Corporate sell-outs exploit a secret new gimmick
Wednesday, Jul 31, 2013 10:33 AM CAST
Corporate sell-outs exploit a secret new gimmick
Craven senators Max Baucus and Orrin Hatch want to shield authors of toxic tax giveaways from the public view
By David Sirota
Max Baucus, Orin Hatch (Credit: AP/J. Scott Applewhite/Reuters/Chip East)
With more and more operations of the executive and judiciary branches happening behind closed doors and out of public view, the legislative branch was bound to join Washington’s secrecy-fest at some point. That point apparently is now.
As The Hill reports, the U.S. Senate’s “top tax writers have promised their colleagues 50 years worth of secrecy in exchange for suggestions on what deductions and credits to preserve” in a tax “reform” bill that aims to overhaul the tax code from scratch. The system, reports the newspaper, allows only 10 congressional staff members to have “direct access to a senator’s written suggestions” and “each submission will be given its own ID number and be kept on password-protected servers, with printed versions kept in locked safes” in the National Archives until the end of 2064.
The architects of this scheme, Senators Max Baucus (D-MT) and Orrin Hatch (R-UT) suggest that secrecy is the best way to facilitate input from all senators, as lawmakers will know they can make substantive suggestions without the fear of political retribution.
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In the national security realm, for instance, secrecy has fostered stuff like the government’s unpopular warrantless surveillance and unpopular mass data mining – stuff that is bad for the average American’s civil liberties but good for both government officials who seek monarchical power and for private defense/intelligence contractors seeking to expand their profits.
A similar dynamic plays out with economics. In that policy realm just a few years ago, secrecy famously shielded policymakers from public outcry and resulted in a stealth $16 trillion bailout that handed out huge tranches of taxpayer cash to some of the largest corporations in the world. Now, as Businessweek’s Brendan Greeley notes, it’s the same dynamic playing out on tax policy (emphasis added):
Sausage is gross, and backroom deals are necessary. But these secrets, the scraps of paper on which Senators write their wishes, vouchsafed in a hope chest at the National Archives, are so precious that they can’t even be trusted to a back room. Senators are scared. Some tax loopholes are just indefensible to voters. There is no way to pretend that they help our kids, or jobs. They just go to people and companies that donate money. That’s what this secrecy is for. The only possible reason for it to exist is to prevent senators from having to defend their choices to the public.
So here’s what we know about Baucus and Hatch’s “blank slate” process, which wipes the tax code clean, forcing senators to justify every loophole they ask to have written back in. We know that some of the loopholes just aren’t defensible, so toxic to voters that not only can we not know them, we may not ever know them…Any senator with a tax plea so secret it has to be physically locked away is definitely, absolutely not requesting it for the voters.
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http://www.salon.com/2013/07/31/corporate_sell_outs_exploit_a_secret_new_gimmick/
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