Taking the Side of the Billionaires: Robert Parry

America’s Right – from the NFL lockout to Rep. Paul Ryan’s budget – side with the billionaires in what amounts to an escalating class war against the middle class and the poor

by Robert Parry

If American football fans end up facing a fall without NFL games, they probably won’t blame George W. Bush and other Republican presidents for packing the federal courts with right-wing judges, but it was two Bush appointees who reversed a District Court ruling that would have ended the lockout of players.

 

The Appeals Court judgment encouraged the NFL’s hardline billionaire owners to resist making the kinds of compromises that a few less intransigent owners recognize could easily resolve the impasse.

Now, the hardliners simply assume that Republican judges will keep siding with the NFL owners and thus enable them to beat down the players, eventually assuring the billionaire owners a bigger piece of the revenue pie – even if that means losing some or all of the 2011 season.

What many average Americans, especially white guys, don’t seem to understand is that whatever the populist-styled rhetoric of Fox News or Rush Limbaugh, the Right’s default position is to side with the billionaires – and to show little or no regard for the fate of anyone else, whether NFL players or sick senior citizens.

Still, one must give the Right credit for having worked hard refining how to phrase its arguments. Right-wingers even have turned the term “class warfare” against the Left by shouting the phrase in a mocking fashion whenever anyone tries to blunt the “class warfare” that the billionaires have been waging against the middle class and the poor for decades.

 On right-wing TV and talk radio across the country, there are tag teams of macho men pretending that ”class warfare” exists only in the fevered imagination of the Left. But billionaire investor Warren Buffett has acknowledged the truth: 

“There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.”

 The right-wing propagandists further earn their keep by disparaging science as “elitist.” So, even as the dire predictions from climate-change experts that global warming will generate more extreme weather seem to be coming true, many Americans who have listened to the “climate-change-deniers” for years still reject the scientific warnings.

While no single weather event can be connected to the broader trend of climate change, the warnings about what might happen when the earth’s atmosphere heats up and absorbs more moisture seem to be applicable to the historic flooding in some parts of the world, droughts in others, and the outbreak of particularly violent storms.

Heat and moisture are especially dangerous ingredients for hurricanes and tornados.

Ironically, the parts of the United States hardest hit by this severe weather are those represented predominately by Republicans who have been at the forefront of obstructing government efforts to address the global-warming crisis.

Flooding, hurricanes and tornados have inflicted horrendous damage on Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, Texas, Tennessee, Missouri and Oklahoma – all part of the Republican base.

God’s Punishment?

If televangelist Pat Robertson were a left-winger instead of a right-winger, he might be saying that God is punishing these “red states” for doubting the science of global warming.

However, even as the U.S. news obsesses over the violent weather, mainstream media stars have steered clear of whether global warming might be a factor. It’s as if they know that they’d only be inviting career-damaging attacks from the Right if they did anything to connect the dots.

The Right also is not eager to explain how these catastrophes will require emergency funding and rebuilding assistance from the federal government. After all, you don’t want Republican voters to understand that sometimes “self-reliance” alone doesn’t cut it; sometimes, we all need help and the government must be part of that assistance.

In the case of the killer tornado that devastated Joplin, Missouri, House Republicans, without a hint of irony, are extracting the funds for disaster relief from green energy programs, which remain a favorite GOP target since many Republicans still insist there is no such thing as global warming.

At both state and national levels, Republican leaders have lined up behind climate-change deniers, with former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty just the latest GOP presidential hopeful to apologize for his past support of a cap-and-trade system aimed at reducing global-warming gases.

Any serious move toward alternative energies would, of course, be costly to the giant oil companies and their billionaire owners, like David Koch of Koch Industries who has spent millions of dollars funding right-wing organizations, such as the Tea Party. The Right’s media/political operatives know better than to bite the hand that feeds them.

GOP orthodoxy also disdains tax increases on the rich or even elimination of tax breaks for the oil industry. The Republican insistence on low tax rates for the wealthy, in turn, has forced consideration of other policy proposals to achieve savings from services for average Americans.

That is why congressional Republicans have targeted Medicare with a plan that would end the current health program for the elderly and replace it with a scheme that would give subsidies to senior citizens who would then have to sign up for health insurance from private industry, which has proven itself far less efficient in providing health care than the government.

The GOP budget, drafted by House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, would impose the Medicare changes on seniors beginning in 10 years.

Most attention on the Ryan plan has focused on estimates that it would cost the average senior citizen more than $6,000 extra per year, but the proposal also has the effect of privatizing Medicare, meaning that the government would make direct “premium support” payments to profit-making insurance companies whose interest is in maximizing profits, not providing the best possible care for old people.

While the Ryan plan would achieve budget “savings” by shifting the burden of health-care costs onto the elderly, Ryan’s budget also would lower tax rates for the wealthiest Americans even more, from 35 percent to 25 percent. Partly because of that tax cut, Ryan’s budget would still not be balanced for almost three decades.

Class Warfare

Thus, the battle lines of America’s “class warfare” are getting more sharply drawn. The conflict is now over the Right’s determination to concentrate even more money and power in the hands of the rich by hobbling any government capability to protect the people’s general welfare.

If the Right wins, individual Americans will be left essentially defenseless in the face of unbridled corporate power.

Ryan’s Medicare plan may be just the most striking example because it envisions sick old people trying to pick their way through a thicket of private insurance plans with all their confusing language designed to create excuses for denying coverage. It is not an exaggeration to say that Ryan’s tight-fisted Medicare plan could consign millions of Americans to a premature death.

The Right’s priorities hit home at a town hall meeting held by Rep. Rob Woodall, R-Georgia, when he chastised one of his constituents who worried that Ryan’s plan would leave Americans like her, whose employer doesn’t extend health benefits to retirees, out of luck.

“Hear yourself, ma’am. Hear yourself,” Woodall lectured the woman. “You want the government to take care of you, because your employer decided not to take care of you. My question is, ‘When do I decide I’m going to take care of me?’”

However, another constituent noted that Woodall accepted government-paid-for health insurance for himself.

“You are not obligated to take that if you don’t want to,” the woman said. “Why aren’t you going out on the free market in the state where you’re a resident and buy your own health care? Be an example. …

“Go and get it in a single-subscriber plan, like you want everybody else to have, because you want to end employer-sponsored health plans and government-sponsored health plans. … Decline the government health plan and go to Blue Cross/Blue Shield or whoever, and get one for yourself and see how tough it is.”

Woodall answered that he was taking his government health insurance “because it’s free. It’s because it’s free.”

Self-reliance, it seems, is easier to preach to others than to practice yourself.

Woodall’s explanation recalled the hypocrisy of free-market heroine Ayn Rand, whom Rep. Ryan has cited as his political inspiration. In her influential writings, Rand ranted against social programs that enabled the “parasites” among the middle-class and the poor to sap the strength from the admirable rich, but she secretly accepted the benefits of Medicare after she was diagnosed with lung cancer.

A two-pack-a-day smoker, Rand had denied the medical science about the dangers of cigarettes, much as her acolytes today reject the science of global warming. However, when she developed lung cancer, she connived to have Evva Pryor, an employee of Rand’s law firm, arrange Social Security and Medicare benefits for Ann O’Connor, Ayn Rand using her husband’s last name.

