The Way the Future Blogs

We meant to print this last week but time got away from us, as it often does. So here it is anyway. Maybe the Week of Heavy Hangovers is an even better time for its message.

When you set out to celebrate the New Year give a thought to what your drinks cost. Not just the jumped up holiday price you pay in your friendly local gin mill, but the cost to society. According to a study by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention every shot of heavy drinking by anybody costs society $2 for items like treatment for cirrhosis of the liver and other drink-related ailments, damages from drink-related auto crashes, lost hours of work, costs of jailing drunk drivers and crimes of alcohol related violence. They estimate the total cost — paid by all of us — is some $224 billion annually.

So Happy New Year!

A few months ago some fed-up Americans decided to let Wall Street know that they were a bunch of greedy, conscienceless pigs, and so they marched down that short, narrow — and crooked — street. It made the papers, and the next day there were a few more of them … and then more still … and then other cities caught the fever, and where it will stop no one can say. And I personally could not be more pleased.

Think it over. When was the last time you saw a spontaneous mass movement in America? We have seen plenty of the cooked-up kind, as where two super-greedy billionaire brothers give in to their appetite and hire experts to start a mass movement to cut their taxes — or a TV network beats the drums 24 hours a day for a “spontaneous” mass meeting.

This is the real thing. It’s the real people, the 99 percent of us, whose incomes are faltering or falling — or gone! — while the richest 1 percent among us are bending the laws and brining our legislators to make them richer still. Can that be called anything less than rapacious greed? It is, in truth, class warfare, an unrelenting effort to take away what even the poorest among us have.

Does anyone leaving a job need a $126 million (Gene Isenberg at Nabors Industries) parting gift? And he is by no means the only one — Eric Schmidt at Google got $100 million, and at IBM, Sam Palmisano stuffed his pockets with an unbelievable$170 million to ease the pain of leaving his job.

That isn’t just disgusting, it’s gross whole-hog piggery. It is one of the many battles the 1 per cent’s class war against the rest of us wins day after day.

If there is one thing we’ve learned in the past few years, it is that the very rich don’t care what happens to the rest of us. When Wall Street’s uncontrollable avarice came within a hair’s breadth of destroying the economy in one villainous spree in 2008 — selling people securities that they knew to be worthless and mortgage loans that they could never in this world pay back, and then evicting them for those unpaid loans — our government gave them nearly a trillion dollars — that’s $1,000,000,000,000 — of your, the taxpayers’, money to save them from bankruptcy, ostensibly in order to help the home owners. But the financial institutions didn’t help the home owners. They took the money and kept it for themselves.

What else have they thought up to do? Well, for a long time, American businesses have been pretending to move to another country in order to avoid paying what they owe America in income tax. Now they’ve gone farther. They’ve kept the vast profits of their deceitful offshore actions offshore. They have all the profits of their activities in overseas banks, where the U.S. can’t tax them for what they owe. (That’s another trillion or so.)

Ronald S. Lauder

You can probably figure out where Ronald S. Lauder’s $3.1 billion fortune came from — namely the relentless demand of many a woman to have Estee Lauder make her more beautiful than she already was. You would only be partly right, though. According to the New York Times, Ronald Lauder’s fortune has been greatly enhanced by what the newspaper calls “artfully sheltering” it from the tax collectors.

I imagine that many of us wouldn’t mind providing a few artful tax shelters of our own. Unfortunately Lauder’s methods of tax saving are not open to those much less wealthy than he. For the simplest of them you need to possess enough scratch to endow an occasional art museum. You then donate a few hundred paintings to it, taking advantage of the huge tax deductions for charitable giving — while keeping the paintings close enough to home so you can go and look at them as much as you want.

That’s only the easiest tax deductions. Others are much more complex than that. One stock deduction was so complex, and so wildly profitable, that the tax examiners couldn’t challenge it — but immediately prevailed on Congress to make it against the law ever to be used again.

Something else that interested me about that story was Lauder’s ranking as 362nd richest billionaire. That means there are at least 361 people in the world that have more than $3.1 billion in the cookie jar. That, in turn, means that just that group of human beings own a collective trillion dollars plus … again meaning that these few men and women own more than many a state that proudly vote in the United Nations.

Think you’re poor just because your annual income is below the poverty level? What about the people with less than half that? Why, they’re the fastest-growing class in America, encompassing some 20.5 million people, or 6.7 percent of all Americans.

That’s an all-time record. But keep going, Republican House of Representatives and Supreme Court. You can get that number bigger!

 

The most hopeful sign I have seen for the future of America is the flash flood of Occupiers that suddenly appeared out of nowhere, all over our land.

See, that’s what the Common Man in the Street is supposed to do when somebody tries to destroy the American system that guarantees his freedoms. With no help from any leader, that perfectly ordinary Man (and Woman!) in the street figured out for himself some important facts. First, that the Republican Party was committed to the job of making things very nice for the very rich and fornobody else. Second, that the only other party that ever got a chance to govern, the Democrats, were a lot more interested in protecting their individual cushy Washington positions than in what disasters were happening to the average voter. Third — sadly — that our president, although he certainly is a highly intelligent and well-meaning man, just doesn’t have the stomach for the rough and tumble of protecting the rest of us in America.

What all that added up to was that there wasn’t any person or group with any real power at all who was willing to put up a fight for the Common Man (and Woman!).

Lacking a defined target, the Occupiers struck out against Wall Street. We’re just lucky that they didn’t — as did many a European citizenry facing the same unbearable slicing away of every existing right, privilege, protection or source of income — didn’t do it with weapons in their hands. No, that’s too optimistic. They didn’t do it so far. We should bear in mind that if attention isn’t paid to their urgent needs the weapons might yet come out, as they did at Bunker Hill, long ago.

But we can avoid that. There is something we can do that doesn’t need deadly weapons. It doesn’t need a political party or a fire-breathing leader to make the mob go wild. We can do it at home, in a short evening’s time, at the cost of a few postage stamps.

We can use the tactics of the right wing to destroy those evil-doers who are now trying to destroy some sacred and essential parts of our political system, including the ability — and requirement — of Congress to cooperate fairly with members of opposing parties.

Sign the pledge! Send a copy to every elected Republican in your district! Teach them a lesson!