Censored 2014 (14 page)

Censored Story #2: Richest Global 1 Percent Hide Trillions in Tax Havens

Despite their already exorbitant wealth, the world's richest institutions and individuals have sheltered $21 trillion and $10 trillion
respectively—a total $31 trillion—in offshore tax havens and in over 14,000 funding entities to avoid paying their fair share of taxes. The figure is more than the total annual GDP of the US and Japan combined, Carl Herman reported.
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An especially important observation in the report is that while this gigantic fortune parked in various accounts fortifies the wherewithal of the extraordinarily privileged, it simultaneously impedes economic productivity and the real potential for eradicating world poverty that kills one million children per month. Indeed, researchers estimate that such poverty could be ended for one to three trillion dollars. Further, curbing poverty through development aid and investment tends to reduce the rate of population growth and would thus diminish such loss of life.

Over the past two decades, Herman wrote, “more human beings have died from preventable poverty than from all wars, murders, and violent deaths of any kind in all human history.” Nonetheless, the US government has failed to uphold the promise to end global poverty made at the 1990 World Summit for Children. This abdication of responsibility might be considered alongside the wanton misuse of American military forces overseas and those profiting from such murder and destruction—many of whom are the same entities allowed to float their riches offshore with impunity.

In reality, there is a profound inverse correlation between such economic imbalances—a heaven and hell dichotomy of sorts reflected in the apparent transcendence of the lavish Hyde Park penthouse, the villa in Monaco, the private jet, versus the bottomless despair and misery of the sub-Saharan farmer driven off his land, or the Chinese sweatshop employee made to work and live in squalor for close to nothing. To be sure, much of the foundation for such increasingly bleak boundaries may be found in the wherewithal to shelter oneself from taxation as much as in the broad and elaborate trade agreements forged by global elites behind closed doors.

Censored Story #3: Trans-Pacific Partnership Threatens a Regime of Corporate Global Governance

Modernity is characterized by a system of representative governance
capable of articulating and exerting the popular will while preserving the basic constitutional rights and freedoms of all citizens. In this way, the inordinate power of corporations may be held in check, thereby providing a more level economic playing field for all.

In many ways, C. Wright Mills's theoretical model of a power elite remains applicable to today's condition, where over half a century of movement through revolving doors—some of which now go to lobbying firms—have brought about an almost thoroughly corporatized state that acts mostly on behalf of its intercontinental masters. As plans for a Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) suggest, however, the now familiar public-private coziness at the national level may be merely the end of the beginning. “What makes the TPP unique,” Andrew Gavin Marshall wrote,

Incorporating the US, Canada, Mexico, Peru, Chile, New Zealand, Australia, Brunei, Singapore, Vietnam, and Malaysia, the TPP became a priority for the Obama administration when it took office in 2009. Yet the true power interests that are intimately involved in shaping the massive pact include about 600 corporations that stand to profit enormously once the deal is sealed.

While the TPP was initially conceived as a counterbalance to China's economic might, it has been redesigned “to be a structure on to which other nations, including possibly South Korea and eventually even China, could be bolted,” Asian Development Bank's Iwan Azis observed.
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The TPP predictably received rave reviews from major transnationals and their lobby groups, yet many independent observers found the accord unsettling at best. In May 2012, over thirty legal scholars from nations falling under TPP provisions signed a letter to US Trade Representative Ron Kirk stating their “profound concern and disappointment at the lack of public participation, transparency and open
government processes in the negotiations.” Along these lines, leading international trade lawyer Gary Horlick remarked, “This is the least transparent trade negotiation I have ever seen.”
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Kevin Zeese at Global Research wrote that the TPP will be a logical extension of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) that displaced several hundred thousand US manufacturing jobs, increased income inequality, and threw up additional barriers to worker unionization
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Yet among the TPP's most ominous features is its expansion of an already functioning corporate-controlled court system that gives major transnationals the ability to sue governments for any lost profits incurred while adhering to the environmental, health, and worker safety laws protecting the natural resources and citizenry of host countries. As with most international trade deals, this requirement will also tend to further transfer governments' autonomy over their own affairs to corporate elites accountable to no one but their shareholders
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Censored Story #6: Billionaires' Rising Wealth Intensifies Poverty and Inequality

As suggested in
Censored
story #2, the world's richest individuals and institutions are busy giving taxation authorities the slip in part because over the past few years alone they've simply become much wealthier. This is largely the manifestation of the very neoliberal policies—cutting taxes on the rich, accelerated deregulation and privatization, reducing social programs, relaxing laws protecting workers—they have since the late 1970S steadfastly promoted through sponsorship of endowed university professorships and “free market”-oriented think tanks that Lewis Powell called for in 1971.

George Monbiot has argued that the neoliberal economic programs test-piloted forty years ago by Latin American dictatorships and proffered with the underlying notion that economic growth would arise through lower taxes and a more “flexible” labor force have had the exact opposite effect.
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The undermining of postwar economic policies—which had reined in elites, compelled a broader distribution of wealth, and created a more robust working class with consistently rising incomes—opened the ground for elites to advocate trimming gov
ernment and scaling back unions as means to unparalleled growth and decreased unemployment.