In 100 Voices: An Oral History of Ayn Rand, Scott McConnell, founder of the Ayn Rand Institute’s media department, quoted Pryor as saying: “Doctors cost a lot more money than books earn and she could be totally wiped out.”

So, when push came to shove, even Ayn Rand wasn’t above getting help from the “despised government.” However, her followers, including Rep. Ryan, now want to strip those guaranteed benefits from other Americans of more modest means than Ayn Rand.

It seems it’s okay for average Americans to be wiped out.

Hypocrisy, Hypocrisy

While the Right’s penchant for hypocrisy is well-known (note how many Republicans involved in the impeachment of President Bill Clinton had their own extra-marital affairs), the bigger mystery is why so many average-guy Americans volunteer to fight for the rich in the trenches of the Right’s class warfare.

Clearly, the Right’s propaganda with its endless repetition is very effective, especially given the failure of the American Left to invest significantly in a competing message machine. The Right also has adopted the tone of populism, albeit in support of a well-to-do economic elite.

Yet, perhaps most importantly, the Right has stuck with its battle plan for rallying a significant percentage of middle-class Americans against their own interests.

Four decades ago, President Richard Nixon and his subordinates won elections by demonizing “hippies,” “welfare queens” and the “liberal media.”

Then, in the late 1970s, a tripartite coalition took shape consisting of the Republican Establishment, neoconservatives and the leaders of the Christian Right. Each group had its priorities.

The rich Republicans wanted deep tax cuts and less business regulation; the neocons wanted big increases in military spending and a freer hand to wage wars; and the Christian Right agreed to supply political foot soldiers in exchange for concessions on social issues, such as abortion and gay rights. Ultimately, each part of the coalition got a chunk of what it wanted.

From Ronald Reagan to George W. Bush, the rich got their taxes slashed, saw regulations rolled back and gained a larger share of the nation’s wealth and political power. The neocons got massive military spending and the chance to dispatch U.S. soldiers to kill Israel’s Muslim enemies. The Christian Right got help in restricting abortions and punishing gays.

But what did the American middle-class get?

Over those three decades, the middle-class has stagnated or slipped backward. Labor unions were busted; jobs were shipped overseas; personal debt soared; education grew more expensive, along with medical care. People were working harder and longer – for less. Or they couldn’t find jobs at all.

With today’s Tea Party and the Ryan budget, the Right’s coalition is staying on the offensive. If the House budget were passed in total, tax rates for the rich would be reduced another 10 percentage points; military spending would remain high to please the neocons (who foresee a possible war with Iran); and Planned Parenthood and other pet targets of the Christian Right would be zeroed out.

Yet, with the proposed elimination of traditional Medicare, the Ryan budget has lifted the curtain on what the Right’s “free market” has in mind for most average Americans, who could expect to find their lives not only more brutish but shorter.

The real-life-and-death consequences of the Right’s tax cuts, military spending and culture wars are finally coming into focus. If you’re not rich – and can’t afford to pick up the higher tab on health care – you’re likely to die younger. Or your kids might have to dig into their pockets to help you out.

Less extreme but still troubling, another consequence of the Right’s remarkable success over the past three decades might become apparent on your TV screens this fall.

Thanks to all those right-wing judges packed onto federal appeals courts by Reagan and the two Bushes, American football fans might not have the NFL to watch.

The NFL’s lockout of its players seemed to be ending several weeks ago when a lower-court judge ruled against the billionaire owners, but the NFL’s lawyers confidently filed an appeal to a three-judge panel on the Eighth Circuit, knowing that they would surely get one dominated by Republican judges.

They did. Steven Colloton and Duane Benton, two Republicans appointed by George W. Bush, constituted the majority on the panel and reflexively sided with the NFL’s owners.

The ruling should have surprised no one. After all, the Right’s default position is almost always to side with the billionaires.

© 2011 Consortiumnews.com

 

Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Neck Deep: The Disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush, was written with two of his sons, Sam and Nat. His two previous books are Secrecy & Privilege: The Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq and Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & 'Project Truth'.

Tax Shell Game: CALPIRG

To download this excellent report:
http://cdn.publicinterestnetwork.org/assets/8d6563bacda5780aa608fa3991994d35/Toward-Common-Ground_Final-Report-2.pdf

2011-04-15

Executive Summary

Tax havens are countries with minimal or no taxes, to which U.S.-based multinational firms or individuals transfer their earnings to avoid paying taxes in the United States. Users of tax havens benefit from access to America’s markets, workforce, infrastructure and security, but pay little or nothing for it—violating the basic fairness of the tax system.

Abuse of tax havens inflicts a price on other American taxpayers, who must pay higher taxes—now or in the future—to cover the government’s revenue shortfall, or must deal with cuts in government services.

The United States loses approximately $100 billion in tax revenues every year due to corporations and individuals sending their money to offshore tax havens.
•    Residents of California paid $440 to make up for the taxes that are avoided by corporations and wealthy individuals through the use of offshore tax havens.
•    In 2010, making up for this lost revenue cost the average U.S. tax filer $434. That’s enough money to feed a family of four for three weeks.

Some of America’s biggest companies—including many who have taken advantage of government bailouts or rely on government contracts—use tax havens. As of 2008, 83 of the 100 largest publicly traded U.S. corporations maintain revenues in offshore tax haven countries.
•    Goldman Sachs, which reported more than $2 billion in profit in 2008, was able to use its 29 tax haven subsidiaries to reduce its federal tax bill to just $14 million. That means that Goldman Sachs’ CEO Lloyd Blankfein, who made $42.9 million that year, earned more than three times the amount that the company paid in federal taxes.
•    General Electric appears to have paid no federal income taxes in 2010, despite reporting profits in the United States of $5.1 billion. The biggest company in the country, GE has lobbied hard for tax breaks and loopholes in the federal tax code, and shifted many of its profits to tax havens to avoid paying U.S. taxes. GE employs nearly 1,000 people in its tax department to help exploit those loopholes, but has laid off one-fifth of its U.S.-based workers since 2002.

To restore fairness to the tax system by preventing corporations and wealthy individuals from avoiding taxes through the use of tax havens, policymakers should:
•    End the ability of U.S. multinational corporations to indefinitely defer paying U.S. tax on their profits. U.S. corporations should pay taxes immediately on profits from U.S. business that companies attribute to their foreign entities, rather than wait until they someday bring the money back to the United States. The United States should not adopt a “territorial” system under which companies temporarily move profits and pay taxes in tax haven countries and then freely bring them back tax-free to the United States.
•    Expand rules against money laundering to cover those who aid and abet. The rules should include lawyers who set up shell companies, hedge fund managers who set up anonymous accounts, and others who help taxpayers avoid tax laws.
•    Increase the penalties and strengthen rules related to offshore tax shelters, including prohibiting tax strategy patents and fees contingent on obtaining tax benefits.
•    Revise tax treaties to enhance sharing of tax information between countries to include the real names of account owners.
•    Require multinational corporations to report financial statements on a country-by-country basis.
•    Close loopholes that allow tax credits from other countries to count against U.S. tax liability.
•    End the ability of U.S. multinational companies to apply tax deductions related to foreign income to U.S. income.
•    Eliminate the incentive for U.S. companies to transfer intellectual property (e.g. patents, trademarks) to tax haven countries for artificially low prices and then pay inflated royalties to use them in the United States. This manipulation masks what would otherwise be U.S. taxable income.
•    Stop the ability of multinational companies to manipulate how they define their corporate status to minimize their taxes, including the ability to represent themselves as different types of corporations to different countries.
•    Treat foreign corporations as U.S. domestic companies if they are managed and controlled in the United States.
•    Increase IRS resources to combat transfer pricing and tax haven abuses.

