Occupy, and The Democracy Project

There are sooooo many things to post about this week.  Apple ripping off the IRS, and therefore all of us, to the tune of billions of dollars....

Sen. Bernie Sanders actually doing something about it -

"Apple Inc. avoided paying billions of dollars in U.S. income taxes. A Senate investigation found the tech giant parked overseas about $102 billion of its $145 billion in cash. A subsidiary in Ireland that earned $22 billion in 2011 paid just $10 million in taxes, according to the report by the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations.

“It is a total scam,” Sen. Bernie Sanders told Ed Schultz on Tuesday. “It’s not just Apple. Virtually every major multi-national corporation has used these offshore tax havens.” Bernie has introduced legislation that would eliminate the tax breaks and generate $600 billion in revenue over a decade.Listen to Bernie talk about Apple on The Ed Show »
Read more about Bernie's legislation »"

Bradley Manning's "trial" at the hands of the very military whose crimes he's accused of exposing....

A Quote from a famous Israeli: 

“The test of democracy is freedom of criticism.”~ David Ben-Gurion

........ but for now I'll settle for a taste of this Review in the LA Times of Sunday, April 21st, in which "David Graeber looks at the Occupy movement, from the inside"

The reviewer, Ben Ehrenreich, isn't entirely satisfied with the book, by a well-known Anarchist theorist.   The Democracy Project, he says, "provides a rather hurried insider's view of the Occupy movement's beginnings and a far-too-cursory account of its collapse."

But he does give some memorable selections from what David Graeber has to say.

(Sadly, I guess it's necessary here to explain that "Anarchist" and "Anarchism" do not mean Chaos and Violence, as the establishment have told us ad pukeum.  Monarchy means "rule by one person", Oligarchy means "rule by a small group" - which is what many of us feel we live under at present - and An-Archy means no government, the idea that free people are quite responsible enough to run their own affairs, without being ordered around by an elite whom they cannot influence or control.)

"Just open a window or turn on the TV — the same old civilization is rotting all around us. Budget cuts, police shootings, endless and ever-broadening wars, the climate in full-scale, almost-end-times spasm, a Congress of hand puppets yelping on about the manufactured crisis of the moment, a president whose answer to every crisis is More of the Same. Analogous situations have, over the last four years, lighted the streets on fire in Britain, France, Spain, Ireland, Latvia, Italy, Greece, Chile, Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain and Syria, to name a few."

"At the center of Graeber's project is an attempt to rescue the Occupy movement from the irrelevance to which most pundits assigned it. Graeber deftly diagnoses the corporate media-imposed "straitjacket on acceptable political discourse" that guarantees that raising certain questions — about, for instance, the plutocratic and frankly kleptocratic nature of a system in which government bows before a financial services industry whose main "service," he points out, is the creation of bottomless consumer debt — marks you as an extremist lunatic unfit to be heard on the air. `The result,' he writes, `is a mainstream ideology … which almost no one actually holds.'"

You can read the whole review here.

Ehrenreich also credits anthropologist David Graeber: "whose anarchist politics, scholarly virtuosity and long history of activism had already earned him a measure of stardom among left intellectuals, a celebrity that would grow exponentially with the publication of his monumental and often brilliant book "Debt: The First 5,000 Years" in July 2011."

The Truth about Corporations

Senator Bernie Sanders posted this in Huffington Post:

A Choice For Corporate America: Are You With America Or The Cayman Islands?

By Senator Bernie Sanders
February 9, 2013

When the greed, recklessness, and illegal behavior on Wall Street drove this country into the deepest recession since the 1930s, the largest financial institutions in the United States took every advantage of being American. They just loved their country - and the willingness of the American people to provide them with the largest bailout in world history. In 2008, Congress approved a $700 billion gift to Wall Street. Another $16 trillion in virtually zero interest loans and other financial assistance came from the Federal Reserve. America. What a great country.

But just two years later, as soon as these giant financial institutions started making record-breaking profits again, they suddenly lost their love for their native country. At a time when the nation was suffering from a huge deficit, largely created by the recession that Wall Street caused, the major financial institutions did everything they could to avoid paying American taxes by establishing shell corporations in the Cayman Islands and other tax havens.

In 2010, Bank of America set up more than 200 subsidiaries in the Cayman Islands (which has a corporate tax rate of 0.0 percent) to avoid paying U.S. taxes. It worked. Not only did Bank of America pay nothing in federal income taxes, but it received a rebate from the IRS worth $1.9 billion that year. They are not alone. In 2010, JP Morgan Chase operated 83 subsidiaries incorporated in offshore tax havens to avoid paying some $4.9 billion in U.S. taxes. That same year Goldman Sachs operated 39 subsidiaries in offshore tax havens to avoid an estimated $3.3 billion in U.S. taxes. Citigroup has paid no federal income taxes for the last four years after receiving a total of $2.5 trillion in financial assistance from the Federal Reserve during the financial crisis.

On and on it goes. Wall Street banks and large companies love America when they need corporate welfare. But when it comes to paying American taxes or American wages, they want nothing to do with this country. That has got to change.

Offshore tax abuse is not just limited to Wall Street. Each and every year corporations and the wealthy are avoiding more than $100 billion in U.S. taxes by sheltering their income offshore.

Pharmaceutical companies like Eli Lilly and Pfizer have fought to make it illegal for the American people to buy cheaper prescription drugs from Canada and Europe. But, during tax season, Eli Lilly and Pfizer shift drug patents and profits to the Netherlands and other offshore tax havens to avoid paying U.S. taxes.

Apple wants all of the advantages of being an American company, but it doesn't want to pay American taxes or American wages. It creates the iPad, the iPhone, the iPod, and iTunes in the United States, but manufactures most of its products in China so it doesn't have to pay American wages. Then it shifts most of its profits to Ireland, Luxembourg, the British Virgin Islands and other tax havens to avoid paying U.S. taxes. Without such maneuvers, Apple's federal tax bill in the United States would have been $2.4 billion higher in 2011.