Taking Back the Country....From Who, Exactly?

Last night CNN broadcast the Republican debate for the 2012 GOP presidential nomination. Seven candidates-- including Michele Bachmann, Newt Gingrich, and Mitt Romney, grinned and postured onstage while essentially declaring how they planned to "take our country back". That phrase has become such a massive theme for an increasingly right-wing Republican party. Naturally conservatives claim that they want to reclaim the country from the stranglehold of the tyrannical government; however, if you stick around long enough for the potential candidates to go beyond their usual superficial tropes, an interesting thing occurs. 

The candidates begin to describe how they want to wrest the country away from its middle-class citizens, the "job-killing" EPA, and all the loose, morally questionable women that insist on having the right to make a choice about whether to get an abortion when the pregnancy is unplanned (Rape and Incest be damned! Keep the baby, life begins at conception!). The right-wing prescription for the black malaise that they claim is rapidly swallowing our society? Tax cuts, deregulation, and strict, Christian Evangelical based social conservatism. No matter what question John King asked, the contenders seemed to always loop back to the party line. 

Typical Republican logic argues that corporations aren't willing to hire because the tax burden is too great, and our "socialist government" discourages innovation by implementing excessive regulations. Michele Bachmann even invoked her experience as a federal tax lawyer to illustrate the dire straits in which businesses exist because of backbreaking tax liabilities. However, there is a fundamental difference between the high tax rate, and what corporations actually send to the IRS. One tactic is for large corporations to simply shift their profits to foreign tax havens, which costs the Treasury about $100 billion a year in lost revenue. Yes, the American corporate tax rate is on the higher end of the spectrum (second only to Japan) at 35%, but built-in loopholes ensure that corporations pay far less.  The New York Times explained it this way:

But by taking advantage of myriad breaks and loopholes that other countries generally do not offer, United States corporations pay only slightly more on average than their counterparts in other industrial countries. And some American corporations use aggressive strategies to pay less — often far less — than their competitors abroad and at home. A Government Accountability Office study released in 2008 found that 55 percent of United States companies paid no federal income taxes during at least one year in a seven-year period it studied.


The paradox of the United States tax code — high rates with a bounty of subsidies, shelters and special breaks — has made American multinationals “world leaders in tax avoidance,” according to Edward D. Kleinbard, a professor at the University of Southern California who was head of the Congressional joint committee on taxes. This has profound implications for businesses, the economy and the federal budget.

That information is just another slice of definitive proof that Republicans have no qualms about making bold declarations that fly in the face of all the available evidence. Furthermore, what some would argue is the tail-end of the Great Recession has given rise to record-shattering corporate profits, cash surpluses, and CEO pay. Yet unemployment is stuck at 9.1%. Those that are getting work are most-definitely getting paid less. Home prices are still plummeting, college grads scramble for nonexistent careers, and Republican governors are in open war against the last vestiges of union culture. The reality is that American corporations have made a strategic shift that explicitly abandons the middle class in favor of both the emerging markets of the BRIC countries and the domestic super-elite oligarchy. Lower tax rates for big business would be just an unwarranted bonus. Chrystia Freeland describes the new economic landscape in the New York Times:

But the reality may be even more chilling: Perhaps U.S. business is learning to get by just fine, thank you, without middle-class U.S. consumers. And while that may be good news for chief executives and shareholders, it could be the beginning of a new and socially wrenching political logic that leaves the great American middle behind.

Wall Street, which is paid for smarts, not sentiment, has this figured out. In a newspaper interview this month, Robert C. Doll, chief equity strategist at BlackRock, the largest money manager in the world, pointed out that the fortunes of U.S. companies and the fortunes of the country as a whole were diverging: “The U.S. stock market and the U.S. economy are increasingly different animals.”

Mr. Doll’s explanation for the shift was the increasing importance of international markets rather than the domestic one — of the rising middle class in emerging markets, rather than the stagnating one back home. He said that over the next five years, 70 percent of the incremental earnings of S.&P. 500 companies would come from outside the United States.

This is a very alarming prospect for one simple reason: National Security. Corporatist politicians are building the weapons of our destruction by encouraging a rogue capitalist system that harbors no patriotic sentiment. Companies that have grown from the seeds of uniquely American innovation are raising stakes and chasing profits in whatever far-flung region that globalization deems its new hotspot. Yes, you can hire Indian techies for one-third of the price of an Engineer from Boston...but at what social cost? 

Income inequality is at an all-time high and yet not a single Republican mentioned that in the CNN debate. Big business has shifted their job-creating resources to unregulated emerging markets. Meanwhile on the homefront, Republicans (aka Citizens United) have sucessfully argued that dollars=free speech; the natural result of which will be that corporations--not government--can maintain a stranglehold on our ostensibly democratic system. For better or worse, less jobs means even less opportunities for the middle class to willfully blind themselves with material trinkets. Even less BMWs, Playstations, and Juicy Couture sweatsuits to assuage our collective psychic pain. Maybe this new, new economy will snatch us away from our backlash mentality and force us to realize that an America without a vibrant, fortified middle class, will just be a global afterthought.