Updated x 3 - Action Diary - 300,000 Activists Needed to Drive ALEC to the Light - Part 1

The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) has come into public prominence in recent months primarily since Dr. William Cronon, a distingushed scholar at the University of Wisconsin - Madison published an essay Who's Really Behind Recent Republican Legislation in Wiscosin and Elsewhere? (Hint: It Didn't Start Here) on March 15, 2011, followed by an OP-ED in the New York Times titled Wisconsin's Radical Break on March 21, 2011.

Two days after Cronon's blog post, the Wisconsin Republican Party, in a breathtaking attack on academic freedom, and a heavy-handed McCarthyite attempt at intmidating college professors into silence on political matters of all kinds, submitted a Freedom of Information Request seeking access to Professor Cronon's emails with the terms:  Republican, Scott Walker, recall, collective bargaining, AFSCME, WEAC, rally, union, Alberta Darling, Randy Hopper, Dan Kapanke, Rob Cowles, Scott Fitzgerald, Sheila Harsdorf, Luther Olsen, Glenn Grothman, Mary Lazich, Jeff Fitzgerald, Mar.  Like I implied, it was a McCarthyite Fishing Expedition.

Fortunately, the administration of UW had the strenth and courage to reject the FOIA request out of hand, helping to preserve UW's proud heritage of adademic freedom.

ALEC has operated since 1973 clearly out of the spotlight, and in fact, has always attempted to run under the radar of American politics and American media.  Its full membership list is hidden from the public, its "Model Legislation" is hidden from the public, its corporate sponsors are not disclosed, in short, it operates as a shadow government, writing hundreds of bills that are introduced in all 50 state legislatures with a success rate of close to 20 per cent.

Since ALEC hides in the shadows, wants to remain a background player, despite its huge influence, and its primary activity of writing corporate sponsored legislation to be introduced in 50 legislatures, usually to the detriment of the voters that the legislative members were elected to represent, I and many other Americans have decided that this secrecy must end.

This diary is the first of a series that all take the form of Action Diaries, and with some advice from fellow bloggers concerned about the ALEC onslaught of union busting, prison privatization, hostility to public education with legislation around the country intended to weaken teacher unions and the institution of Public Education itself through vouchers and charter schools, for profit schools, Voter ID Laws which are really Democratic Voter Suppression laws (passed in some states, introduced in at least 38 states), anti-environmental legislation, anti-regulation of all kinds of businesses, the list goes on, and the goals of this group are radical.  This letter will also seek an answer to the question if the legislator in question is traveling to the August ALEC Annual Conference, whether they will be traveling at public expense, or if they are accepting an ALEC "scholarship" for the travel, what the perks are, and what they wish to exchange in consideration for the free travel and wining and dining, with hundreds of CEO's, Washington Lawyers, Lobbyists, and why they need outside help to solve your state's problems.

Since ALEC proposes Model Legislation, we are going to put the shoe on the other foot and propose Model Letters to state legislators of both parties with the goal of having hundreds of letters seeking disclosure of ALEC membership status and ALEC input into introduced legislation.  The next in the series will include a Model Letter to the Editor, with a goal to have hundreds of LTE's seeking answers to why they do not report it when an ALEC piece of legislation has been introduced in our 50 legislatures, and to ask why the legislators are too lazy to write legislation themselves.  We want to make it impossible for any newspaper or record in any city or state to ignore ALEC.

The next in the series will ask that all legislators of both parties introduce into the legislative record a notation any time ALEC or any outside organization has written the legislation.

I have some other subjects for Model Letters, and will entertain more ideas from readers.  I appeal to Kossacks to show Republicans and Tea Partiers what a real grass roots campaign looks like.  In the end, I would like to see tens of thousands of letters going out to every state legislator seeking to find out if they are ALEC members, if they plan to travel to ALEC events, if they are spending out tax money to get there, if they are traveling at someone else's expense, what the spending party expects in return for that investment and much more.

I want Americans who care about how their legislation is created to be a bee up ALEC's nose with a non-detachable stinger.  ALEC must know that Americans are no longer passive to its existence, and its manipulation of our legislators.

ALEC claims over 2000 legislative members, and others have identified over 500 known funders (not all are current members).  Here is a diary with some interesting lists.

My first Model Letter is to legislators who may or may not be ALEC members of both parties.  For those of you who get positive responses, (legislator is an ALEC member), please send a Kos message to me, or comment this diary.  There is a group of Kossaks who are compiling what we hope is a comprehensive database.  Eventually we want to know who all the legislative members are, who the corporate funders are, and this is key, to get all of ALEC's Model Legislation and force full disclosure of the legislation and what interests benefit from ALEC legislation.  We want absolute full disclosure of ALEC, and eventually we want to shut it down.  How's that for Creative Destruction?  We know if ALEC is weakened, another ALEC-like organization will replace it, but we want, from the start, the tools to expose and bring other like organizations to the light.  As our president says, sunlight is the best disinfectant.  Let's start to clean this mess up.

Honorable XXXXX XXXXXXX,
Office, District, Full address, City, State Zip

Dear Sen (or Rep) XXXXXXX,
It has come to my attention that there is an organization known as The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) that has gained enormous power in American politics, specifically at the state level.  This organization is known to work behind the scenes, will not disclose its rank and file membership, will not disclose its funders, and will not disclose the principal product of its work, which is Model Legislation.  I see this as a dangerous practice because such failure to disclose who writes and sponsors legislation in our 50 state capitols is a serious breach of transparency which our laws and constitution demands of all legislators.  Every voter in our state deserves to be advised of who is writing our laws, the interests behind the laws, and whether they favor special interests at the expense of the residents, voters and taxpayers of our state.

•    My first question is; Are you a member of ALEC, yes or no?
•    If Yes, when did you join?
•    Have you ever sponsored, or co-sponsored legislation written or partially written by ALEC?
•    Please identify all ALEC written legislation you have sponsored or co-sponsored.
•    ALEC has a series of conferences and workshops throughout the year.  The next event is the Annual Meeting which is to be held in New Orleans, LA August 3-6, 2011.  Do you intend to attend this event?
•    If you attend this event, will you be traveling at Taxpayer expense, Yes or No?
•    If you will be traveling at ALEC expense, please identify how much this is costing ALEC for your travel, lodging, meals and other considerations (golf outings and the like).
•    If you are not traveling to the New Orleans conference, do you intend to join via teleconference or video link?
•    Please explain how legislation written by Washington DC Lawyers, Washington DC Lobbyists, and Corporate interests, some of which do not do business in our state, represents the interests of the residents, voters and Taxpayers of our state better than legislation written by our elected legislators.
•    If you are a member of ALEC or any other organization which has a hand in writing the laws of our state, please verify that your listing in the legislative website correctly states this affiliation.  Legislative transparency demands this.  I want to know who is writing the laws of my state, and I want to know why outsiders think they know more about our problems than our elected representatives do.

