Sequestration is just a smokescreen

Sequestration is just a smokescreen for the real crisis of growing corporate power

Well, we’ve experienced the first two parts of the quote above, now we are fast falling into the third. There is a “smokescreen” being laid down in front of us to hide the real crises confronting the United States of America. I tend to think that “We The People” are being hood-winked by some explicit, grand design.

The government “sequestration” is not a crisis. At best it is simply forcing us to tighten our national budget belt. There seems to be a concerted effort to have the American public believe that our national budget deficit is getting larger and larger with every passing day of the Obama Administration. This is not only untrue, but exactly the opposite of what’s been happening over the last five years. Our budget deficit has been shrinking, and is now approximately half of what it was at the end of 2008. While all these scare tactics are flooding the country, the stock market has just reached an all-time high.

There must be a “grand design” meticulously constructed by the real people who run this country; Our captains of industry. What a perfect design it is! Our major Industries have abandoned this nation’s labor force. They have sent us all straight down the crapper without so much as a thank you. As I recall, it was the middle class that brought the United States into its golden era of manufacturing and production of goods and services. The rest of the world couldn’t wait to see what was coming out of America at any given moment.

Then something went terribly wrong. It started slowly with a handful of greedy manipulative business men. They started making obscene amounts of money, not a bad thing in itself. They took their companies public, again not a bad thing in itself. The more obscene profits they made, the more they were willing to pay out as dividends to a relatively small group of “investors”. That’s when things began to snowball down a long steep hill to the two-class society we are morphing into today.

Meanwhile, back at the farm our businesses were growing exponentially as were their profits and investor dividends. Finally the federal government woke up and came to the realization that there was quite a bit of tax revenue to be had by taxing these businesses more and more. On top of all that, our government started coming up with certain regulations which very few wanted to understand, let alone follow. This is where the fat cats got more than just a little nervous.

The big bad wolf (the fed’s) was coming for more, and more of their money. It didn’t take business and industry very long before they figured out how to sidestep both corporate taxes and federal regulations. The answer; take it all off-shore and hide it, so off-shore they went!

While they were busy finding their way around all this “big government” stuff, they found it well worth their while to hire some folks to go to Washington, DC and do their bidding. We saw the birth and maturation of the “lobbyist”. With the influx of lobbyists from all sorts of businesses, our members of congress had very little time to do their jobs.

They relied, more and more, on lobbyists to actually craft and write the legislation that our congress was to consider making the Law of the Land. The end result, with few exceptions the laws that got passed and signed heavily favored the same businesses whose lobbyists had written them; a reasonable conclusion.

What got lost in the mix? A number of things got lost in this transformation that took over half a century to complete. Perhaps the most damaging of all is our corporate tax structure. In a nutshell it allows corporate profits to be sent out of the country thus avoiding taxation. It allows for corporate losses and write-offs to be kept here and deducted from any domestic tax liability. The gain is usually a fat “refund” for corporations who really don’t need it and certainly don’t deserve it.

This tax situation in turn made it more profitable to to ship jobs out of the country. This kept American businesses ahead of the government and handed the American public the bill. The American middle class was just wealthy enough to foot that bill for a number of years, but now the middle class has shrunk to the point that it can no longer sustain the nation’s tax revenues and is in debt itself.

It’s not clear what the continuance of this grand design is, but when you take a serious look at it there is nothing good for “We The People”. So, are we doomed to a government by the corporations, of the corporations, and for the corporations? This is the real crisis…