Judy's Homegrown Blog

Originally posted at Writeindependent.org on January 30, 2012

Not surprisingly, Wall Street and the top of corporate America are doing extremely well as of June 2011. For example, in Q1 of 2011, America’s top corporations reported 31% profit growth and a 31% reduction in taxes, the latter due to profit outsourcing to low tax rate countries. Somewhere around 40% of the profits in the S&P 500 come from overseas and stay overseas, with about half of these 500 top corporations having their headquarters in tax havens. If the corporations don’t repatriate their profits, they pay no U.S. taxes. The year 2010 was a record year for compensation on Wall Street, while corporate CEO compensation rose by over 30%, most Americans struggled. In 2010 a dozen major companies, including GE, Verizon, Boeing, Wells Fargo, and Fed Ex paid US tax rates between -0.7% and -9.2%. Production, employment, profits, and taxes have all been outsourced. Major U.S. corporations are currently lobbying to have another “tax-repatriation” window like that in 2004 where they can bring back corporate profits at a 5.25% tax rate versus the usual 35% US corporate tax rate. Ordinary working citizens with the lowest incomes are taxed at 10%.

Originally posted at Writeindependent.org on January 29, 2012

Someone told me the other day that they were “in the top 1%”… which begged the question: How much do you have to make per year to qualify to be in the top 1% of wage earners? Did you know that you have to make over $400,000 per year and hold an average of 1.2 million in assets to be in that category?

The top 0.5% starts at 1.8M in assets.

“The 99th to 99.5th percentiles largely include physicians, attorneys, upper middle management, and small business people who have done well,” writes an investment manager who handles wealthy clients, whom I will call Anon.

The tier between 0.5% and 0.1% are people who work very hard for a living, but who will have to curtail their spending or budget themselves in order to retire. They will be living very well, but they aren’t the people who have hurt our economy.

It’s the top 0.1% that is living in a sea of cash. These people do not have to work for a living. Their cash works for them. You could say, these are the true “lazy people.” They made their money in the financial sector, from the “failure of complex mortgage derivatives, CDS credit swaps, cheap Fed money, lax regulation, compromised ratings agencies, government involvement in the mortgage market, the end of the Glass-Steagall Act in 1999, and insufficient bank capital.” Or they had been married to a person of that kind of means.

“Most of the serious economic damage the U.S. is struggling with today was done by the top 0.1% and they benefited greatly from it,” Anon writes.

If you ask most Americans today whether or not the wealthiest people in this country should do a little more to ease the economy by paying a little extra in taxes, most would say “yes.” But in order to raise the taxes on this powerful elite, we would have to fire most of the incumbents in office today by electing new representatives. I personally don’t think that would be very hard to do.

That’s the kind of quantitative easing I’d like to see.

Source: http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/power/wealth.html

Originally posted at Writeindependent.org on January 27, 2012

The verdict is in: NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement) of 1993 has been a complete and utter failure to provide what it promised. Many of the world’s largest corporations claimed it would create hundreds of thousands of new high-wage U.S. jobs, raise living conditions in the U.S., Mexico and Canada, improve the environment and transform Mexico from a poor country into a booming U.S. export market.

At first, I could not understand why people complained so much about government regulations. Weren’t government regs supposed to set guidelines to protect our environment, require products, drugs, drinking water and food to be safe for consumers, and help structure federal programs to provide roads, libraries, education? What was the problem?

The more I study the bills that were passed, the more convinced I am of one thing: the corporations are writing the regulations that everyone is complaining about! It’s the lobbyists and the lawyers who are writing these omnibus rules that favor the biggest corporations and remove safeguards like meat inspection, environmental protection, and labor standards. In many cases, these corporate-favored laws make it impossible to replace old, dirty technologies with cleaner, less expensive alternatives. (I will give examples of this in future posts.)

NAFTA is a perfect example of a corporate-favoring regulations nightmare. “Hidden” in this 900 page behemoth are rules that benefit corporations without regard for the country’s domestic laws, even when the safeguarding policies of said governments were voted in by democratically elected representatives and their constituents.

According to Public Citizen, a public advocacy group: “NAFTA requires limits on the safety and inspection of meat sold in our grocery stores; new patent rules that raised medicine prices; constraints on your local government’s ability to zone against sprawl or toxic industries; and elimination of preferences for spending your tax dollars on U.S.-made products or locally-grown food. In fact, calling NAFTA a ‘trade’ agreement is misleading, NAFTA is really an investment agreement. Its core provisions grant foreign investors a remarkable set of new rights and privileges that promote relocation abroad of factories and jobs and the privatization and deregulation of essential services, such as water, energy and health care.”

Even worse, Chapter 11 of NAFTA allows corporations to sue governments when their consumer protection actions prevent those corporations from making profits. One example lawsuit is enough to make anyone sick:

Canada tried to ban the fuel additive MMT (methylcyclopentadienyl manganese tricarbonyl) because it has been shown to cause nervous-system problems. When MMT’s maker Ethyl Corporation sued, a secret tribunal ordered the Canadian government to pay $10 million in damages and issue a public statement that the formula posed no health risk.

The same corporations who supported NAFTA are pushing to expand it into 31 more countries in Central and South America through FTAA, Free Trade Area of the Americas. In 2005, Congress voted to extend NAFTA to five Central American countries through the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA); Peru was added in 2007.

The problems of free trade aren’t just a race-to-the-bottom dynamic where workers get paid less and less, with less labor protections. Free trade encourages the practice of moving jobs to other labor markets, and away from the United States. NAFTA, CAFTA, FTAA are all supported by the World Trade Organization (WTO) and World Customs Organization. Beware arguments that use faulty reasoning by the World Bank or Mackinac Center for Public Policy, which are both bolstered by the corporate wealth of the largest companies.

For more information, see:

http://www.globalexchange.org/resources/ftaa/biotech
http://www.citizen.org/Page.aspx?pid=531
http://www.albionmonitor.com/9809b/copyright/naftasue.html

Originally posted at Writeindependent.org on January 21, 2012

Rich people think they should be in charge of the money, because only they know how to spend it.

I find this attitude appalling, and yet it seems hopeless to fight it. The reality is: people who have money have an easier time making more money, and when it has become so easy that they don’t even have to work anymore, (or their family members don’t) then they become philanthropists and get to decide how poor people should live their lives.

Look what has happened in this country: the wealthiest companies have changed the laws to make it easier and easier to become monopolies or conglomerates, or multi-national, to reduce their burdens whether they be regulations or taxes, and to price the little guy out of his ability to compete.

I don’t know why people complain about the “lazy” people on welfare. What about the lazy rich?

If we want to level the playing field, and protest the mega-opolies, we’re going to have to do a few things. First, we’re going to have to stop shopping at the super mega marts, cancel our accounts, subscriptions, or patronage of the conglomerates, and most importantly, we’re going to have to get our government back to place proper regulations on banks, multi-nationals, and the heaviest polluters. Obviously, I’m not talking about all companies; just the ones who are lousy stewards of the planet and our economy, who don’t care about quality but just bottom line.

If we think the big companies are doing such a great job of taking care of our country with their influence on our government, then just sit back and let them do it. Children want to be taken care of; they let their parents run the house. Or, you could grow up, take charge of your circumstances and begin to transform your world.  Who are you?