In closing, I am very serious about wanting to know who is writing and influencing the legislation that is enacted in our state.  Please respond seriously.

Sincerely,
Your Name
Address,
email if desired
Phone

Of course, it would be nice to know who to write to.  In Ohio where I live you can find contact information for your Representative or Senator here: 

Ohio House of Represenatives Contact Info, click on the legislator's name
Ohio Senate Contact Info, click on the Senator's picture for more info

Michigan:
House Republican Caucus
I hate to say it, but the Michigan Democratic website is difficult to navigate and if someone finds a good link, please put it in a comment and I will put it here.

Wisconsin:
WI Assembly Representatives
WI Senate contact info

Minnesota:

www.leg.mn/leg/districtfinder.asp

I do not have time to research contacts for all 50 states, but if you can get the contact info for both houses in your state (except for Unicameral in Nebraska), I will update the diary later.  When it is complete, you may choose to hotlist it as a resource.  To find your state's legislators google "your state Legislature" and follow the links, please put links in your comments, I will compile them and do another diary with the links.

I have a volunteer who will put a pdf copy of the letter above on his website.  I am looking for someone to volunteer to put a Word version up so that it is easier to click and get an easily editable file.  PDF editors are fairly common now, and when my friend puts the link up on his website, I will update this diary.

Please consider joining the demonstrations for the ALEC Annual Meeting in New Orleans August 3-6.  Let's show them that they can no longer hide.  All the Republican presidential hopefuls will be there, our opportunity to shine the light on ALEC will never be bigger.

I would appreciate tweets, FB's and other dissemination in various media.  The more the merrier.  Thanks for reading.

Update 1:  h/t to Bfealk for putting the letter up in pdf on The Rochester Citizen.
Update 2:  MNDem999 provided a link to a Google Docs site where you can find an editable version of the letter.  Letter link,  Instructions follow:
Choose File
Choose Download As
Choose Word – if you are using Microsoft word
Choose Text if using another program and do a copy and paste
Edit and Send
Update 3:  I take great pride in having the first diary ever posted in the new Daily Kos Group titled Exposing ALEC.  Here is a link to the Exposing ALEC blog., and I believe I added the first reference to the Tag "Open ALEC" h/t to ManFromMiddletown.

Originally posted to KasichWatch on Tue May 24, 2011 at 06:25 AM PDT.

Also republished by Exposing ALEC and Class Warfare Newsletter: The Plutocracy VS the Working Class.

Tags

• ALEC Follow
• ALEC Annual meeting New Orleans Follow
• American Legislative Exchange Council Follow
• Exposing ALEC Follow
• John Kasich Follow

iHate Tax Cheats: US Uncut Targets Apple

Allison Kilkenny

May 27, 2011  

US Uncut, the anti–corporate tax dodging group, recently announced that Apple is its newest target. In a press release, the organization declares it will stage actions across the country on June 4 against the popular company.

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About the Author

Allison Kilkenny

Allison Kilkenny is the co-host of the progressive political podcast Citizen Radio (wearecitizenradio.com) and...

Related Topics

America Apple United States iPhone

The group is demanding Apple remove its support of the Win America Campaign (WAC), an effort aimed at repatriating $1 trillion in foreign accounts back to America at just a 5 percent tax rate. Essentially, WAC’s efforts would lead to a $4 billion tax cut for Apple.

The Win America campaign backs a Congressional proposal called the Freedom to Invest Act of 2011 that seeks to give corporations that shelter profits overseas—including giants like Apple, Microsoft, Google, Adobe, Cisco and many others—a limited-time “tax holiday” that would allow them to return their profits to the United States without paying traditional rates of taxes.

“Apple plays huge games with their taxes. By disguising profits in the United States as foreign earnings in low-tax countries, Apple dodges billions of dollars of taxes they should be paying,“ the group stated.
Last month, Apple reported a record March-quarter growth rate of 83 percent with a 95 percent profit growth and record iPhone sale growth of 113 percent. The company’s second-quarter revenue was a record-setting $24.6 billion.

“When this ‘Win America’ tax cheat coalition wins, we all lose as Americans,” US Uncut San Francisco organizer Ana Corrie stated in the group’s press release. “We are all disappointed to see a great company like Apple participate in such a deceitful campaign that violates their commitment to operate in a socially responsible manner.”

Other companies, such as Bank of America, Pfizer, Duke Energy, General Electric and big oil companies all use this technique of disguising profits as earnings in low-tax countries to lower their tax liability, and on a far lager scale, but US Uncut is targeting Apple due to the company’s popularity. The group hopes to draw attention to the problem of tax dodging by focusing on a brand universally recognized by working Americans.
“I love my iPhone, but I hate tax cheats,” said US Uncut spokesperson Carl Gibson, “The only winners in the WAC effort are the same corporate executives who continue to steal $1 trillion out of our nation’s coffers every decade. We all pay our fair share of taxes, and Apple should too.”

Thus far, the group has put together an “Action Scenario” detailing a typical scenario for how a flash mob might occupy an Apple store. Such an event entails unveiling signs, banners, chanting and distributing leaflets to customers. But it also can involve the more creative approaches of dressing like Apple employees and participating in dance parties.

“It’s outrageous for a company that got $4 billion in tax credits last year to only pay 85 percent less than they should in taxes while the public services we all depend on get the axe,” said US Uncut San Francisco organizer Joanne Gifford. “Should we really be giving away tax loopholes to the folks who sell iPads at the same time we cut Grandma off Medicare? It’s shameful.”

“We already got duped once by this hoax of repatriating profits with the ‘American Jobs Creation Act of 2004’ under Bush,” said US Uncut spokesperson Ryan Clayton, “It did not create jobs and only opened the door for tax haven abusers to continue to cheat the system. As the saying goes: ‘Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.’ ”

Like this blog post? Read it on The Nation’s free iPhone App, NationNow.

Allison Kilkenny

Lawrence O'Donnell Exposes ALEC (Yes!) MUST WATCH

Submitted by Miranda on May 18, 2011 - 7:41am

Cross-posted on the People For blog
Last night, People For’s Andrew Gillum went on the Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell to discuss the new Right Wing Watch: In Focus report on ALEC, the group that helps corporate donors get legislation they like placed in statehouses.
Read the report and watch the clip:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Dick Cheney: 'I worship the ground Paul Ryan walks on'

Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0511/55749.html#ixzz1NZzPDdQM

By JENNIFER EPSTEIN | 5/26/11 8:32 AM EDT

Former Vice President Dick Cheney doesn’t want Paul Ryan to run for president — he likes the House Budget chairman too much.

“I worship the ground the Paul Ryan walks on,” Cheney said Wednesday during a rare public appearance, the Houston Chronicle reported. “I hope he doesn’t run for president because that would ruin a good man who has a lot of work to do.”

