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What a complex web we weave, when our lives are ruled by greed. Verizon is an example of what corporate greed (the 1%) is doing to our middle class and vulnerable (the 99%). It is a highlyprofitable company, just gave its CEO a huge raise, but dodges its taxes (schools, roads, police, firefighters for the 99%), and to top things off is asking its workers to take cutbacks. So its workers are going over the head of the CEO, and look what they find.

Background

Verizon is a highly-profitable company. Last August (yes this has been going on a long time) I wrote in, Verizon’s Workers Strike Back At Corporate Greed — You Can Join Them!

The giant telecom company Verizon, currently raking in the billions ($6 billion in profits and a $10 billion dividend on $108 billion in revenue last year), while paying no taxes, is putting the squeeze on its workers, and they are fighting back. With all those profits, the company has been consumed by greed: Now Verizon is asking for $1 billion in concessions from its workers.

Verizon’s directors recently approved a 200% increase in compensation for the CEO, to $23.1 million. But Verizon continues to demand cuts in compensation from its workers of at least $10,000 a year.

Dodging Taxes

Taxes are how our government does what it does for We, the People and our small and medium businesses. Schools, teachers, police, firefighters, courts, ports, enforcing environmental regulations, enforcing worker safety regulations, enforcing consumer-protection regulations, etc. Verizon, with all of its profits, dodges taxes. In November’s How Wealthy Companies Like Verizon Avoid Taxes,

Verizon needs to open a call center, which means a few new low-paying jobs. They get local governments bidding against each other, offering all kinds of tax breaks if only they’ll bring those jobs there. Before the bidding war these jobs will be in the economy somewhere, but local schools, police, etc. will be funded. After the bidding war the same number of jobs open up but schools, police, etc. are not funded — and the 1% are that much richer. Company after company does this. Community after community, desperate for jobs, loses. Schools, police, infrastructure go unfunded. Just who does this help? The 1%.

… [Verizon] aggressively manipulated state tax rules, demanded subsidies, and used other methods to end up with a negative federal income tax rate, and receiving state and local tax subsidies in at least 13 states. When setting up call centers, for example, they offer localities the prospect of jobs that that will be created somewhere in US, where the company would have paid taxes to fund schools and infrastructure, but get the localities bidding against each other until they end up making a profit instead of paying taxes. (more…)

Mitt Romney may claim that he will work with Democrats “but he is no more likely to work with Democrats than Grover Norquist is,” Nevada Senator Harry Reid remarked to a group of reporters in the Capitol.

This news about Bain Capital being a pioneer in outsourcing, investing in some of the leading early companies that advised American companies in how to most effectively do it, is a pretty big deal on the face of it, but it has even deeper implications than many people realize. Being in this kind of business when the vast majority of Americans are so upset by out-sourcing is just one of Mitt Romney’s deep dark secrets that he has been trying to hide, and helps to powerfully make the case that Romney’s entire business career has been fundamentally at odds with the interests of the American middle class.

The other thing this news does is that it very likely ends the debate within the Democratic party as to whether it is okay to talk about Bain Capital’s business practices. There are still going to be Wall Street Democrats squeamish about beating up on this kind of wealthy financial company, but to defend a company that was literally a pioneer in helping American companies out-source jobs would be incredibly unpopular. Given how deeply unhappy voters are about out-sourcing, given how it generally is one of the top issues mentioned by voters in any poll I have seen over the last decade, it would be political malpractice not to attack Bain and Romney over this news, and any honest Democrat will have to understand and acknowledge that fact.

The reason this story goes so deep is that Romney’s entire political strategy is based on carrying blue collar white voters very heavily. Obama won 53 percent of the vote in 2008 while losing white working class voters by 18 percent. Even if you assume Obama doesn’t do quite as well turning out his base voters, to win this election Romney will have win that white working class demographic by at least 62-38 percent. Given how big a deal out-sourcing is to blue-collar workers, this story becomes close to a deal-breaker for Romney.

The Romney campaign’s reaction to the story is hilarious:

“This is a fundamentally flawed story that does not differentiate between domestic outsourcing versus offshoring nor versus work done overseas to support U.S. exports.” The very incoherence of the quote speaks to their strategy: try to confuse the issue, try to make it sound complicated. The problem for Romney is that this is a remarkably simple story: whether you call it out-sourcing or off-shoring (and I don’t see how the new word helps him), Romney was caring only about his company’s profits and not at all about creating jobs here in the U.S., and he saw out-sourcing jobs as a great new way to make money. (more…)

Robin Hood would not be happy if he happened upon our incredibly top-heavy modern world. But the new campaign to levy a tax on speculative trading would most likely have him breaking out in smiles.

The most lavishly paid bank CEO in America, Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase, sashayed back to Capitol Hill last week for still another congressional hearing on JPMorgan’s billions in speculative trading losses this past spring.

Dimon didn’t have much trouble fending off the few tough questions that came his way from lawmakers on the House Financial Services Committee. But Dimon and his fellow Wall Streeters may have much more trouble handling a new campaign — for taxing financial speculation — that launched the same day Dimon testified.

The goal of this new “Robin Hood” campaign: a tiny tax on the ever-churning financial transactions that have made the Jamie Dimons of our time fabulously wealthy.

This Robin Hood campaign for a financial transaction tax actually began two years ago in the UK and quickly spread to over a dozen other nations. The U.S. branch of the campaign that launched last week comes with some high-profile champions.

