-Caveat Lector-
Begin forwarded message:
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: May 7, 2007 12:22:33 PM PDT
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: class war -- coming to a town near you
Beware -- the class war
may be coming to a town near you
David Sirota
May 4, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/blogs/peek/51447/
What happens when the class war comes to your little town? That's
what I explore in my new column for the San Francisco Chronicle
today. You can read it here. Over the last week, we here in the
rural state of Montana were the target of an intense onslaught by
conservative class warriors, both in the state legislature and at a
glitzy international economic summit in Butte - the most unglitzy,
hard-scrabble, salt-of-the-earth places in America. And as the
column says, you can bet what happened here could happen anywhere.
As Republican legislators threatened to shut down the government
over their demands to enact massive new cuts for out-of-state
corporations and landowners, captains of global finance came to the
Mining City to lay down cover fire for Montana Sen. Max Baucus (D),
whose Finance Committee will be deciding whether to push forward
with the lobbyist-written trade agenda Democrats across the country
campaigned against in the 2006 election. Attacking as
"isolationists" those who want our trade policies reformed to
include protections for the environment, human rights and wages,
CEO after CEO got up to the podium not to talk about Montana's
economy, but to demand Congress bend to the will of K Street.
What's most unnerving is how these class warriors don't even try to
take the sheen of hypocrisy off their arguments. In the
legislature, Republicans say they want to cut taxes for out-of-
state corporations and kill Democrats' plans to strengthen tax
enforcement on out-of-state wealthy landowners as a way to lower
taxes for in-state residents - even though in-state residents are
forced to pick up the tab when out-of-staters are allowed to avoid
paying what they owe. Republicans also say they are trying to
protect taxpayer money, even though the emergency special session
their antics forced will cost taxpayers $38,000 per day.
Same kind of nonsense at the conference. When I stood up in front
of 2,000 people to ask the $20-million-a-year chairman of the
Business Roundtable whether he believed trade deals should include
protections for people (labor, human rights, and environment) that
are a strong as the protections already included for profits
(intellectual property, patents, copyrights), he turned into a
blithering ball of incoherent babble.
The behavior is just the local version of what's echoing through
Washington. The Hill Newspaper reports today that as a courageous
group of Democrats works to build consensus for adding labor
protections to our trade pacts, "business groups say they will not
support an agreement that would allow U.S. labor laws to be
challenged" by multinational unions and governments. Yet, the very
same business groups have successfully fought for years to include
provisions in trade deals that allow U.S. environmental and
consumer protection laws to be challenged by multinational
corporations and governments - in many cases, forcing states to
overturn their laws and pay multinational corporations tens of
millions of taxpayer dollars in "compensation." Here's an excerpt
from my book Hostile Takeover to explain what I'm talking about:
"At the very same time lawmakers lie about who is actually filing
lawsuits and claim they want to stop 'lawsuit abuse,' they are
actually granting corporations special privileges to file even more
lawsuits. The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) quietly
established special courts where foreign companies can sue U.S.
federal and state governments for compensation when their laws
protecting health, labor or environmental standards cut into
corporate profits. One company, for instance, sought nearly $1
billion from California (more than 1 percent of the state's entire
budget) as compensation for a state law that prohibited the use of
an environmentally hazardous gasoline additive. In all, Big
Business has used these special tribunals to force American
taxpayers to hand over $1.8 billion."
Go over to the San Francisco Chronicle's site to read the full
column** http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/
archive/2007/05/04/EDGTLOS9JV1.DTL ... and beware -- the war on the
middle class could be coming to your town soon.
---------------
*When the class war goes local
David Sirota
San Francisco Chronicle, May 4, 2007
WHEN MOST non-Montanans think of Montana, they think of "A River
Runs Through It" -- they don't think of the central front in the
war on anything (except, maybe trout, if you consider fly fishermen
"warriors"). But for the last week, this sparsely populated state
has been the central front in the war on the middle class, and the
onslaught Big Sky country experienced shows that this fight could
be coming to a town near you.