VIDEO LINK BELOW.

POLITICO 44

Support for Ryan’s budget plan, which includes an overhaul of Medicare, has become an early litmus test for the GOP presidential field. The plan was also a definitive issue in the special election in New York on Tuesday, where Democrat Kathy Hochul won one of the most Republican-friendly congressional seats in the country. Democrats have heralded that victory as a sign that Americans oppose Ryan’s plan.

But as the field of potential contenders for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination has narrowed, some members of the GOP have begun to call for him to run. House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) said earlier this week that he would welcome a White House run, saying of his colleague, “What Paul Ryan is about is real leadership.”

Ryan said Sunday on NBC News’s “Meet the Press” that he is “not running for president,” but didn’t completely close the door to being drafted or getting on the ticket as a running mate.

“You never know what opportunities present themselves way down the road,” he told host David Gregory.

Video posted at: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0511/55749.html#ixzz1NZzfSnGK

ALEC: The Voice of Corporate Special Interests In State Legislatures

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• Who Founded and Funds ALEC?
• Who’s Behind ALEC?
• How Does ALEC Work?
• What Does ALEC Lobby For?
• Undercutting Health Care Reform
• Corporate Power and Workers’ Rights
• Tax Policy
• Private School Vouchers
• Voter ID and Election Laws
• Obstructing Environmental Protection
• Conclusion

Introduction

When state legislators across the nation introduce similar or identical bills designed to boost corporate power and profits, reduce workers rights, limit corporate accountability for pollution, or restrict voting by minorities, odds are good that the legislation was not written by a state lawmaker but by corporate lobbyists working through the American Legislative Exchange Council.  ALEC is a one-stop shop for corporations looking to identify friendly state legislators and work with them to get special-interest legislation introduced. It’s win-win for corporations, their lobbyists, and right-wing legislators. But the big losers are citizens whose rights and interests are sold off to the highest bidder.

Who Founded and Funds ALEC?

The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) was founded in 1973 by Paul Weyrich, who helped build a nationwide right-wing political infrastructure following the reelection of Richard Nixon. In the same year, he helped establish the Heritage Foundation, now one of the most prominent right-wing policy institutes in the country. One year later, Weyrich founded the Committee for the Survival of a Free Congress, the predecessor of the Free Congress Foundation. In 1979, he co-founded and coined the Moral Majority with Jerry Falwell, and in 1981 he helped establish the ultraconservative Council on National Policy. 

ALEC’s major funders include Exxon Mobil, the Scaife family (Allegheny Foundation and the Scaife Family Foundation), the Coors family (Castle Rock Foundation), Charles Koch (Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation and the Claude R. Lambe Charitable Foundation), the Bradley family (The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation) and the Olin family (John M. Olin Foundation). These organizations consistently finance right-wing think tanks and political groups.

Members of ALEC’s board represent major corporations such as Altria, AT&T, GlaxoSmithKline, Johnson & Johnson, Koch Industries, Kraft, PhRMA, Wal-Mart, Peabody Energy, and State Farm. Such corporations represent just a fraction of ALEC’s approximately three hundred corporate partners. According to the American Association for Justice, over eighty percent of ALEC’s finances come from corporate contributions.

Who’s Behind ALEC?

ALEC’s activities reflect its founding, funding, and control by corporate interests. According to the American Association for Justice, “the nuts and bolts of lobbying and crafting legislation is done by large corporate defense firm Shook Hardy & Bacon.” This firm plays a significant role in managing ALEC’s legislative and governmental advocacy programs.

The American Bar Association Journal describes Shook Hardy & Bacon as the “darling of corporate America. ” Their tenacious defense of the tobacco industry “made Shook Hardy the firm many of the world’s biggest companies turn to at the first hint of trouble with one of their products.” A New York Times report on Shook Hardy said “tobacco is their middle name,” and the firm’s lawyers have been viewed as “industry propagandists, apologists and co-conspirators.” Shook Hardy represents clients from the pharmaceutical, energy, food, banking and tobacco industries, like Pfizer, Bayer, Eli Lilly, Cargill, Kraft, Bank of America, Philip Morris, Lorillard Tobacco, and British American Tobacco. ALEC’s monthly periodical Inside ALEC demonstrates the significant role of Shook Hardy, as members of the law firm contributed essays criticizing environmental protection efforts¹, endorsing corporate immunity from lawsuits², and defending abusive insurance company practices³. 

The clout of corporations and corporate-backed groups comprising ALEC is unmistakable: Victor E. Schwartz, a Shook Hardy partner and head of its Public Policy Group, chairs ALEC’s Civil Justice Task Force; Tom Moskitis, the American Gas Association’s Director of External Affairs, chairs the Energy, Environment and Agriculture Task Force; Bob Williams, founder and senior fellow of the corporate-funded Evergreen Freedom Foundation, chairs the Tax and Fiscal Policy Task Force; Bartlett Cleland, director of the corporate-financed Institute for Policy Innovation, chairs the Telecommunications and Information Technology Task Force, and Emory Wilkerson, associate general counsel for State Farm Insurance, chairs the Commerce, Insurance and Economic Development Task Force.

Simply put, “corporations can implement their agendas very effectively using ALEC,” as stated by Edwin Bender of the National Institute on Money in State Politics.

How Does ALEC Work?

ALEC serves as a means for corporations to advise, lobby and sway legislators. By paying hefty dues and sponsorship fees, corporations are able to participate in ALEC ventures, forums and legislative advocacy work and also underwrite conferences, task forces and meetings with politicians. Corporations use ALEC to formulate, present and promote model legislation to elected officials who are ALEC members and sometimes hold leadership roles in the organization. 

“Our members join for the purpose of having a seat at the table. That’s just what we do, that’s the service we offer,” explains Dennis Bartlett, an ALEC task force head who is also the executive director of the American Bail Coalition. “The organization is supported by money from the corporate sector, and, by paying to be members, corporations are allowed the opportunity to sit down at the table and discuss the issues that they have an interest in.”

ALEC propagates a wide range of “model legislation” that seeks to make it more difficult for people to hold corporations accountable in court; gut the rights and protections of workers and consumers; encumber health care reform; privatize and weaken the public education system; provide business tax cuts and corporate welfare; privatize and cut public services; erode regulations and environmental laws; create unnecessary voter ID requirements; endorse Citizens United; diminish campaign finance reformand permit greater corporate influence in elections.

In order to draft and promote their “model legislation,” ALEC operates task forces that bring representatives from corporations together with lawmakers. Each ALEC task force is chaired by both elected officials and “private sector” members. According to Jesse Zwick of the Washington Independent, “ALEC’s task forces are better known for crafting legislation that coincides, rather than conflicts, with the interests of its private-sector members. Famous for hosting lavish conferences for state legislators who possess no staff of their own, the group pampers lawmakers while providing them the opportunity to collaborate on legislation often previously researched and introduced by the policy shops of its corporate members.”

According to ALEC, in 2009, of the 826 “model bills” that were introduced in state legislatures, 115 of those bills were enacted into law. That number is sure to grow following the major Republican gains in the 2010 elections.

