Greetings!
I’m sorry to be so late; I’ve been doing my work as a Committee-person for my
ward in South Philadelphia. Politics, the process of electing persons who run
the community’s affairs, are the concern for all of us.
I was
delighted by the defeat of Amazon, in its attempt to establish its second
headquarters in New York-specifically, Long Island City in Queens-by
neighborhood people protesting the disruption of their neighborhoods and the
massive tax breaks, up to $3 billion, that the City and the State would have
given the company-a company said to have $11.2 billion in profits (including
the upscale grocery store chain Whole Foods), and whose CEO Jeff Bezos is worth
$130 billion-rich enough to organize his own private space program, SpaceX. There
were also worries by the community and the unions-still the best hope for
working people-of low-wage work under stressful conditions-there were reports
out about those practices at Amazon facilities-and of disruption of
neighborhoods and gentrification.
Working-class
and low-income people standing up to a corporate behemoth that, for a while,
was valued at one TRILLION dollars, (https://www.cnbc.com/2018/09/04/amazon-hits-1-trillion-in-market-value.html), is something to be proud of. Organizations
for tenant’s rights, immigrant rights groups like Make The Road NY, and
neighborhood groups joined together to stand up to Amazon and for their
community. (https://www.commondreams.org/views/2019/02/19/organizers-oust-amazon-hq2-new-york?cd-origin=rss#)
Amazon also
serves as a poster child for the challenge to the idea that giving corporations
tax breaks stimulates the economy, and so state and city governments must offer
these to corporations to establish themselves I their communities. That was the
way Amazon played it-several cities, including Philadelphia, were on the list
to be the site for HQ2, and cities and states offered the company billions in
tax breaks. A report by the Institute for Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP)
shows that Amazon, with all its billions, has not paid a single cent of federal
income taxes last year. (https://itep.org/amazon-in-its-prime-doubles-profits-pays-0-in-federal-income-taxes/) Moreover, Amazon has received a tax
REBATE of $129 million.
Another bad
example of corporate socialism is Foxconn, the Taiwan-based manufacturer of pasts
for Apple. The original deal was that, according to Governor Scott Walker (with
Donnie trump going along), Foxconn would set up a factory that would create “up
to 13,000” manufacturing jobs, mainly for display panels; for that it company
would have the incentive of tax breaks from the state, worth $3 billion, along
with three-quarters of a billion from local municipalities. But all of a
sudden, Foxconn executives announced that the company would make the site into
a research and development “hub,” which would hire approximately 1,000
technical employees. Billions of dollars lost, elected officials groveling to
foreign capitalists, hopes raised for jobs for workers who have no jobs-for
nothing. ( https://thinkprogress.org/factory-wisconsin-foxconn-billions-to-build-eea422ff0cef/)
May I
introduce you to one of the most influential-and malignant-economic thinkers
you never heard of: economist James McGill Buchanan, who did his work out of
George Mason University. (https://www.ineteconomics.org/perspectives/blog/meet-the-economist-behind-the-one-percents-stealth-takeover-of-america) . Buchanan, like Milton Friedman,
Friedrick Hayek, Ayn Rand, and Ludwig Von Misis, has been an influencer to the
economic elite, advocating absolute “free market” capitalism, at the expense of
workers and community people.
Buchanan has
projected upon workers, social activists, and similar enemies of conservatives the
traits of utter selfishness-to him, they are people who want to take property
away from its owners for their own benefit-but are the capitalists, the owners
of said property, not being selfish in bleeding workers and community people
for their profit being selfish? Property owners-oligarchs-must, said Buchanan,
be protected from working-class and low-income voters standing up for their
rights-which, to Buchanan, would lead to tyranny, and so protecting the
property of plutocrats-who wouldn’t be where they were without their
workers-was defending liberty.
And in
defending his idea of “liberty,” Buchanan had the support of Charles Koch-you
know, of the Koch brothers-and worked against such threats to “free enterprise”
as the environmental movement, feminism, public education, Social security and
Medicare, and the civil rights movement-blatant racism was a loser in
publicity, so Buchanan’s patrons utilized the arguments of “controlling
government spending.” Buchanan’s ideas were antithetical to the idea of
utilizing the state apparatus for progressive ends, for the public weal; but he
was happy to be an advisor for the brutally repressive Pinochet regime in
Chile, and he supported the repression of low-income and working people
organizing themselves for their benefit.
The 2019
Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) has come and gone, and there
was none of the defense of tradition that is supposed to epitomize what
“conservative” is supposed to mean. There
was the old scare of “socialism,” updated to include terrifying pictures of
Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortes, and distorted interpretations of
the proposed Green New Deal.
One
rock-star speaker was Sebastian Gorka, a former trump advisor and member of the
Vitezi Rend, a Hungarian group founded by that nation’s pro-fascist (and
anti-Semitic) dictator Miklos Horthy; members of the group were declared
“Inadmissible” into the United States by the State Department. ( https://www.haaretz.com/us-news/trump-anti-terror-adviser-a-sworn-member-of-nazi-allied-group-1.5449737)
But that did not stop Gorka from raving against how he interprets the Green New
Deal; “They want to take your pickup truck, they want to rebuild your home, they
want to take away your hamburgers! This is what Stalin dreamt about!” said one
of the deep thinkers of conservativism today.
Michelle
Malkin, another right-wing pundit, raved about the “invasion” of immigrants,
both legal and illegal; “Both parties are to blame,” Malkin proclaimed, “and
yes, I’m looking at you, retired Paul Ryan. And yes, I’m looking at you, Mitch
McConnell. And yes, I’m looking at you, Bush family. And yes, I’m looking at
you, the ghost of John McCain.” The crowd cheered at that-an attack on people
who were as conservative as themselves, but they disowned them when it suited
their purpose. ( https://www.huffpost.com/entry/cindy-mccain-john-mccain-cpac-speaker_n_5c7c225ae4b0614614db7900)
The fear of
the “Other,” of dark-skinned immigrants, who don’t look like themselves, was in
Malkin’s speech. (Malkin, by the way, is of Filipina extraction, yet she used
rhetoric worthy of David Duke. Hmmm…) Blatant white nationalists-like Peter
Brimelow, of the racist web site VDare; Gavin McInnes founder of the Proud
Boys, the white nationalist thug gang; and Faith Goldy, who has been on
podcasts of the racist web site Daily Stormer- people who conservatives of an
earlier era would have shunned, roamed the halls of the conference, denying the
value of diversity and treating it as a plague. And during the conference,
there were reports of harassment of Muslims and LGBTQ people by CPAC attendees.
(https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/cpac-harassment_us_58b7360fe4b0284854b3a2a4?fbclid=IwAR3B2uOpF77FJXBsq5NRV36bJYREya5R887z7y37RBdylEZ61CYFt3UJp5E)
THIS is what
there up against; and our commander in chief is their enabler and hero. Let us
continue to organize, to study the issues, and fight against this menace to our
liberties.
Bye!
Like this:
Like Loading...
