Bill Moyers: The Shady Inside Deals That Are Protecting Goldman Sachs at Your Expense
BillMoyers.com /
By Bill Moyers, Michael Winship
The Shady Inside Deals That Are Protecting Goldman Sachs at Your Expense
Theyre privately protecting their interests as they publicly urge austerity on everyone else.
January 12, 2013 |
In economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugmans book, End This Depression Now!, theres a chapter titled The Second Gilded Age in which he describes the extraordinary rise in wealth and power of the very rich during this era of unregulated greed. Since Ronald Reagans election in 1980, the top one percent of Americans have seen their incomes increase by 275 percent. After accounting for inflation, the typical hourly wage for a worker has increased just $1.23.
Big Money, as Krugman writes in his book, buys Big Influence. And thats why the financiers of Wall Street never truly experience regime change their cash brings both political parties to heel. So it is that the policies that got us where we are today in this big ditch of chronic financial depression have done little for most, but have been very good to a few at the top.
But theyre not satisfied with having only most of it they want it all. If Krugman were writing his book today, he could find plenty of evidence in the deal that supposedly kept us from going over the fiscal cliff. Behind closed doors, Congress larded it with corporate tax breaks worth tens of billions of dollars everything from tax credits for NASCAR racing and the railroads to subsidies for Hollywood, rebates for the rum industry and loopholes for off-shore financing that could help giant multinationals like General Electric avoid billions of dollars in corporate income taxes.
Writing in the conservative Washington Examiner, columnist Tim Carney says many of these expensive giveaways were spawned by a web of lobbyists, donors and staffers surrounding Democratic Sen. Max Baucus of Montana, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee. As we know from the Obamacare fight, Baucus is a connoisseur of revolving door corruption. Pick any one of the special-interest tax breaks extended by the cliff deal, Carney wrote, and youre likely to find a former Baucus aide who lobbied for it on behalf of a large corporation or industry organization. Even the pro-business Wall Street Journal was appalled. They called it a Crony Capitalist Blowout. .....................(more)
The complete piece is at:
http://www.alternet.org/economy/shady-inside-deals-are-protecting-goldman-sachs-your-expense