ALEC was influential in crafting and passing a Texas law, dubbed the “Successor Asbestos-Related Liability Fairness Act, that shielded Crown Cork and Seal, a business that in 1966 acquired a company that used asbestos in its products, from lawsuits from the company’s workers. Even though Crown agreed to pay the company’s liabilities, it wanted immunity from paying damages to workers facing asbestos-related diseases. Crown Cork and Seal turned to ALEC to help shape the Texas law, which put an extremely low cap on liability for companies like Crown who acquired companies which committed wrongdoing, known as a “successor immunity” law.” Mark Behrens, an attorney for Shook Hardy, worked as a lobbyist for both ALEC and Crown to encourage allied lawmakers to introduce and pass the bill. The American Association for Justice writes that “this so-called ‘successor immunity’ has all the hallmarks of an ALEC special interest bill. It is plainly designed not with public policy in mind, but rather a specific industry (or in this case, a specific company).” The Texas Supreme Court ultimately found the cap to be an unconstitutional retroactive protection for Crown that inhibited the rights of people to rightfully sue corporations for damages, but similar ALEC-derived laws are still on the books in other states.

In Arizona, an investigative report by NPRfound that ALEC significantly helped one of its clients, the Corrections Corporations of America (CCA), influence the state’s new immigration law. The CCA is a for-profit prison company whose “executives believe immigrant detention is their next big market,” and thought that a law which “could send hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants” to prison would “mean hundreds of millions of dollars in profits to private prison companies responsible for housing them.” As a dues-paying member of ALEC, the CCA was able to write, present and lobby Arizona policymakers for a draconian immigration bill at an ALEC-hosted conference. “Four months later, that model legislation became, almost word for word, Arizona’s immigration law,” and many of the bill’s cosponsors later received significant campaign contributions from the CCA.  ALEC also helped the CCA by pushing “truth in sentencing” laws that restrict parole eligibility for felons, and consequently increase the number of prisoners.

What Does ALEC Lobby For?

Since the organization claims to only “exchange” legislation, ALEC is not technically a lobbying firm, and does not need to register. However, ALEC’s tactics and operations are strikingly similar to those of registered lobbyists with corporate benefactors.

Undercutting Health Care Reform

After the passage of health care reform, ALEC’s top priority has been to challenge the law by encouraging members to introduce bills that would prohibit the law’s insurance mandate. ALEC’s Health and Human Services task force is led by representatives of PhRMA and Johnson & Johnson, and representatives of Bayer and GlaxoSmithKlein sit on ALEC’s board. The group’s model bill, the “Freedom of Choice in Health Care Act,” has been introduced in forty-four states, and ALEC even released a “State Legislators Guide to Repealing ObamaCare” discussing a variety of model legislation including bills to partially privatize Medicaid and SCHIP. The legislative guide utilizes ideas and information from pro-corporate groups like the Heritage Foundation, the Goldwater Institute, the James Madison Institute, the Cato Institute, the National Center for Policy Analysis and the National Federation of Independent Business.

Corporate Power and Workers’ Rights

ALEC works fervently to promote laws that would shield corporations from legal action and allow them to limit the rights of workers. The group’s model legislation would roll back laws regarding corporate accountability, workers compensation and on the job protections, collective bargaining and organizing rights, prevailing wage and the minimum wage. ALEC is a main proponent of bills that undermine organized labor by stripping public employees of collective bargaining rights and “right to work” laws.They also push “regulatory flexibility” laws that lead to massive deregulation. It is no surprise that the director of ALEC’s Commerce, Insurance and Economic Development Task Force previously worked as a Koch Associate at the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation.

Tax Policy

As states face challenging budget deficits, ALEC wants to make it more difficult to generate revenue in order to close shortfalls. Bills include the “Super Majority Act,” which makes it so complicated for legislatures to change tax policy that California voters overturned the law; the “Taxpayer Bill Of Rights,” which brought fiscal disaster to Colorado; and measures to eliminate capital gains and progressive income taxes. The main beneficiaries of ALEC’s irresponsible fiscal policies are corporations and the wealthiest taxpayers.

Private School Vouchers

Despite constitutional problems, negative impacts on public schools, bias against disadvantaged students, and comprehensive studies in cities like Washington DC, New York, Milwaukee, and Cleveland which demonstrate that private school voucher programs failed to make any improvements to the education system, ALEC sees vouchers as a way to radically privatize the public education system. Under the guise of “school choice,” ALEC pushes bills with titles like “Parental Choice Scholarship Act” and the “Education Enterprise Act” that establish private school voucher programs.

Voter ID and Election Laws

ALEC is directly tied to the emerging trend among state legislatures to consider voter ID laws. Using false allegations of “voter fraud,” right-wing politicians are pursuing policies that disenfranchise students and other at-risk voters,--including the elderly and the poor--who are unlikely to have drivers’ licenses or other forms of photo ID. By suppressing the vote of such groups, ALEC’s model “Voter ID Act” grants an electoral advantage to Republicans while undermining the right to vote. In addition, ALEC wants to make it easier for corporations to participate in the political process. Their Public Safety and Elections taskforce is co-chaired by Sean Parnell of the Center for Competitive Politics, one of the most vociferous pro-corporate election groups, and promotes model legislation that would devastate campaign finance reform and allow for greater corporate influence in elections.

Obstructing Environmental Protection

At the bidding of its major donors like Exxon Mobil and Koch Industries, ALEC is behind state-level legislation that would hinder the ability of government to regulate and curb polluters. ALEC has previously said that carbon dioxide “is beneficial to plant and human life alike,” and promotes climate change denialism. The group’s model legislation assails EPA emissions guidelines and greenhouse gas regulations, destabilizes regional climate initiatives, permits free-reign for energy corporations, and pushes for massive deregulation. Unsurprisingly, ALEC’s “Energy, Environment and Agriculture” task force is led by Tom Moskitis of the American Gas Association and Martin Shultz of Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck, a major lobbyist firm for oil and gas companies like ConocoPhillips. The group receives funding from ExxonMobil, Shell, Chevron, Texaco, Amoco, the American Petroleum Institute, and the American Electric Power Association.

Conclusion

Americans are increasingly recognizing and speaking out against the disproportionate power of corporations in shaping public policy and steering politicians, and ALEC is a prime example of how Corporate America is able to buy even more power and clout in government. Rather than serve the public interest, ALEC champions the agenda of corporations which are willing to pay for access to legislators and the opportunity to write their very own legislation.  It helps surrogates and lobbyists for corporations draft and promote bills which gut environmental laws, create a regressive tax system, eliminate workers’ rights, undermine universal and affordable health care, privatize public education, and chip away at voting rights.  It's no wonder that so many big corporations view ALEC  as a wise investment.  ALEC represents an alarming risk to the credibility of the political process and threatens to greatly diminish the confidence and influence ordinary people have in government.

Endnotes

1. Phil Goldberg, “State-Sponsored Global Warming Litigation is Weighing Down on American Business.” Inside ALEC. March 2011.
2. Victor Schwartz and Cary Silverman. “Rage Against Federal Pre-Emption.” Inside ALEC. June 2009.
3. Victor E. Schwartz. “How “Bad Faith” Becomes Bad Law.” Inside ALEC. November/December 2009. 

