cain’s claim that Planned Parenthood was created to “kill black babies” and deemed it “a ridiculous, cynical play of the race card.”

In 2004 and 2006 Cain led a radical group that produced radio advertisements accusing Democrats of wanting to kill “black babies.” Cain himself provided the voiceovers for some of the ads.

Cain would have the government have absolute control over a woman's body and basic rights. His view of women is in fact much like that of the world's worse despotic regimes, such as Iran. Cain would make a good ayatollah.

Republican pundit Roger Simon: Being ‘a little bit racist’ helps in GOP primary

House GOP's "Job Creating" Spending Cuts Destroyed 370,000 Jobs

Why inequality in America is even worse than you thought - A new study shows economic and social conditions in the U.S. rank near the bottom of the developed nations

Why Are Those Ordinary Working Class OWS Protesters So Upset?

Why Are Those Ordinary Working Class OWS Protesters So Upset? by Glenn Greenwald

I’m preparing for my book tour and book release beginning next week, on October 25 (details for which I’ll post shortly). But in thinking about the book’s main argument in relation to the OWS protests, one point that I think becomes clear is that growing wealth and income inequality, by itself, would not spark massive protests if there were a perception that the top 1% (more accurately thought of as the top .1%) had acquired their gains honestly and legitimately. Americans in particular have been inculcated for decades with the belief that even substantial outcome inequality is acceptable (even desirable) provided that it is the by-product of fairly applied rules. What makes this inequality so infuriating (aside from the human suffering it is generating) is precisely that it is illegitimate: it is caused and bolstered by decisively unfair application of laws and rules, by undemocratic control of the political process by the nation’s oligarchs, and by a full-scale shield of immunity that allows them — and only them — to engage in the most egregious corruption and even criminality without any consequence (other than a further entrenching of their prerogatives and ill-gotten gains).

Anyone who expressed difficulty seeing or understanding what motivates these protests revealed many things about themselves. None is flattering.

The rest at the link. Do some of the protesters seem to go too far. Think of it this way. You have a family composed of pretty good folks, but some of them get a little too upset or too emotional or dress funny or whatever their eccentricity is, that doesn't mean they are bad people or that they're wrong. The same is true for the OWS protesters. Don't fall for that old special interests.powers that be trick of letting a few eccentric apples define the greater whole.

    Republican Jobs Plan? Same As It Ever Was

That the Senate Republicans' ersatz plan is a merely a repackaging of a years-old Republican wish list is apparent from the description on John McCain's web site. It's not merely a litany of existing GOP legislation; the call for upper class tax cuts, cutting federal regulations and tort reform could have come straight out of George W. Bush's 2000 campaign playbook. And the demands for steep spending cuts, a balanced budget amendment, 25% tax rates for individuals and corporations and the repeal of the Affordable Care Act are just a copy and paste from the Republicans' Ryan budget, the GOP "Pledge to America", the Tea Party "Contract from America" and other recent conservative manifestoes mercifully consigned to the dustbin of history.

Of course, if you think you've heard this story before, that's because you have.

It has been these very same conservative economic prescriptions which lead to the great recession. Conservatives are now telling America that if you bang your heads against the wall one more time, this time the results will be different. If tax cuts alone lead to economic heaven we'd all be swimming in gold by now.

Republicans Say All Taxes are a Form of Confiscation. So What Is It Called When Corporate America's Sunshine Patriots Takes Most of The Capital Produced By Labor

Republicans Say All Taxes are a Form of Confiscation. So What Is It Called When Corporate America's Sunshine Patriots Takes Most of The Capital Produced By Labor

A quick perusal of Mt. Vernon's annual report reveals that its many corporate funders include the Ford Motor Company, Toyota, the Distilled Spirits Council of the United States, Altria (formerly Philip Morris), Coca Cola, the American Gas Association, PricewaterhouseCoopers, M&T Bank, Stanley Black & Decker and BAE Systems -- the massive, British-based defense contractor that last year pled guilty to criminal charges related to bribery allegations and paid almost $450 million in penalties to the United States and Great Britain. (Wonder what the George Washington of slaughtered cherry tree and "I cannot tell a lie" fame would make of that?)