Our story begins in the Montana legislature, though it could be
anywhere, as this lawmaking body is a microcosm of America's
ideological divides. Democrats pushed to boost education spending
and give each resident homeowner a $400 property tax rebate. To
fund the plan, they proposed closing tax loopholes and
strengthening tax enforcement in a state where roughly half of all
Fortune 500 companies doing business get away with paying less than
$500 a year in taxes.
But such a move offends conservative politicians and the corporate
lobbyists who crowd the hallways of state capitols like the one in
Helena -- and these types don't take lightly to being offended.
The GOP-controlled Montana House pressed a tax cut for corporations
financed by spending cuts, including one eliminating all public-
health programs. When last week it came time to negotiate a
compromise, Republican class warriors dug in further, offering
amendments to kill Democrats' proposal to beef up corporate tax
enforcement.
The result? The legislature ended without a budget, and Montana is
now on the brink of its own version of the 1996 Gingrich-Clinton
government shutdown. It is a troubling situation for middle-class
Montanans, but for anti-government Republican politicians and
lobbyists, it is a big victory in their war on the middle class.
Days later, Montana's U.S. Sen. Max Baucus, a Democrat, joined
Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke in headlining an economic-
development summit in Butte, a devastated city that is one of
America's all-too-common casualties in this economic war. Once the
bustling capital of the copper industry, Butte today is known for
its salt-of-the-earth inhabitants and for its canyon-like Superfund
site known as the Berkeley Pit -- a defunct open-pit mine that the
Anaconda Company abandoned with a pool of deadly chemicals at the
bottom.
The captains of global finance attending this summit no doubt saw
Butte's boarded-up brick buildings and rusting mine shaft skeletons
from the windows of their private jets that crowded the town's
airport. Yet, they delivered speeches as if they were attending an
executive conference at a Caribbean resort.
Corporate leaders looked out over Butte's wreckage and not only
trumpeted the supposedly booming economy, but then berated worker
protection laws and lavished praise on the "benefits" of free-trade
policies -- policies that have decimated wages and job security by
forcing American workers, farmers and small businesses to compete
in a global race to the bottom.
Executive Dan Rice of Printing for Less criticized Montana for
being "an employee-slanted state;" for considering a bill asking
businesses to take into account the environmental and community
impact of their decisions; and, thus, for being hostile to job
growth. He didn't explain why, if this was true, Montana has one of
the lowest unemployment rates in the nation.
Similarly, the $20-million-a-year CEO of McGraw-Hill, Harold McGraw
III, claimed America's trade policies have "had a net positive
impact on U.S. manufacturing jobs." This, despite 3 million
manufacturing jobs lost since the China free-trade pact was signed
in 2000.
That so many major players trekked to Montana to read the same
script proved this event wasn't about local economic development --
it was about making sure Baucus remains a reliable Washington ally
in the war on the middle class. The Senate Finance Committee he
chairs oversees America's economic and trade policies, and Baucus
has been feeling pressure to stand up for his middle-class
constituents after the Montana state Senate passed a resolution
demanding he oppose more free-trade deals. Such volleys rarely go
unanswered by Corporate America in this war, and so the big guns
came to Butte to tell the locals to back off.
At a time of growing job insecurity, stagnating wages and Great
Depression-level economic inequality, the 2006 election gave us
reason to hope for change. But as events in Montana show, change
will not come with one election, nor will it come easy. If the war
on the middle class can make its wrath felt in a small state's part-
time legislature or cheerily propagandize at a decimated town's
economic-development meeting, you can bet it can -- and will --
come anywhere.
David Sirota worked for Montana Gov. Brian Schweitzer's 2004
gubernatorial campaign. He lives in Helena, Mont.
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/chronicle/archive/
2007/05/04/EDGTLOS9JV1.DTL
This article appeared on page B - 11 of the San Francisco Chronicle
© 2007 Hearst Communications Inc.
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