~ The most powerful testimony against cuts to the disabled ~

An eloquent man named Kurt Rutzen, who lives with cerebral palsy, sums up what extreme cuts to public services will mean to disabled people. He’s testifying to the Minnesota Senate, but the same story could be told in dozens of states across the country, and in Washington.



Originally submitted by Brandon W. Found on MNSenateDFL’s YouTube Channel.

Facebook, Apple and Google are trillion dollar companies - The Cody Word - MarketWatch

Facebook, Apple and Google are trillion dollar companies - The Cody Word - MarketWatch

High-tech is low-balling America.

"A large part of predicting a building of this now burgeoning app/tablet/smartphone/cloud bubble has been and is...the Fed’s...pursuing...policies of extreme easy money & the Republican/Democrats creating ever new targeted tax tricks & explicit welfare subsidies for corporate America."

Despair Not -- In These Times

Despair Not -- In These Times

We must confront ‘well-informed futility syndrome’ to overcome our fossil fuel addiction.

By Sandra Steingraber

What will we say when our grandchildren ask us the names of the departed? Or, by then, will the loss of favorite animals be the least of our worries?

To Despair or Not to Despair, That Is the Question

What do you think? Is confronting climate change the moral issue of our time?

• Or should we make like a polar bear and adapt? After all, the planet may warm and seas may rise and crops may fail, but surely some humans--at least the fittest (and richest)--will survive.

• Or is such grim optimism too complacent--and complicit?

We invite you to share your thoughts. E-mail despairnot@inthesetimes.com. Please include your phone number and address. The In These Times Board of Editors will compile your contributions, which will be published in an upcoming issue of In These Times or at www.InTheseTimes.com.

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In Alton, Ill., downstream from Peoria, the Illinois River town where I grew up, the abolitionist Elijah Lovejoy was pumped full of bullets on a dark November night by a mob intent on silencing the man once and for all. On this evening, they succeeded.

By dawn, Elijah was dead, and his printing press—the means by which he distributed his radical ideas—lay at the bottom of the Mississippi River. The year was 1837. The Rev. Lovejoy, a Presbyterian minister who attended Princeton Theological Seminary, was buried on this 35th birthday.

But the story doesn’t end there.

Almost immediately, membership in antislavery societies across the nation swelled. Vowing to carry on the work of his fallen friend, Edward Beecher, president of Illinois College in Jacksonville, threw himself into abolitionist efforts and, in so doing, inspired his sister, Harriet Beecher Stowe, who went on to write the most famous abolitionist treatise of all: Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Meanwhile, Elijah’s brother, Owen Lovejoy, turned his own house into a station along the Underground Railroad. Owen went on to win a seat in Congress and, along the way, befriended a young Illinois politician by the name of Abraham Lincoln.

These facts impressed me as a child.

When I read Reverend Lovejoy’s biography as a grown-up and mother, I found other things impressive. Such as the fact that, at the time of his assassination, Elijah had a young family. And yet, in the weeks before his death—when it became clear that the mob pursuing him was growing bolder by the hour—he did not desist from speaking out against slavery. So Elijah declared in one of his final speeches:

While all around me is violence and tumult, all is peace within…. I sleep sweetly and undisturbed, except when awakened by the brickbats of the mob.

Truly? With a pregnant wife in the bed next to him and a 1-year-old son in the next room? He wasn’t worried?

A letter to his mother in Maine tells a more nuanced story:

Still I cannot but feel that it is harder to “fight valiantly for the truth” when I risk not only my own comfort, ease, and reputation, and even life, but also that of another beloved one.

And then there’s this poignant aside:

I have a family who are dependent on me… And this is it that adds the bitterest ingredient to the cup of sorrow I am called to drink.

Here’s something else that I’ve noticed while reading his words. To the slave owners and murderous thugs, Elijah spoke calmly. He reserved his fierce language for the members of the community who gladly lived in the free state of Illinois but wished to remain above the fray: the ones who added their signatures to a resolution asking him to cease publication of his newspaper and leave town, but would not sign a resolution that urged protection of law against mob rule; the ones who agreed that slavery was a homicidal abomination but who feared that emancipation without recompense to slave owners for loss of property would be socially destabilizing; the ones who believed themselves upstandingly moral but who chose to remain silent about the great moral crisis of the day.

Two crises, one cause

In the spirit of Elijah Lovejoy—the man who is the namesake of my 9-year-old son—the time has come for outspoken, full-throated heroism in the face of the great moral issue of our own day: the environmental crisis—an unfolding calamity whose main victims are our own children and grandchildren.

In fact, the environmental crisis is actually two crises, although they share a common cause. You could view it as a tree with two main branches: One branch represents what is happening to our planet through the atmospheric accumulation of heat-trapping gases (most notably, carbon dioxide and methane). The second branch represents what is happening to us through the accumulation of inherently toxic chemical pollutants in our bodies.

Follow the first branch and you find droughts, floods, acidifying oceans, dissolving coral reefs and faltering plankton stocks (the oceans’ plankton provides half of our atmospheric oxygen supply). Follow the second branch and you find pesticides in children’s urine, lungs stunted by air pollutants, abbreviated pregnancies, altered hormone levels and lower scores on cognitive tests.

The trunk of this tree is an economic dependency on fossil fuels, primarily coal (plant fossils) and petroleum and natural gas (animal fossils). When we light them on fire, we threaten the global ecosystem. When we use them as feedstocks for making stuff, we create substances—pesticides, solvents, plastics—that can tinker with our subcellular machinery and various signaling pathways that make it run.

Biologist Rachel Carson first called our attention to these manifold dangers in her 1962 book, Silent Spring. She wrote, “Future generations are unlikely to condone our lack of prudent concern for the integrity of the natural world that supports all life.” Since then, the scientific evidence for the disintegration of our world has become irrefutable, and members of the future generations to whom she was referring are now occupying our homes.

They are our kids.

I mean this in the most basic ways. When my son Elijah, at age 4, asked to be a polar bear for Halloween, I sewed a polar bear costume—and I did so with the full knowledge that his costume might outlast the species. No other generation of mothers before mine has ever borne such knowledge—nor wondered if we should share this terrible news with our children. Or not. It’s a novel situation. Indeed, according to the most recent assessment, one in every four mammal species (and one in every three marine animals) is now threatened with extinction, including that icon of Halloween itself: the little brown bat. Thus, animal costumes whose real-life correspondents have been wiped from Earth may well become commonplace.

This leads me to wonder: What will we say when our grandchildren ask us the names of the departed? When bats, bees, butterflies, whales, polar bears and elephants disappear, will children still read books about them? Will they want to dress up as vanished species? Or, by then, will the loss of favorite animals be the least of their worries?

‘New morbidities of childhood’

Chronic childhood diseases linked to toxic chemical exposures are rising in prevalence. Here are a few of the current trends:

• 1 in 8 U.S. children is born prematurely. Preterm birth is the leading cause of death in the first months of life and the leading cause of disability. Its price tag is $26 billion per year in medical costs, special services and lost productivity. Preterm birth has demonstrable links to air pollution, especially maternal exposure to fine particles and combustion byproducts of the type released from coal-burning power plants.

