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Politicians With Your NASCAR-Sponsor Patches: Pay Attention; The Election Track's Getting Bumpier

By Joe Rothstein — November 25, 2013
Editor, EINNews.com

When did the wealthy decide they no longer wanted to help pay for a stable U.S. society?

Was it when they discovered that workers in under-developed countries had much lower expectations of pay and benefits, and that they no longer needed the American worker?

Was it when Ronald Reagan sanctified the notion that government was at the root of our problems, and should no longer be supported?

Maybe it was when the rules of political financing changed and candidates of both parties permitted legislating to become something of a protection racket for rich donors.

Whenever or however it happened, it has. And the past five years keep piling on evidence that it has.

Let’s start with the stock market, which now is at an all-time high. Who owns the stocks? The richest 10% of Americans own 90%. The top 1% alone own 40%. These have been gangbuster years for them that has.

And them that don’t? Well, we know that the unemployment needle is stuck in the high range. We know that household income continues its decline. We know that the top three employers in the U.S., all highly profitable, are Wal-Mart, McDonald’s and Yum Foods, which own KFC and other fast fund chains. And we know that these employers are advising their workers to sell their Christmas presents, eat stale bread, get a second full-time job and find other survival strategies.

We learned earlier this year through whistleblowers and a unique year-long investigation by a consortium of media that the wealthy are stashing hundreds of billions of dollars in offshore tax avoidance bank accounts, and that top tier accounting firms have been competing vigorously to be complicit in that flight from social responsibility.

A particularly egregious bit of tax avoidance has been going on in New York City. Thanks to a recent New York Times article by James Stewart we learned that ultraluxury apartments in Manhattan are assessed for tax purposes at chump change rates.

Some examples cited by Stewart: Apartments at 15 Central Park West are assessed for $332 a square foot. Sales there average $7,000 a square foot. An apartment at the Plaza Hotel that sold for $48 million is taxed as if it is worth $1.7 million. In a recent sale, a Russian billionaire paid $88 million for his apartment. His tax is based on a $2.97 million valuation. These aren’t anomalies. Letting the wealthy off the hook on New York City property taxes is, and has been, local government policy.

More than any other reason, New York voters elected Bill de Blasio mayor based on his pledge to try to bring more financial equity to those who can’t buy multi-million dollar apartments or make killings in the stock market.

De Blasio’s election came as a surprise to Mayor Bloomberg and most of us who live elsewhere and read only about the renaissance of downtown Manhattan. Beneath that veneer, homelessness climbed 75% during the Bloomberg years. The city now has more than 1,000 pantries and food kitchens serving the hungry. The real estate boom driven by the wealthy is making more and more property unaffordable for the rest.

And so New York City voters on the short end of that stick revolted, as is their right on election days. They elected a mayor who isn’t tone deaf to real life.

Something of the same thing happened in Seattle and Minneapolis. Seattle voters tossed out a veteran business-friendly councilman and replaced him with Kshama Sawant, 41, who grew up in Mumbai, India, and ran as an avowed Socialist. A Socialist council candidate in Minneapolis came so close to winning that the result wasn’t known until five days after the election.

The issue in Seattle is Boeing, a company whose stock price has nearly doubled this year. Workers in Boeing’s machinist union recently turned down a company offer for cuts in retirement benefits and a miserly one percent raise every other year.

After the union refused its insulting offer, Boeing threatened to move more jobs out of Seattle. Kshama Sawant, the new city council member, responded by advising workers to take over the company. That’s the kind of worker-centric support you don’t hear much from elected representatives. In fact, it’s not often these days you hear much at all about the rampant greed of a company like Boeing rolling in profit and refusing to share it with the workers whose labor helped created that profit.

The overall average U.S. tax rate is about 15 percent. That’s the lowest it’s been in 60 years. Yet topping the big business wish list is lowering it more, and forgiving taxes on foreign profits, and fighting off attempts to tax billions parked in dark accounts, and cutting Social Security and Medicare benefits, and food stamps and other services.

It didn’t used to be this way. There was a time, not that long ago, when the wealthiest among us recognized that workers needed jobs with decent pay to buy the goods business produces. There was a time the wealthy saw the value in helping to pay for the roads and other services that keep society stable.

And there was a time when elected representatives were aware of this bargain, too. Now so many are beholden to their money patrons they might as well be wearing those commercial sponsor patches you see on the suits of NASCAR drivers.

The de Blasio victory in the nation’s largest city should not be a surprise to those who understand the dynamics of growing inequality. Neither should be the Socialist victory in Seattle or the near-miss in Minneapolis. That 9 percent approval rating for Congress isn’t a mirage or just fodder for late night TV jokes. It’s a big red warning flare to the greedy wealthy and their legislative enablers. They should pay attention. The next one could be bigger, and louder.

(Joe Rothstein can be contacted at joe@einnews.com)



Joe Rothstein is a political strategist and media producer who worked in more than 200 campaigns for political office and political causes. He also has served as editor of the Anchorage Daily News and as an adjunct professor at George Washington University's Graduate School of Political Management. He has a master's degree in journalism from UCLA. Mr. Rothstein is the author of award-winning political thrillers, The Latina President and the Conspiracy to Destroy Her, The Salvation Project, and The Moment of Menace. For more information, please visit his website at https://www.joerothstein.net/.