Pox Americana

[Alistair Sim]

Pox Americana
Bush's moral code is do unto others anything you can get away with
http://zmagsite.zmag.org/Jan2005/sklarpr0105.html

By Holly Sklar

What a country, our United States. We haven't had a woman president.
We haven't had a black president. We haven't had a Latino or Native
American president. But we've had two George Bushes. If the Bush
dynasty continues, the first Latino president could be George P.
Bush, son of Columba and Jeb Bush, the vote-rigging governor of
Florida. He's one of the grandkids George the Elder called "the
little brown ones." George P. is a lawyer specializing in mergers and
acquisitions and other corporate law. Perfect.

George W. Bush, even more than his father before him, was, to use
Hightower's phrase, "born on third base and thought he hit a triple."
Now he and the Republican Party are born again-ready to slander and
gerrymander their way to "The Architect" Karl Rove's dream of
permanent right-wing rule.

Bushwhacker Bible

If you haven't read it yet, I recommend Kevin Phillips's latest book,
American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune and the Politics of Deceit in
the House of Bush. Phillips was a pivotal Republican strategist,
blueprinting Richard Nixon's "Southern strategy." Over the years,
though, Phillips became increasingly disgusted with the kind of crony
capitalism, insider dealing, influence peddling, war profiteering,
anti-worker, and increasingly fundamentalist Christian right
Republicanism now personified by George W. Bush and
Dick "Halliburton" Cheney.

Phillips thinks it's terrible for democracy that with Bush, the "de
facto head of the Religious Right" and the president of the United
States is the same person. As House Republican leader Tom Delay
assured a Texas Baptist audience, God made Bush president to "promote
a biblical worldview."

In the bible according to Bush, Cheney, Rove, and Delay, Jesus wants
the rich to get richer and richer while children are hungry and
homeless, the Garden of Eden blooms with oil wells, and you do unto
others anything you can get away with. American fundamentalists want
less Darwinism in the schools and more Social Darwinism in the
economy.

The core economic agenda is undo the New Deal. Even better, remake
the United States in the image of retro Texas. Check out Michael
Lind's book, Made in Texas: George W. Bush and the Southern Takeover
of American Politics. The Texan Michael Lind says Bush's presidency
can be seen as a successful coup by the Southern conservative
oligarchy and culmination of 70 years of counter-revolution against
the New Deal in both domestic and foreign policy. Bush, he writes,
was shaped by "a culture that combines Protestant fundamentalism and
Southern militarism with an approach to economics that favors
primitive commodity capitalist enterprises like cotton and oil
production over high-tech manufacturing and scientific R&D." Now
there's a recipe for peace, prosperity, and sustainable development.

Think the United States before Franklin Roosevelt. Before even Teddy
Roosevelt. Think of the Nixon and Reagan administrations as the good
ol' days. Ronald Reagan used to joke, "Sometimes our right hand
doesn't know what our far right hand is doing." That's the political
spectrum now driving the White House and Congress and reshaping the
courts.

Bush's biggest corporate backer was Enron. Before it imploded in an
orgy of greed-destroying jobs and retirements-Enron helped set policy
on energy, the environment, deregulation and so on. Bush is
Enronizing the environment and the economy. Milking them like cash
cows and sticking future generations with the bills. W stands for
global warming. Our grandchildren may study Bush as the president who
could have taken action against global warming at the final tipping
point to disaster-but didn't.

Bush's basic economic goal is simple: the rich get richer. This has
been a trend since the mid-1970s, but Bush is accelerating it with
deep tax cuts. For underpaid workers and the
unemployed, "compassionate conservatism" means, "Let them eat
bibles." The shriveled public safety net is being outsourced to faith-
based homeless shelters, church suppers, and so on. The government
increasingly fuels right-wing faith-based initiatives, which fuels
evangelism, which counters economic populism.

