Enough, Already
Cutting the Corporate Income Tax
By RAHUL MAHAJAN
Posted on Counterpunch.org
I listened to the State of the Union speech. What I heard, though, was not President Obama's string of irritating platitudes, but the sound of a nation bent on self-destruction.
I don't say this lightly. Intellectuals have been talking about the fall of the new Rome for decades, and mostly it has been hyperbolic nonsense. This time feels different. It even makes the darkest days of the Bush-Cheney administration seem like some distant, bygone utopia.
The reason for this change is the emergence of two extremely powerful groups that have not the slightest interest in any notion of the public good and are willing to put all of it in jeopardy to satisfy the shortest of short-term interests.
I'm not talking about the forlorn neoconservatives and their paleoconservative allies. They wrecked Iraq, which may never recover. They ripped the velvet glove off America's iron fist. They made American foreign policy a byword for destructive incompetence. They were arrogant and senseless. They instituted what looks to be a permanent national security state.
But they couldn't quite touch, and mostly didn't try to, most of what was good, or at least adequate, about living in America.
That job falls to two of the most sinister forces in the country: finance companies and the Republican Party, also known as the Tea Party.
Now, as Obama might say, let me be clear. I am not saying that these two groups don't have the good of working Americans at heart, that they are in it for themselves, or anything that banal. I am saying that their deliberately unenlightened self-interest, fixated on immediate aggrandizement, puts at risk the good of even the most privileged Americans, and that they are quite happy to hang it all on a throw of the dice in which there are no winning rolls, just losing ones. They are as happily jeopardizing their own long-term interests too.
Before the financial crisis, finance companies made 40% of all corporate profit in the United States (see Freefall, by Joseph Stiglitz), up from typical postwar levels under 20%. The reason is that, except for information technology and entertainment, the one remaining bastion of good old American corporate knowhow is figuring out how to fleece suckers--the raison d'etre of the modern American financial service company (see Griftopia by Matt Taibbi).
Their toxic combination of arrogance, ignorance and short-sighted avarice built a vast imaginary economic empire and when at last it collapsed under the weight of enormous stupidity, the collapse caused very real consequences. And yet they are still not grateful to Obama and his administration for working so hard to save themselves collectively from the consequences of their own actions. The administration's ceaseless labors to repair the damage to credit markets, stock markets, and financial profits (to be contrasted with their half-hearted efforts to address the problems of unemployment, dislocation, and alienation the rest of us have been faced with) have been met with anger, hatred, and constant declarations of victimization by those very lords of the financial earth.
More here:
http://counterpunch.org/mahajan01282011.html
Cutting the Corporate Income Tax
By RAHUL MAHAJAN
Posted on Counterpunch.org
I listened to the State of the Union speech. What I heard, though, was not President Obama's string of irritating platitudes, but the sound of a nation bent on self-destruction.
I don't say this lightly. Intellectuals have been talking about the fall of the new Rome for decades, and mostly it has been hyperbolic nonsense. This time feels different. It even makes the darkest days of the Bush-Cheney administration seem like some distant, bygone utopia.
The reason for this change is the emergence of two extremely powerful groups that have not the slightest interest in any notion of the public good and are willing to put all of it in jeopardy to satisfy the shortest of short-term interests.
I'm not talking about the forlorn neoconservatives and their paleoconservative allies. They wrecked Iraq, which may never recover. They ripped the velvet glove off America's iron fist. They made American foreign policy a byword for destructive incompetence. They were arrogant and senseless. They instituted what looks to be a permanent national security state.
But they couldn't quite touch, and mostly didn't try to, most of what was good, or at least adequate, about living in America.
That job falls to two of the most sinister forces in the country: finance companies and the Republican Party, also known as the Tea Party.
Now, as Obama might say, let me be clear. I am not saying that these two groups don't have the good of working Americans at heart, that they are in it for themselves, or anything that banal. I am saying that their deliberately unenlightened self-interest, fixated on immediate aggrandizement, puts at risk the good of even the most privileged Americans, and that they are quite happy to hang it all on a throw of the dice in which there are no winning rolls, just losing ones. They are as happily jeopardizing their own long-term interests too.
Before the financial crisis, finance companies made 40% of all corporate profit in the United States (see Freefall, by Joseph Stiglitz), up from typical postwar levels under 20%. The reason is that, except for information technology and entertainment, the one remaining bastion of good old American corporate knowhow is figuring out how to fleece suckers--the raison d'etre of the modern American financial service company (see Griftopia by Matt Taibbi).
Their toxic combination of arrogance, ignorance and short-sighted avarice built a vast imaginary economic empire and when at last it collapsed under the weight of enormous stupidity, the collapse caused very real consequences. And yet they are still not grateful to Obama and his administration for working so hard to save themselves collectively from the consequences of their own actions. The administration's ceaseless labors to repair the damage to credit markets, stock markets, and financial profits (to be contrasted with their half-hearted efforts to address the problems of unemployment, dislocation, and alienation the rest of us have been faced with) have been met with anger, hatred, and constant declarations of victimization by those very lords of the financial earth.
More here:
http://counterpunch.org/mahajan01282011.html
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