Welcome to the weekly roundup of great articles, facts and figures. These are the weekly finds that made our eyes pop.
You may wonder why to create jobs, government doesn't just stop offshore outsourcing them? We sure do. With that, the theme of this week's links is offshore outsourcing.
Lessons of the Chinese Invasion
David Sirota pulls out some astounding facts of state and local governments literally offshore outsourcing contracts to China:
Then news hit that San Francisco is importing its new bay bridge from China. Then came The New York Times dispatch about the Big Apple awarding Chinese state-subsidized firms huge taxpayer-funded contracts to "renovate the subway system, refurbish the Alexander Hamilton Bridge over the Harlem River and build a new Metro-North train platform near Yankee Stadium."
Astounding as all of that is, it was quickly topped by news last week reminding us that the new Martin Luther King monument in Washington was designed by a Chinese government sculptor and assembled by low-wage Chinese workers.
Offshored Jobs Numbers Way Too Low
Public Citizen noting more bad trade deals are simply more offshore outsourcing deals, quoted some government statistics. These statistics are simply way too low. The reality is corporations don't report, release, admit and hide how many jobs they either directly offshore outsource or create overseas instead of the United States. That said, even the small numbers reported are damning. The corporations pushing more bad trade deals are offshore outsourcers.
Larry Summers Hearts Offshore Outsourcing
Salon outlined some of the hidden agendas going behind the scenes by large corporations. They also quote Larry Summers:
There are those today who would resist the process of international integration; that is a prescription for a more contentious and less prosperous world," stated Summers. "We should not oppose offshoring or outsourcing.
Another example that team Obama is really the political branch of multinational corporations.
Speaking of Jobs
IBM signs yet another $1 billion offshore outsourcing contract, cities are now offshore outsourcing and even hotels. Of course the Federal Government does and India is salivating at more on the way. Did anyone mention we have a jobs crisis in the United States?
Corporations Push for Tax Breaks, Then Offshore Outsource the Jobs
Even conservatives get what's going on. It's only politicians who refuse to acknowledge this:
Several top U.S. corporations are pushing for job-creation tax breaks while working to hide the number of jobs they’ve sent overseas.
Time Machine: Some Real Data Corporations Moved Jobs Offshore
Just a couple of Economic Populist articles showing U.S. corporations are creating jobs, it's just in other countries. We actually have government data proving what we already know, jobs are being offshore outsourced in droves. So does this study. You can get some policy history as to to why from Numerian's A Little Extortion Never Hurts the Bottom Line.
Business Won't Hire Despite Jobs Plan
Here's the thing, we have a jobs crisis. Guess what. half a trillion dollars isn't enough to get businesses to hire people. That nasty thing called weak demand keeps popping up.
Obama Plan Will Destroy Social Security
Seems this site isn't the only one pointing to the defunding of social security.
Tax Cuts Will Not Create Jobs
Finance people aren't stupid and even they are pointing out payroll tax cuts will not create jobs.
Consider it a form of horse trading — tax cuts for jobs. There is only one small problem with this strategy: temporary tax cuts rarely result in new jobs and always result in less tax revenue.
With Friends Like These.....
Not only do tax cuts not create jobs, but Democrats have no spine to promote what actually would:
In a recent study for Demos, the economist Philip Harvey modeled the effects of spending $100 billion on direct job creation versus unemployment benefits and food stamps. He found that the funds spent on job creation would produce 1,519,000 jobs overall — 1,075,000 created immediately by government and 444,000 created over two years through in-direct stimulus effects. In contrast, such spending on food stamps and UI would create 568,000 jobs.
Treasury is Considering Tax Holiday for Corporations Who Offshore Outsource
A corporate tax holiday is one time act which enabled corporations to bring back profits parked offshore tax free into the United States. Not only did the 2004 foreign repatriation tax holiday not create any jobs, lobbyists are demanding another, complete with lying fictional white papers and spin. So, who else would cave and say ok? Why Treasury Secretary Geithner of course:
The Treasury Department is considering a proposal to eliminate some but not all taxes on the overseas profits of U.S. multinational companies, a central element of the administration's broader plans to overhaul the corporate-tax code, according to two people familiar with the deliberations.
U.S. businesses have pushed hard to exempt all overseas earnings from U.S. taxes, claiming the current system puts them at a disadvantage to foreign competitors.
The taxation of overseas income is a political hot potato. Liberals and trade unions have warned that eliminating U.S. taxes on overseas earnings could encourage businesses to shift operations and jobs overseas. ...
A Simple Income Tax
David Cay Johnston outlines taxes in China, which more model the United States before 1943. Finland also has a 1 page simple income tax form. A prime example on how the U.S. tax code, especially the corporate tax code is now loop-holed and rigged for the uber-rich.
Comments
Kudos to David Cay Johnston
Johnston doesn't even reach, in this particular blog, the egregious loopholes for the uber-rich that he has pointed out elsewhere. This is just about the effects of what corporate media presents as a clever system (of, by and for the shrewd) supposedly designed to encourage certain 'generally accepted] social goals through various preferences.
But the cost of this 'social engineering' through tax policy?
A numerical analysis of who benefits and who doesn't?
And the simplified progressive tax system that could replace the current preference system rigged in favor of the rich against most working families?
Oh no! .... corporate media, the RNC, the DNC, most likely your friendly local representative in the U.S. House, the so-called 'tax revolt' of the so-called 'Tea Party', Grover Norquist's so-called 'Americans for Tax Reform', the so-called 'Americans for Fair Taxation', the various 'highly respected' think-tanks .... wouldn't want to discuss facts showing that --
We could, instead, have a country where 98% of working people pay no income tax at all, yet with a tax system not rigged in favor of the rich and international corporate interests!