In fairness, they all have helped preserve a beautiful historic landmark, but as I looked at their names, I couldn't help but think that they and their big business colleagues could perform an even greater patriotic service to America by working to create more jobs.

Naive? Not really. After all, as of last week, as per the website Zero Hedge and data analysts Capital IQ, 29 public companies -- including Bank of America, JP Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, GE and Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway -- each have more cash on hand than the US Treasury. And as Citigroup's Peter Orzag, former director of Obama's Office of Management and Budget wrote on July 13, we need to be "as bold as we can." Says he, "The right policy response is a combination of more aggressive attention to bolster the job market now and much more deficit reduction enacted now to take effect in a few years."

So why not make a sacrifice bigger than a nice hefty grant to Mount Vernon or the historic location of your choice and commit instead to finding employment for at least some of the 14.1 million out of work?  After all, the Republicans keep telling us these corporations and their rich executives and stockholders need every last one of their outlandish tax breaks -- because they're job creators!

Yeah, right. In May, when Fortune magazine released this year's list of America's top 500 companies, its editors wrote, "The Fortune 500 generated nearly $10.8 trillion in total revenues last year, up 10.5%. Total profits soared 81%. But guess who didn't benefit much from this giant wave of cash? Millions of U.S. workers stuck mired in a stagnant job market... we've rarely seen such a stark gulf between the fortunes of the 500 and those of ordinary Americans."

In June, a report from Northeastern University's Center for Labor Market Studies found that since the economic recovery began two years ago, "Corporate profits captured 88 percent of the growth in real national income while aggregate wages and salaries accounted for only slightly more than one percent." It goes on to declare, "The absence of any positive share of national income growth due to wages and salaries received by American workers during the current economic recovery is historically unprecedented. The lack of any net job growth in the current recovery combined with stagnant real hourly and weekly wages is responsible for this unique, devastating outcome."

The report concludes that in this jobless, wageless recovery, "The only major beneficiaries of the recovery have been corporate profits and the stock market and its shareholders."

A new study conducted for The New York Times by the executive compensation data firm Equilar found that the median pay for top executives at "200 big companies" last year was $10.8 million: "That works out to a 23 percent gain from 2009." The richest one percent makes almost 25 percent of the nation's income. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities notes that the United States has the worst income inequality of the 24 industrialized nations that belong to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development -- more horrendous, in fact, than Pakistan and Ethiopia.

And yet a recent headline on CNBC's website reads, "Firms Have Record $800 Billion of Cash But Still Won't Hire." Maybe they've never heard the Bible's exhortation that to whom much is given, much is expected, a sentiment well understood by George Washington, who gave up the life of a gentleman farmer -- twice -- to come to the aid of his fledgling nation.

Just a couple of days before Washington crossed the Delaware during that bleak Christmas of 1776, with real ice, wind and snow -- no soap suds -- Thomas Paine famously predicted that "The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country." Today's corporate giants, blinded by greed, oblivious to the despair around them, are doing much the same. That can't last.

By the way, all those complaints about corporate tax rates and hanging on to their precious loopholes, subsidies and Bush tax cuts? The Center for Tax Justice, a nonprofit research and advocacy group, finds "the U.S. is already one of the least taxed countries for corporations in the developed world" -- as a percentage of GDP second only to, wait for it, Iceland. Up the revolution.


Michael Winship, senior writing fellow at Demos and president of the Writers Guild of America, East, is former senior writer of Bill Moyers Journal on PBS.

If socialism's core principle is a collective, a small group that owns everything. The U.S. economy has thus been formed into a corporate collective. We are all forced to participate in this collective by having most of the value we produce in goods and services siphoned off to pay for the decadent unearned income of our corporate pimps. What happened to making a good product, doing a good day's work and being rewarded in proportion to our contribution for that work. Some people call this the plutocracy. In some ways we're back to the monarchs and princes of the 15th century where the peasants break their backs and most of the fruits of our labor go to the king or prince.