• 1 in 11 U.S. children has asthma, the most common chronic childhood disease and a leading cause of school absenteeism. Asthma symptoms have been linked to certain ingredients in plastic (phthalates) as well as outdoor air pollution, including traffic exhaust. The annual cost of childhood asthma is estimated at $18 billion. Its incidence has doubled since 1980.

• 1 in 10 U.S. children has a learning disability, and nearly 1 in 10 has attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder. All together, special education services now consume 22 percent of U.S. school spending—about $77.3 billion per year at last count. Neurodevelopmental disorders have significant associations with exposures to air pollution, organophosphate pesticides like diazinon, and the heavy metals lead, mercury, and arsenic, among others.

• 1 in 110 children has autism or is on the autism spectrum. Annual costs are $35 billion. Causes are unknown, but exposure to chemical agents in early pregnancy is one of several suspected contributors.

• 1 in 10 U.S. white girls and 1 in 5 U.S. black girls begin breast development before the age of eight. On average, breast development begins nearly two years earlier (age 9) than it did in the early 1960s (age 11). A risk factor for breast cancer in adulthood, early puberty in girls is associated with increasing body fat as well as exposure to some hormonally active chemical agents known as “estrogen mimickers.” We have no cost estimates for the shortened childhoods of girls.

All together, asthma, behavioral problems, intellectual impairments and preterm birth are among the “new morbidities of childhood.” So concludes a 2006 federally funded investigation of pediatric environmental health. Ironically, by becoming so familiar a presence among children, these disorders now appear almost normal or inevitable. And yet, with an entirely different chemical regulatory system, farm bill and energy policy, their prevalence might be much reduced.

The fact that we do not identify and abolish hormone-disrupting, brain-damaging chemicals to which children are routinely exposed raises profound ethical questions. The authors of the pediatric health investigation, published in Environmental Health Perspectives, put it this way:

In the absence of toxicity testing, we are inadvertently employing pregnant women and children as uninformed subjects to warn us of new environmental toxicants. … Paradoxically, because industry is not obligated to supply the data on developmental neurotoxicity, the costs of human disease, research, and prevention are socialized whereas the profits are privatized.

In the absence of federal policies that protect child development and the ecology of the planet on which our children’s lives depend, we parents have to serve as our own regulatory agencies and departments of interior.

Already manically busy, we are encouraged by popular media reports to read labels, consult websites, vet the contents of birthday party goody bags, shrink our carbon footprints, mix our own nontoxic cleaning products, challenge our school districts to embrace pesticide-free soccer fields and limit the number of ounces of mercury-laced tuna fish consumed by each child per week.

Well-informed futility’

Thoughtful but overwhelmed parents correctly perceive a disconnect between the enormity of the problem and the ability of individual acts of vigilance and self-sacrifice to fix it. Awareness without corresponding political change leads to paralyzing despair. And so, eventually, we begin to discount or ignore the latest evidence of harm. We feel helpless in the face of our knowledge, and we’re not sure we want to know anything more. The apt term for this is “well-informed futility syndrome.”

“Well-informed futility” refers to a particular kind of learned helplessness. It’s a term that was coined in 1973 by psychologist Gerhart Wiebe, who was writing in an age when television had brought war into the living rooms of Americans for the first time. Wiebe noticed that a steady onslaught of information about a problem over which people feel little sense of personal agency gives rise to a sense of futility. Ironically, the more we know about such a problem, the more we are filled with a paralyzing sense of futility. That sense, in turn, forestalls action. And yet, action is the cure for paralysis.

Just down the street from well-informed futility resides denial. According to contemporary risk communication expert Peter Sandman, we all instinctively avoid information that triggers intolerable emotions—such as intolerable fear or intolerable guilt. In the face of knowledge too upsetting to bear, there is nothing to do but look away.

Well-informed futility and its inattentive neighbor, denial, especially flourish, says Sandman, when there are discontinuities in the messages we receive, as when we are told that a problem (mass extinctions, melting icecaps) is dire but the proposed solutions (buy new light bulbs) seem trivial. If the problem were really so dire, wouldn’t we all be asked to respond with actions of equivalent magnitude? So … maybe the problem isn’t so dire.

It is such discontinuity that provides the exit doors. And soon enough, we retreat into silent paralysis rather than stand up for abolition now.

The antidote to despair

Action is the antidote to despair, and by action I do not mean shopping differently. Indeed, the notion that toxicity should be a consumer choice must be soundly rejected. Instead, we must seek the higher ground of human rights, and from that vantage explore systemic solutions to the ongoing chemical contamination of our children and our biosphere.

The domestic routines of family life with young children—however isolated and detached from public life they seem—are inextricably bound to the most urgent public health issues of our time:

• Risks for asthma are related to transportation and energy policies.

• Bedtime snacks are linked to global systems of agricultural subsidies.

• The highly explosive raw materials used for manufacturing my kitchen floor pose demonstrable threats to national security.

• Sunburn at the beach is linked to the stability of the ozone layer, which, in turn, is threatened by particular pesticides used in the production of tomatoes and strawberries.

• The capture of a rabid bat in the kids’ bedroom demonstrates the precautionary principle in action as enlightened public health policy. The proposal to extract natural gas from the Marcellus Shale that lies below my rural county in upstate New York demonstrates the abandonment of that same principle.

From understanding the inter-relatedness of situations like these, two epiphanies emerge.

ONE: Ultimately the environmental crisis is a parenting crisis. It undermines my ability to carry out my two fundamental duties: to protect my children from harm and to plan for their future.

Current environmental policies must be realigned to safeguard the healthy development of children and sustain the planetary life-support systems on which their lives depend.

TWO: Such a realignment necessitates emancipation from our terrible addiction to fossil fuels in all their toxic forms.

Happily, the best science shows us that we can do so. Mark Jacobson and Mark Delucchi, in their 2009 Scientific American article, “A Path to Sustainable Energy by 2030,” explain how in the course of the next 20 years, we could entirely meet our energy requirements with renewable, non-carbon-based sources, if we cut our energy consumption by half. With the willingness to make deep cuts in consumption, the whole fossil-fuel freedom project becomes doable. And this is a place where a thousand molehills really do a mountain make.

According to Paul Stern, the director of the Committee on the Human Dimensions of Global Climate Change at the National Research Council, in the United States, individuals’ homes and vehicles are responsible for 38 percent of carbon dioxide emissions. Therefore, we don’t have to wait around for political change before making immediate and radical transformations in our own lives and spheres of influence.

We should not despair. We can break the spell. We can prepare the way. In other words, as Elijah Lovejoy exhorted his fellow citizens when encouraging them to imagine a U.S. economy no longer dependent on the unpaid labor of people held as property: It’s time to “come up to the rescue, and let it be known whether the spirit of freedom yet presides.”

This essay was adapted from Raising Elijah: Protecting Our Children in an Age of Environmental Crisis (Merloyd Lawrence Books/Da Capo Press, April). Sandra Steingraber’s last In These Times article was “How Mercury-Tainted Tuna Damages Fetal Brains: The Story Procter & Gamble Censored,” our January 17, 2005, issue’s cover story.