Economic inequality has gone back to the future-circa 1929. The 400
richest Americans who make up the Forbes 400 have $1 trillion in
combined wealth. That's nearly as much as the combined wealth of the
more than 50 million households in the less moneyed half of the
population.

The middle class is shrinking. The share of national income going to
the middle class in 2003 was nearly the lowest on record, with data
back to 1967. The share going to the bottom fifth of households was
the lowest on record.

Poverty rates are higher now than they were in the 1970s. One out of
five children is born into poverty, by the lowball official count, in
this poorest richest nation on earth. Poverty rates would be much
higher if the poverty line were adjusted to realistically reflect the
cost of minimally adequate housing, healthcare, food, and other
necessities such as childcare for employed parents.

In 1979, the richest 1 percent of Americans had 23 times as much
after-tax income as the bottom 20 percent. By the year 2000, the top
1 percent had 63 times as much after-tax income as the bottom 20
percent. That's before all the Bush tax cuts.

Workers have not been getting their fair share of the benefits of
rising worker productivity. Between 1947 and 1973, worker
productivity rose 104 percent while the minimum wage rose 101
percent, adjusting for inflation. Between 1973 and 2003, however,
worker productivity rose 72 percent, but the minimum wage fell 22
percent and average hourly wages fell 10.5 percent, adjusted for
inflation.

The minimum wage has been stuck at $5.15 an hour since 1997. That's
lower than the real minimum wage of 1950, which was $5.88, adjusted
for inflation in 2004 dollars. In technology terms, 1950 is so long
ago that pocket calculators were still two decades in the future.
When the minimum wage is stuck in quicksand, it drags down wages for
average workers as well. As Business Week observes in a May 31, 2004
cover story on the growing numbers of working poor, "Today more than
28 million people, about a quarter of the workforce between the ages
of 18 and 64, earn less than $9.04 an hour, which translates into a
full-time salary of $18,800 a year-the income that marks the federal
poverty line for a family of four" ($9 is not much more than the
minimum wage peak of $8.69 in 1968, adjusting for inflation).

Many companies have been ripping off workers and shareholders.
They're paying workers so little they can't make ends meet. They're
paying CEOs so much, their grandchildren won't have to work.

Some of today's worst CEOs make millions more in a year than the best
CEOs of earlier generations made in their lifetimes. Fortune magazine
put a smiling pig in a pinstriped suit on the cover and headlined its
2003 CEO pay roundup, "Have they no shame? Their performance stank
last year, yet most CEOs got paid more than ever."

U.S. companies are busily outsourcing workers when they should be
insourcing CEOs from other countries. European and Japanese CEOs run
many of the world's leading companies for a lot less pay than their
U.S. counterparts. U.S. CEOs make five times as much as CEOs in
Japan, four times as much as CEOs in Spain, three times as much as
CEOs in the United Kingdom, France, Italy, and the Netherlands, and
twice as much as CEOs in Germany and Switzerland.

U.S. CEOs have put factory workers, computer programmers, and
engineers in a race to the bottom with workers around the world while
keeping themselves in a rigged race to the top. U.S. CEOs at major
corporations made 44 times as much as workers in 1980 and 254 times
as much in 2003. British CEOs make just 28 times as much as workers.
You'd think the Brits were the ones who rebelled against royalty-not
us.

A major reason for the decline in the value of wages and benefits has
been the decline of unions, with plant closures, market
fundamentalist globalization and union busting. Only 13 percent of
workers are union members, including nearly 4 in 10 government
workers, but just 1 in 12 private sector workers. The U.S. Bureau of
Labor Statistics reported that full-time workers who were union
members had median 2003 weekly earnings of $760 compared with just
$599 for workers not represented by unions-and union members are much
more likely to have health insurance and pensions.

The decline of unions affects everyone, not just union members. In
Business Week's words, "While labor unions were largely responsible
for creating the broad middle class after World War II, bringing
decent wages and benefits to even low-skilled employees...that's not
the case today. Most U.S. employers fiercely resist unionization,
which, along with other factors, has helped slash union membership."
Unions have historically been strong supporters of progressive
legislation such as Social Security, Medicare, minimum wage, and
health and safety protections. Shrinking union membership has left
those programs and policies much more vulnerable.

