Obama has begun to make a few tentative moves toward increasing revenues to get the deficit down rather than just cutting or threatening to cut Soc Sec, Medicare, and other programs aimed at helping people who aren't rich. He has proposed raising the top level of income taxes from 36% to 39%, way below what they were in the 50's, 60's and even 80's under St Ronnie. This has caused Glenn Beck to cry on camera about how his country is being destroyed and Sean Hanity to compare Obama to Hitler.
Corporate America ain't happy about it either and they're fighting it if somewhat lackadaisically. What they're far more concerned about is Obama's attempt to raise taxes on profits they thought were protected by sham overseas accounts. (Via dday at Hullaballoo)
In one of the biggest battles between the business community and the White House, corporate lobbyists are intensifying efforts to block an Obama administration proposal to raise taxes on overseas profits. Executives say the measure, which could cost U.S.-based multinationals $100 billion over the next decade, would hamper economic recovery efforts.
Of course they would. Take ONE PENNY of obscene corporate profits to boost the recovery of a society brought to the brink of dissolution by corporate greed and the ECONOMIC SKY WILL FALL IN!! THE OCEANS WILL HEAVE, TORNADOS WILL BELLOW, HURRICANES WILL BLOW YOUR HOUSE DOWN AND GOD WILL SMITE YOU!!!
And so on. The usual suspects are banding together to buy, uh, lobby Congress.
In recent days, groups including the Business Roundtable, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers and the National Foreign Trade Council have helped form a lobbying coalition called Protect America's Competitive Edge that is devoted specifically to the issue. A letter sent to Congress last month opposing the plan was signed by 200 trade associations and companies, including General Electric Co., Intel Corp., International Business Machines Corp., McDonald's Corp., Merck & Co. and Microsoft Corp.
As far as these perps are concerned, America's Competitive Edge is identical to the ability of corporate executives to continue lining their pockets, flying their own jets, taking expensive vacations, and otherwise enriching themselves at everybody else's expense. Govt, after all, exists to give Corporate America $$$, not the other way around. Just ask the insurance companies, who even as we speak are lining up with their hands out, demanding their pound of our flesh.
The U.S. Treasury said on Wednesday some life insurers have met requirements for government capital investments under an existing rescue plan, clarifying that it is not launching a new bailout for the sector.
"There are a number of life insurers that have met requirements for the Capital Purchase Program because of their bank holding company status," said Treasury spokesman Andrew Williams. "These are among the hundreds of financial institutions in the CPP pipeline that will be reviewed and funded as appropriate on a rolling basis."
They're not even going to have to ask, and no humiliating GM-like kneeling and scraping in front of Congress for them. They're in the system. Their payments will be, you know, automatic, and will NOT be accompanied by Admin demands that they cease illegal and/or unethical business pratices. Unlike GM, they're not even going to have to lay anybody off because insurance companies aren't unionized so what would be the point?
Or you can ask the oil companies, who were recently lobbied by the Obama Admin to help "transform the energy industry" like said oil companies have been promising to do for 4 decades. Pushed to do something other than just talk about it, making empty promises that sound good on teevee ads, turns out they're not interested.
The Obama administration wants to reduce oil consumption, increase renewable energy supplies and cut carbon dioxide emissions in the most ambitious transformation of energy policy in a generation.
But the world’s oil giants are not convinced that it will work. Even as Washington goes into a frenzy over energy, many of the oil companies are staying on the sidelines, balking at investing in new technologies favored by the president, or even straying from commitments they had already made.
Royal Dutch Shell said last month that it would freeze its research and investments in wind, solar and hydrogen power, and focus its alternative energy efforts on biofuels. The company had already sold much of its solar business and pulled out of a project last year to build the largest offshore wind farm, near London.
BP, a company that has spent nine years saying it was moving “beyond petroleum,” has been getting back to petroleum since 2007, paring back its renewable program. And American oil companies, which all along have been more skeptical of alternative energy than their European counterparts, are studiously ignoring the new messages coming from Washington.
“In my view, nothing has really changed,” Rex W. Tillerson, the chief executive of Exxon Mobil, said after the election of President Obama.
(emphasis added)
In Tillerson's view nothing will ever change if he has anything to say about it. Same with the rest of these rich dinosaurs. The only thing they care about is that the money keeps rolling in right up to the point that the Gulf of Mexico rises so much it drowns Houston. At which point they will pack up and move to Vail.
What may be the worst part of this melee is Obama's demonstrated cluelessness about cause-and-effect. His most recent statement, urging people to buy or refinance their homes now while the "mortgage rates are low", doesn't seem to take account of the fact that one of the reasons for the mortgage scams in the first place was that so much money has been moved overseas or up to the top of the income rung that without some sort of hanky-panky nobody could afford to buy the damn things.
Somebody needs to explain to him that the reason mortgage companies and banks used financing tricks to sell homes is because they had to. For 30 years corpo's have been moving our jobs overseas, cutting the pay of the jobs that were left, decimating the middle class wage structure and turning it into a Third World poverty-wage structure. We used to grow the housing market by growing the wages of workers until they could afford to buy them. We haven't done that since Reagan.
But can you see Timmy Geithner telling that to Barry? "Oh and by the way, Mr President, you need to stop goosing the middle class to do things. See, there is no middle class. We finished destroying them in, oh, I'd say about 2005. We dismantled the unions, moved all those jobs overseas, automated what we couldn't outsource, and turned all those skilled workers into short-order cooks and waitresses at $7/hr. They, um, can't afford to refinance. They got no equity and the house is worth half what we conned them into paying for it. I'd go easy on that if I were you."
No, you can't see him doing that.
But never mind. With the economy going into a tailspin, Fox is preparing a new reality show. Instead of voting on which schlemiel has to leave the island, we get to vote on which guy in the company gets to keep his job. Won't that be fun? We'll be on teevee while our lives are going into the shitter.
Is this a great country or what?
Comments