Actor Mark Ruffalo — a star in the hit film The Avengers — introduced the campaign on Tuesday with a video now bouncing all around the online world.

A follow-up came Thursday, when over 50 top financial industry professionals from around the world endorsed the financial transaction tax notion in a letter to the leaders of the world’s 20 top nations economically.

The volume of global speculative trading, these financial industry experts pointed out, now exceeds — by 70 times — the size of the entire real global economy, the actual goods and services that people use everyday.

This massive speculation endangers the entire world. But a tiny tax on every trade, the financial professional letter notes, could moderate that speculation.

The Robin Hood campaign is calling for a 0.5 percent tax on stock trades — the equivalent of a 50 cent tax on every $100 of trading — and a smaller levy on Wall Street’s heavier-volume, casino-style trading in derivatives, currency, and other speculative instruments. (more…)

There are responsible tax cuts—and then there are tax giveaways for the already really rich.

In discussions over extending the Bush tax cuts, Republicans propose massive tax giveaways for the wealthy while the middle- and lower-income families would pay slightly more, according to a new analysis by Citizens for Tax Justice (CTJ) and the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP).

The analysis compares the tax plans proposed by President Obama and congressional Republicans.

President Obama

The richest 1 percent would get an average tax cut of $20,130.

Congressional Republicans

The richest 1 percent would receive an average cut of $70,790.

President Obama

The poorest 20 percent of Americans would receive an average tax cut of $270. (more…)

It’s one thing when one of the world’s wealthiest capitalists argues that he is not being taxed fairly because he is not being taxed enough, as Warren Buffett did last August. But it’s quite another when a wealthy capitalist explains why the kind of gross inequality of income the U.S. now has is actually bad for business. That’s what Nick Hanauer did in a TED University talk last month about “job creators”: “In a capitalist economy, the true job creators are consumers, the middle class. And taxing the rich to make investments that grow the middle class, is the single smartest thing we can do for the middle class, the poor and the rich [emphasis added].”

Hanauer is a super-wealthy venture capitalist who was an early investor in Amazon.com and founded a couple of internet start-ups that were bought by Overstock.com and Microsoft – the latter for a tidy $6.4 billion. In his TED talk he denied being a “job creator,” and with directness, humor, and plain-spoken common sense, he attacked the notion that folks like him create jobs. It’s only 6 minutes long, but it sparked an internet fury when TED refused to post the speech on its web site, as it ordinarily does. Time Magazine’s links-rich retrospective of the controversy that forced TED to post the speech can bring you up-to-date if you didn’t know about it.

Certifiably successful capitalists (and Buffett and Hanauer make Republican Presidential Nominee Mitt Romney’s $250-million net wealth look mediocre) arguing that they should be taxed more is the classic man-bites-dog story that is supposed to attract journalists. In both cases Buffett and Hanauer did eventually get a fair amount of attention, but only because they are savvy entrepreneurs who made extraordinary efforts to get that attention. Once attended to, however, they are treated as outliers, interesting personalities, eccentric curiosities – sort of like men who bite dogs – rather than initiating discussion about the issues they tried to raise.

Who or what creates jobs? How could our tax system be fairer – and simpler? And what is the connection between jobs and taxes? These are big issues that should be at the center of the political debate in this year’s election, as the two mainstream political parties have very different answers to them. (more…)

The most important thing about today’s Supreme Court health care decision is the victory for the millions of Americans who will live longer, happier, healthier lives because of the new health care law.

It is also an historic day for the thousands of health care warriors who have fought to make health care a right in America for decades and have finally seen their struggle rewarded with success.

But the Supreme Court’s decision has massive political implications as well:

First, this victory will send another bolt of electricity through Obama’s base. Nothing succeeds better than a hard-fought victory at pumping people up — and firing them up for the next great battle. The victory will send thousands of volunteers streaming into Obama campaign offices — and millions of dollars into its coffers. It will invigorate Obama’s army of volunteers.

It is particularly important when coupled with the president’s decision two weeks ago, protecting Dream Students from deportation. That decision already had a major impact on enthusiasm among Obama supporters — and particularly Latinos.

Their Supreme Court defeat will also dispirit the right-wing — particularly because they were abandoned by their own iconic, conservative Chief Justice who wrote the opinion finding the law constitutional.

Enthusiasm is a huge factor in electoral politics.

Second, the Romney campaign — and Republican candidates across the board — have now been forced to double down on repealing the entire bill. They will argue that now, the only way to get rid of the bill is to elect a new president and a Republican House and Senate. (more…)

President Barack Obama praised the U.S. Supreme Court’s 5-4 decision that his signature health care law is constitutional, calling the ruling “a victory for people all over this country.”

That Mitch McConnell, ­what a scream he is!

The Republican Senate leader ­who’s perpetually in a political pout ­hates, hates, hates any effort to limit the gusher of corrupting cash that corporate powers are spewing into our elections. In particular, the Kentucky Senator is mad, mad, mad at Barack Obama, accusing him of “attempting to change the First Amendment” by curtailing the free speech rights of corporations.

Mitch, you see, agrees with the five-man Supreme Court edict in the infamous Citizens United case that a corporation is a “person,” that corporate money is “speech,” and that these poor corporations have had their “voices” silenced by past Congressional action to restrict their buying of our elections. Mitch is also one of the few Americans who actually gets misty-eyed over the odd notion that corporations have not had a strong enough voice in our government. As I mentioned, Mitch is mad ­as in truly insane, cuckoo, nuts! (more…)