Wal-Martism

The model for post-New Deal America is Wal-Mart. Always low wage,
anti-union, taxpayer-subsidized Wal-Mart. While Wal-Mart heirs and
executives are among America's richest, Wal-Mart workers are among
the poorest.

The heirs to Wal-Mart founder Sam Walton hold down half the Forbes
400 top-ten spots, with about $18 billion each. Wal-Mart's U.S.
workers-most without health benefits-average just $8 an hour. That
compares poorly with $12 in retail trade generally. By contrast, Wal-
Mart CEO Lee Scott's 2003 pay package of $29.8 million amounted to
more than $3,400 for every hour of every day of the year.

Wal-Mart is the United States' largest private employer and the
world's largest retailer. It's rolling back wages in the areas it
dominates, from the U.S. to China. Forget any crying about
competition in the Wal-Mart race to the bottom in wages. Wal-Mart
goes to cheap labor suppliers in the markets it dominates and
pressures them to lower wages even more.

As the Washington Post (February 8, 2004) reported, "More than 80
percent of the 6,000 factories in Wal-Mart's worldwide database of
suppliers are in China. Wal-Mart [accounted in 2003] for nearly one-
eighth of all Chinese exports to the United States. If [Wal-Mart]
were itself a separate nation, it would rank as China's fifth-largest
export market, ahead of Germany and Britain..... `Wal-Mart pressures
the factory to cut its price, and the factory responds with longer
hours or lower pay,' said a Chinese labor official, who declined to
be named for fear of punishment. `And the workers have no options'."

Wal-Mart is heavily subsidized by taxpayers as well as underpaid
workers. For example, a state survey in Georgia, where Wal-Mart is
the largest employer, looked at enrollment in PeachCare, which
provides health insurance to children in low-income families. It
found that Wal-Mart had one child in PeachCare for every four
employees. The ratio for the next ranked company, Publix, was one
child in PeachCare for every 22 employees.

Wal-Mart's chief competitor, Costco, takes a higher road approach.
Comparing the two, Business Week (April 12, 2004) reports, "Costco's
high-wage approach actually beats Wal-Mart at its own game on many
measures.... We found that by compensating employees generously to
motivate and retain good workers, one-fifth of whom are unionized,
Costco gets lower turnover and higher productivity." With an average
hourly wage of nearly $16, plus much better benefits than Wal-Mart,
Costco gets higher profits per employee than Wal-Mart's Sam's Clubs.

Business Week said, "The larger question here is which model of
competition will predominate in the U.S.... The cheap-labor model
turns out to be costly in many ways. It can fuel poverty and related
social ills and dump costs on other companies and taxpayers, who
indirectly pick up the health-care tab for all the workers not
insured by their parsimonious employers. What's more, the low-wage
approach cuts into consumer spending and, potentially, economic
growth."

Taxes and Social Insecurity

If there is one mission President Bush has accomplished, it's tax
cuts for the wealthy. When the first round of tax cuts was proposed
the public propaganda was we have so gigantic a budget surplus we
could shrink government revenues, protect Social Security, and still
have plenty for needed services. Surplus quickly changed to deficit.
Never mind, tax cuts would be wrapped in the post-9/11 flag of
economic recovery, and now, the rhetoric of Bush's so-called
ownership society. That means, "We own, you pay." Already enacted tax
cuts for the wealthiest 1 percent will cost more than $1 trillion in
2001-2010. That translates into more than $300 million in lost
revenues every day for 10 years.

Bush is building up deficits and debt to record levels, setting
Social Security and Medicare up for the kill. One out of three
seniors depends on Social Security for ninety to one hundred percent
of their income. Two out of three seniors depend on it for more than
half their income. Bush's moral values mean robbing retirees to pay
for tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires.