If you want real information, go to Citizens for Tax Justice --
http://www.ctj.org/
Also --
Fair, progressive tax reform would be good policy, good politics by John S. Irons and Robert Gordon (Center for American Progress)
People happier with progressive tax system (UPI.com, 10 September 2011)
THE PROGRESSIVE INCOME TAX: Theoretical Foundations by Robert H. Frank
nice tax links
Truly David Cay Johnston is a must read. He digs around in databases and the IRS and finds the most amazing stuff and that's because almost no one reads the tax code, at least the corporate tax code. I highly recommend his books, he points out some amazing loopholes. He also turned me onto how Washington D.C. as well as Wall Street, the more something is a rip off, the more complex and obfuscated it will be.
no 9.11 on EP, why
I have a hard time "celebrating" just one very ugly tragic day. I don't understand why media is running the same experience, over and over again. It was pretty damn horrific, with myself included, mesmerized by watching those towers collapse, shown over and over and over. I remember financial insanity behaviors, like pumping savings into airline stocks, as a patriotic act by some. But I don't feel like reliving it or celebrating it.
Others may feel differently, but that's why there isn't much about the 10th anniversary published on this site.
Annivadverse
As this date approached, I thought I'd be feeling...I don't know what. But something bigger than I do. It dawned on me as I sat down to write a letter to a friend in the Midwest who was in Lower Manhattan on 11 Sept 01. In doing so I realized that my main sense was, what made this death of 3,000 people more dramatic than any other? And I had to conclude that it was because people reacted exactly as al-Qaida expected them to: something on TV, the images, and most of all the 24/7 coverage, repetition compulsion, and mythic narrative creation, would capture their minds and cause fear, paralysis, and infighting.
I think of the thousands of people in my waterfront area who died of asbestos and industrial accidents. They haven't even been counted. Nobody cares. Yet they all left families and friends and big holes in our lives and psyches.
It was that use of corporate mass media propagandizing against our own people by al-Qaida that concerns me the most. And what concerned me most today, and what I thought about while caring for various food-growing parcels during a heat wave was this:
Is it possible to wean people from their dependency on mediated information produced by anonymous corporations, whose people don't admit (or often even recognize) what their viewpoints/skews are?
I spent six years in grad school at a highfalutin' communications research and policy department, learning how to turn people into demographics, market segments, and information campaign targets for profit. So I'm a bit more cynical, and concerned, about stuff like this than a lot of people I meet, mostly because I know just how shaped, massaged, planned, and, yes, conspired mass media content is. Sometimes that's done passively, through a kind of profit-seeking inertia rather than active intent to commit mass mind engineering. But it has effects nonetheless. My schooling let me see how that works; I'm a minority in having had that schooling, and a further minority in having dissented from what I was taught I should do with that schooling.
It interests me how liberals in particular are so up in yo grill about obese children and obese adults. They don't seem to recognize that they, just like conservatives, have been on a steady diet of hyper-dense-energy junk content for the brain for a good 50 years now. And the highly portable new communications technologies mean that there is never a time when so many people are away from this matrixhiveborg of corporate content.
Jabberwocky portmanteaus
Animist Drive-by is a jabberwocky portmanteau genius! All I can say is that we have no choice but to overcome this snavenish annivadversity that confronts us here in the matrixhiveborg!
I find some hope in my impression that everyday conversation ... also the movies and probably a lot of stuff on pay-teevee and the growing internet download ... whatever has to make money directly from viewers ... somehow reflect a much deeper understanding of real-world USA than mediamavenly truthkillers of corprotaganda like to acknowledge. Realty may be ignored on the news side, but cartoon shows can't do without it.
"It is a wise father that knows his own child ... truth will come to light; murder cannot be hid long; a man's son may, but at the length truth will out." -- Merchant of Venice, Act 2, Scene II
off shore jobs
and if local and state gov't awarded contracts to "us" firms (which may not have anymore local workers then chinese firms, and which are probably buying as much offshore as the chinese firms) at a higher price,you have in effect
taxpayers subsidizing wealthy US owners
does that make sense ?
maybe it has to do with technology that just isn't available anymore in the us
many years ago, the state gov't in NY, as is typical oflocal gov'ts everywhere, poured huge sums into what was to become the Jacob K Javits Convention center (you may recall that JKJ's last official act was to run as a 3rd party candidate, splittin the vote and allowing the loathsome alfonse d'amato to get elected over liz holtzman)
anyway, as is the wont of local gov'ts they went for a technically ambitious, $$ building, that was sort of a giant tinkertoy - there were these huge metal hubs, and giant metal beams fit into the hubs
ordered some hubs from american vendor, hubs no good,cracked, had to go to japan....
anyway, if local gov't did award contracts to us firms, at a higher price, then can you imagine the howls of outrage from the liberal blogospsher ? cozy pols give away tax dollars to connected biz guys......
hire local
This is not an either/or proposition and the assumption you are making is somehow Chinese products or Japanese ones are superior in quality. As we know from drywall from China to inferior steel to all sorts of problems, that measn nothing for quality.
You also assume it's cheaper and that also is simply not correct.
The political corruption is and what's going on is we have domestic lobbying groups loaded with nationals from India and China lobbying for U.S. jobs and dollars and contracts.
So, all that has happened is political corruption went global.
This does nothing for jobs.
BTW: Folks, spell checker is your friend and Firefox browser has it built right in.
Some of the comments are so bad with spelling one seriously doubts English could possibly be their first language.