Private: Coddling the Super Wealthy; House Set to Consider Measure to Serve Interests of Boeing Corp.

by Jeremy Leaming

Earlier this year Columbia University Business School professor Joseph E. Stiglitz examined, in sharp and incredibly disheartening detail, the efforts of America’s super wealthy to protect their lavish lifestyles at a great cost to the rest of the nation.

The professor noted that the nation’s top 1 percent have seen “their incomes rise 18 percent over the past decade, those in the middle have actually seen their incomes fall. All the growth in the recent decades – and more – has gone to those at the top. In terms of income equality, America lags behind any country in the old, ossified Europe that President George W. Bush used to deride. Among our closest counterparts are Russia with its oligarchs and Iran.”

And the country's wealthiest, Stiglitz continued, have seriously lost touch with “ordinary people,” and are striving to ensure that the federal government does not do anything to change the way things are. (The tired debate over nation’s debt-ceiling and an accompanying agreement to slash spending on programs for the nation’s middle class and poor reveal more evidence of that effort to hold the status quo.)

Congress’s Tea Party-backed politicos are against any effort to raise taxes on the wealthy, and, as Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi points out even Democrats are joining the fight for a so-called “tax repatriation holiday,” to allow some of the nation’s largest corporations to repatriate income from overseas at a major tax-break. Economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman says “the idea of granting a tax holiday for corporations that repatriate income they’ve kept overseas, and on which they have avoided taxes, is one of the worst ideas I’ve heard in a long time. (And that’s saying something in these days and times.)”

Taibbi also notes the administration's consideration to cap bailed-out bankers’ salaries at $500,000, and the ensuing revelation that a “great many of the people who make big six-figure incomes consider themselves middle class.”

He continues, “All of this is a testament to the amazing (and rapidly expanding) cultural divide that exists in this country, where the poor and the rich seldom cross paths at all, and the rich, in particular, simply have no concept what being broke and poor really mean.”

Instead, Tea Party leaders and their supporters have amazingly made “government workers with their New Deal benefits out to be the kulak class of modern America,” which Taibbi notes reveals “a lot about the unique brand of two-way class blindness we have in this country. It’s not just that the rich don’t know the poor exist, and genuinely think a half a million a year is ‘not a lot of money,’ …. The poor, Taibbi continues, “have no idea what real rich people are like.”

And today the House of Representatives was set to consider H.R. 2587, a measure intended to protect Boeing Aerospace Corporation from a federal proceeding to determine whether it broke federal law when it moved its Dreamliner production from Washington State to South Carolina. The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) lodged a complaint against the massive corporation arguing that it moved the jobs out of Washington State in retaliation against workers there who in the past have exercised their right to strike.

The measure would trash the only meaningful remedy available to the NLRB to hold corporations accountable for violating workers’ rights. The bill, let’s call it the Corporate Pardon Act, includes a retroactive clause that grants a congressional pardon to Boeing, suggesting that the company is awfully concerned about its chances in the adjudication of case.

The House measure is yet another stark example of the Right’s devotion to interests of the nation’s most powerful, and of the relentless efforts of the super wealthy to ensure their lifestyles, which most Americans will never see. 

Economic Inequality, Labor and Employment Law