Since 1983, the government has collected much more from Social
Security taxes than it pays out in benefits in order to build up a
surplus for the baby boom retirement. From 1984 to 2002, the
government collected $1.7 trillion more in Social Security taxes than
it paid out in benefits. In the year 2000, the federal budget was
balanced without borrowing the surpluses in the Social Security or
Medicare trust funds.

Contrary to common belief, Social Security is not going broke. Social
Security Trustee projections over 75 years show that Social Security
can pay full benefits until the year 2042-nearly four decades from
now. That's using pessimistic economic assumptions. The Congressional
Budget Office (CBO) says Social Security won't have a shortfall until
2052, after which about 80 percent of benefits could be paid under
the current system.

Most Americans pay more in payroll taxes than income taxes. The
Social Security payroll tax takes a bigger share out of low- and
middle-income paychecks than high-income ones because earnings above
a cap ($87,900 in 2004) are exempt. Removing this cap would erase
most of Social Security's projected future revenue shortfall.

The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities reports, "The cost over
the next 75 years of the tax cuts just for the one percent of
households with the highest incomes-a group with average incomes of
about $1 million per year-exceeds the entire 75-year Social Security
shortfall that CBO projects."

Social Security is popular and politicians who want to kill it can't
say that. Instead, they manufacture a "crisis" and offer to fix it
with cuts and privatization. They want you to be so scared Social
Security won't be there in the future that instead of restoring
higher taxes on the rich you'll let them rip you off even more.
You'll let them privatize Social Security, putting more and more of
your retirement in the hands of the stock market with no security-
even though Social Security is meant to give people stable retirement
income whatever the ups and downs of the market.

The Bush administration wants to turn the nation's most reliable anti-
poverty program into a cash cow for Wall Street. The Bushwhackers
specialize in the politics of fear. They want you so scared Social
Security won't be there in the future, you'll let them make that a
self-fulfilling prophecy.

When President Bush launched the PR campaign to sell his first tax
cuts, he surrounded himself with middle-class families. When asked
why no one was there representing the top bracket, Bush laughingly
replied, "Well, I beg your pardon. I'm representing...the top tax
bracket."

"The Bush tax cuts, which included a reduction in the top tax rate,
as well as reductions in taxes on estates, capital gains and
dividends," the Wall Street Journal observed, "helped bolster the
fortunes of the fortunate." Households with incomes above $1 million
will receive tax cuts averaging $123,600 in 2004, says the Center on
Budget and Policy Priorities. That will cause their after-tax income
to jump by more than 6 percent-widening the gap with those below.

It would take 17 Donald Trumps to match the $43 billion net worth of
investor guru Warren Buffett, the world's second richest man. When it
comes to federal taxes, though, Buffett pays about the same rate as
his office receptionist. "I pay a somewhat higher [federal tax] rate
for my combination of salary, investment and capital gain income than
our receptionist does," Buffett wrote in 2003, "But she pays a far
higher portion of her income in payroll taxes than I do."

If Bush's tax cuts for the wealthy keep moving forward, the
receptionist will pay a higher overall tax rate than her boss. She
already pays a higher rate in state and local taxes. In Nebraska,
home of Buffett's firm, Berkshire Hathaway, the richest 1 percent of
families effectively paid 6.4 percent of their income in state and
local taxes in 2002, the middle 20 percent of families paid 9.8
percent, and the bottom 20 percent paid 10.2 percent, reports the
Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy.

In Bush's home state, Texas, taxes are even more regressive. The
richest 1 percent paid just 3.2 percent of their income in state and
local taxes, the middle fifth paid 8.2 percent, and the poorest fifth
paid 11.4 percent-more than 3 times the rate of the rich. Nationally,
the richest 1 percent paid just 5.2 percent of their income in total
state and local taxes in 2002 while middle Americans paid 9.6 percent
and those with income less than $15,000 paid 11.4 percent-more than
twice the rate of the rich.

