Author: Greg Saunders

A president invoking national security to defend wrongdoing? I dare you to not think of George Bush while watching this video.

Interesting applause line there, Mr. President.

The Republican scumbags in Washington and their well-trained Democratic toadies can all go to hell as far as I’m concerned. It’s hard to hide my rage over the fact that the poverty rate has gone up every year of the Bush presidency, yet we’re greeted with infuriating news like this :

IBM, for example, is banking a $2.8 billion refund—well, better to call it a “tax savings”—because instead of paying the normal corporate tax rate of 35 percent on $9.5 billion in profits it earned overseas, the company paid only 5.25 percent. That’s the magic of the American Jobs Creation Act, a piece of legislation that passed with comfortable margins in both the House and the Senate and was signed into law by President Bush just two weeks before the 2004 elections.

The AJCA, which was pushed through during the last fit of panic about outsourcing, was ostensibly designed to encourage companies to add jobs here. It gave a small tax deduction to American manufacturers, and it offered a one-time tax holiday in 2005 when corporations could repatriate their foreign income at a massively reduced tax rate. This repatriation, the theory went, would encourage R & D and capital investment in the United States, leading to new positions down the road. But, like President Bush’s creatively named Clear Skies initiative and Healthy Forest Restoration Act, the American Jobs Creation Act has not lived up to its title.
. . .
Analysts anticipate that American companies will have repatriated around $350 billion in 2005 as a result of the law. While it’s hard to make a straight calculation because of the vagaries of the tax code, that works out to a savings of roughly $104 billion on corporate America’s tax bill. At Pfizer, the pharmaceutical giant that announced the single largest repatriation—$37 billion—the one-time windfall works out to approximately $11 billion. That kind of tax savings buys a lot of $600-an-hour lobbyists, though not, apparently, many scientists and salespeople. In its annual report, Pfizer doesn’t list employees by region. But the company’s total head count dropped to 106,000 at the end of 2005, about 8 percent fewer jobs than at the end of 2004.

I know I’m sounding like a shrill liberal here, but screw it. The American government should never, ever trust corporations. No, not because of some cartoonish fantasy of a CEO devising new ways to poison the environment and eat babies, but because looking after our best interests isn’t their job. Their job is to make as much money as possible, period. I’m not making a moral judgement here. Getting rich isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but we shouldn’t ever expect corporations to put aside their own financial interests for ethical concerns.

Which is why it’s so damn frustrating to see this supply-side bullshit pop up again and again. It seems like a truism that businesses care more about the bottom line that anything else, but that level of common sense is absent from our government today. I’m all for capitalism and I think the stated goals behind a lot of conservative economic incentives are pretty good. Give tax breaks to corporations to reinvest in the country and help create jobs? Sounds like a great idea. Yeah, I said it, I agree with the Republicans. I just wish the Republicans agreed with the Republicans.

When a politician tells you they want to cut taxes to help jumpstart the economy, create jobs, or whetever, they’re lying to you. Yes, there are schools of economic thought that support their trickle-down theories, but these aren’t honest differences of opinion, they’re shameful lies. If they really thought their tax cuts would benefit working Americans they’d put it in writing. There’s nothing stopping politicians from making their tax cuts only apply to companies who create X number of jobs or invest a certain percentage of their profits within the U.S., but that never happens because conservative politicians are for the most part too craven to put their money where their mouth is.

Now corporations are laughing all the way to the bank with $104 billion in tax refunds and all we can do is sit back and wonder why people still believe a word that comes out of the mouths of the corporate whores in Washington D.C. Of course, that’s just how they wanted it. It doesn’t matter whether or not we feel robbed, the getaway car escaped a year and a half ago.

If you’re a Democrat, you might want to figure out how you’re going to vote in the Iranian War Resolution of 2006. “What war resolution?” you might ask, but don’t be so naive. We all know that from a marketing standpoint you don’t introduce a new product in August…I mean, April. Right now we’re in the viral part of the marketing campaign. Just like you can’t sell floor cleaner to someone who doesn’t think they have a dirty floor, you’re not going to convince people to nuke Iran without making an argument that they’ve got it coming.

Seriously, how would Democrats respond to a use of force resolution against Iran? The obvious answer would be to oppose it on the grounds that the Bush Administration has already shown itself to be dishonest and incompetent with Iraq, but do the Democrats in D.C. have the guts to vote against a war resolution, especially when it concerns a country that, in contrast to Saddam Hussein’s caginess, is openly flaunting its nuclear technology? Considering that it was a Democratic Senate that gave Bush the authorization to invade Iraq in 2002, I have my doubts about whether the current slate would be willing to risk looking weak on national security in order to do the right thing.

Things look peachy for the Democrats right now, seven months out from the midterm elections, but let’s not confuse disgust with the GOP with an infatuation for Dems. Even now with all of the troubles the GOP has had, I’d be willing to bet they’re a scare tactic away from regaining their strength in the polls. If th Democrats want to win in November, they need to start connecting the dots for the American people before they get put on the spot. It’s not enough to wring your hands in public and hope for the best, you’ve got to make the case again and again that Republicans are wrong for the country and that they can’t be trusted with another war. If you must, make jokes like “The Bush Administration wants to bring their Hurricane Katrina style of leadership to Iran”, but do something. Please.

Y’know, I’ve given Bill O’Reilly a lot of flack over the years for being a bully, a blowhard, and a fool, but you’ve gotta give him credit for one thing. He really is the only person on TV standing up the the secular left in defense of Christian symbols like Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny (via C&L) :

The problem is even worse than O’Reilly points out. At the last meeting of the Vast Left-Wing Conspiracy™ Barbara Streisand gave a PowerPoint presentation about ways to remove the Tooth Fairy from the public square and Michael Moore spoke at length about how the Bush Administration has been largely fabricating the serious threat posed by the Boogey Man. Needless to say, their hatred of Christianity was on full display.

I’ve noticed the idea of increasing the minimum wage has been popping up recently. Awesome idea that’s long overdue, so you know what that means. Endless whining from conservatives about small businesses being forced to close their doors and layoffs for the people who we’re trying to help. To listen to them, you’d think a modest increase in take home pay for the working poor is the tipping point that lead us all into the gutter. Put aside the fact that these supposed advocates for the poor and small business owners only seem to show their love when it’s an issue that would cost their campaign contributors money, here’s the real reason why these arguments are garbage.

The Fair Labor Standards Act was passed in 1938 and set a minimum wage of $0.25 per hour. Here’s what FDR said in one of his fireside chats shortly after signing the bill :

After many requests on my part the Congress passed a Fair Labor Standards Act, commonly called the Wages and Hours Bill. That Act—applying to products in interstate commerce-ends child labor, sets a floor below wages and a ceiling over hours of labor.

Except perhaps for the Social Security Act, it is the most far-reaching, far-sighted program for the benefit of workers ever adopted here or in any other country. Without question it starts us toward a better standard of living and increases purchasing power to buy the products of farm and factory.

Do not let any calamity-howling executive with an income of $1,000 a day, who has been turning his employees over to the Government relief rolls in order to preserve his company’s undistributed reserves, tell you—using his stockholders’ money to pay the postage for his personal opinions-/that a wage of $11 a week is going to have a disastrous effect on all American industry.

Since then the federal minimum wage has been raised twenty five times. Yet if Republican doomsday scenarios are to be believed, does that mean we’ve had 25 economic crises? What about all of the state-specific minimum wage laws? Have more progressive states like California been bleeding jobs due to their fairer wages? We’ve had a minimum wage in this country for almost seventy years, so why are we still dealing with the save executive crybaby act?