The results have been spectacular for the 1 percent. Yet for the overwhelming majority they have been disastrous. The loss of unionized jobs has contributed to wage suppression in most every occupation while “free trade” deals such as NAFTA and the impending TPP brought geo-economic forces to bear on workers. “As wages stagnated,” Monbiot contended, “people supplemented their incomes with debt. Rising debt fed the deregulated banks, with consequences of which we are all aware.”
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Even though the consequences have in-tensified wealth accumulation among an infinitesimally small stratum, citizens remain largely unaware of the extent to which they are fleeced, quite literally on an everyday basis.

Censored Story #8: Bank Interests Inflate Global Prices by 35 to 40 Percent

In our present economic system, two out of every five dollars spent on ordinary goods and services ends up in the bank accounts of the most well-to-do institutions and individuals on the planet. This is essentially due to the fact that banking itself is a private, for-profit enterprise beholden only to the lenders, financiers, and bondholders who run it. A study conducted by German professor Margrit Kennedy, and brought to the attention of alternative media readerships by financial author and attorney Ellen Brown, noted that while 1 percent of the world's population now owns 42 percent of the wealth, the bottom 80 percent yield to such hidden charges that bolster the very wealthy merely for sitting on their assets.
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Many harbor the false understanding that interest is paid only on a debt that has not been satisfied within a particular time frame. Yet the prices of many goods and services, from running water to sewer and garbage collection, include interest charges necessary to keep money in circulation and banks solvent. The higher up the wealth chain a family is, the greater the chance that they take in more interest than they pay out. Within our monetary system, Kennedy explained in her study,

Indeed, not only is this a stealth form of confiscation, “baked into the cake,” it's an extremely regressive wealth transfer, unwittingly forfeited by the least well-off.

Left unregulated and to its own devices, the present financial system will weave its way into almost all facets of everyday existence. Kennedy and Brown's solution, of which the latter has written extensively, involves de-privatizing the banking system that holds the 99 percent captive and making those interest payments and fees something the public once again owns.

Such an undertaking doesn't have to be national in scope. While Iceland's electorate provides an important example of economic enfranchisement and resilience stemming from its full-scale rejection of private banks' unwarranted claims on the public purse, North Dakota's booming economy, low unemployment, and consistent state budget surpluses are due to the fact that it possesses a state-owned bank.
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While North Dakota is rich in natural resources, “[a]ccess to credit is the enabling factor that has fostered both a boom in oil and record profits from agriculture in” the state, Brown noted. “The Bank of North Dakota does not compete with local banks but partners with them, helping with capital and liquidity requirements. It participates in loans, provides guarantees, and acts as a sort of mini-Fed[eral Reserve] for the state.”
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Beyond North Dakota, Montana's example has inspired fifteen states to consider legislation that would change banking policy or establish public banks that could contribute to ending Wall Street's control over Main Street and the cycle of indebtedness that hinders economic development and further jeopardizes living standards.
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The fact that such profit schemes exist to fleece the broader public, as tens of millions across the US lack the simple means to adequately feed themselves, should be cause for serious alarm. Yet such activities
and conditions are seldom the focus of corporate media overwhelmingly concerned with the latest murder rampage, “terrorist” threat, or celebrity breakup.

Censored Story #13: A Fifth of Americans Go Hungry

As suggested thus far, the United States, once regarded as the upholder of freedom and prosperity, has been rotting from within over the past several decades and now has in many respects the distinctive qualities of an unindustrialized peripheral country. This observation is confirmed in unemployment numbers reminiscent of the Great Depression—as much as 23 percent—yet allayed in the public mind through the deceptive bookkeeping methods of federal government statisticians.
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In this way, an August 2012 Gallup Poll revealed that 18.2 percent of the public find it routinely difficult to feed their families. Nevertheless, both the US House of Representatives and Senate are proposing cutbacks in the Supplemental Nutrition Insurance Program (SNAP) that may reduce or eliminate aid to as many as 1.8 million already struggling people. Such measures will only further America's already precipitous decline toward conditions resembling Dickensian England. “In 15 states,” Mike Ludwig wrote at
Truthout,
“at least 1 in 5 Americans polled in the first half of 2012 reported struggling to pay for food during the past 12 months.”
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Recall that just forty years ago a majority of families looked forward to the security of a modestly expanding income in accord with rising GDP and accompanied by little-to-no debt.

The proposed cuts come at a particularly difficult time as food prices increased in the wake of the most severe drought in fifty years. Opponents of the reductions point to how such measures will hit the most vulnerable especially hard—particularly seniors, children, and working poor families. Even in light of those grave socioeconomic disparities, brought on largely through a corrupt financial system, misplaced economic priorities, and the abandonment of honest governance, those comprising the 1 percent and working in its interests are quick to resist even modest attempts to level the playing field, such as an extremely small tax on investment transactions.