By Bush's moral code, soldiers and teachers should pay a larger share
of their incomes in taxes than even the laziest heirs of the wealthy
living off inherited investments. The Bush administration wants to
remake the tax system, increasingly exempting money from investments,
so that non-rich citizens pay a bigger share of their incomes-mostly
from paychecks-than wealthy Americans pay from their incomes, heavily
derived from investments in stocks, bonds, real estate, and so on. If
they can get away with it, the Bushwhackers will implement a flat tax
or national sales tax-shifting the tax burden even more heavily onto
people living off their paychecks.

Bush wants growing government debt, like the Reaganites did, so the
public services and public works they don't want anyway are starved
of money under this and future Administrations-whether they're in the
White House or not.

In the now famous words of conservative strategist Grover Norquist,
president of Americans for Tax Reform, the goal is to get
government "down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub."
The huge tax-cut driven Bush debt wave will drown education, Social
Security, and Medicare along with much else. The lifeguards will be
protecting the military, some homeland security, and corporate
cronies.

Since January 2001, a projected 10-year federal budget surplus of $5
trillion has become projected deficits of more than $4 trillion. The
budget crisis is a revenue crisis. Federal revenues have fallen to
their lowest level as a share of the economy since 1950. As the
Center on Budget and Policy Priorities observes, that's "a time when
Medicare, Medicaid, most federal education aid, [and] most
environmental programs...did not exist."

Democratic Values

These are dangerous times. The Republican rulers think the United
States can recreate the post-World War II Pax Americana with pre-
World War II, pre-New Deal values and policies. The United States is
an increasingly shaky superpower with a skyrocketing debt held
heavily by other countries. It has a growing trade deficit, including
a newly growing agricultural deficit.

The European Union is an economic superpower and China is fast
becoming one. Unlike the EU and China, the United States is
increasingly hostile to science and reason. According to an AP/Gallup
Poll from 2001, the "percentage of Americans who believed more in"
creationism was much higher than those who believed more in the
theory of evolution:

creationism 48 percent/evolution 28 percent
leaning creationism 9 percent/leaning evolution 5 percent
no opinion 10 percent
Bush and his base think you can lead globalization like the Crusades-
by force. Pax Americana born again without the Pax. A Pox on Your
House Americana. It can't last. But it sure can hurt.

We've heard a lot of talk about values since the election. We need to
value democracy. We need democratic values.

Democracy is not demagoguery. Democracy is not divide, conquer and
crush.
Democracy is not government of, by, and for the right-wing Republican
people. Democracy is not government of, by, and for corporations.
Democracy is not a gated community of beliefs.
Democracy is not bully politics and bullying pulpits.
Democracy is not theocracy. Much less the theocracy of Armageddon.
Democracy is not religious fundamentalism or Fox News fundamentalism
or market fundamentalism.
Democracy is not sending other peoples' kids to die in wars of choice
you wouldn't expect your own kids to fight.
Democracy is not thinking freedom ends at your beliefs. Democracy is
not conformity.
Democracy is not voter purges, suppression, unverifiable electronic
voting, and fraud.
Democracy values whistle blowers.
Democracy is equal rights, not self-righteousness.
Democracy is openness. Democracy is compromise.
Democracy is diversity.

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Holly Sklar's latest book is Raise The Floor: Wages and Policies That
Work For All Of Us (www.raisethefloor. org).

--
Alistair Sim

"I am the Whistler, and I know many things, for I walk by night. I
know many strange tales, many secrets hidden in the hearts of men and
women who have stepped into the shadows. Yes, I know the nameless
terrors of which they dare not speak."

They seek him here
They seek him there.
Those Frenchies seek him everywhere.
Is he in heaven?
Or is he in hell? That damned elusive Pimpernel!

"How often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the
impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth?"

The little things are infinitely more important."

"I am an omnivorous reader with a strangely retentive memory for
trifles."