Bad Deeds for 4-15-2009

Want to get steamed on tax day? Well, here are some things to get steamed about, and it’s not that junk being pushed at those goofy tea parties.

 

More CEOs Got Pay Hikes Than Cuts Last Year – Eleven million people lost their jobs and the government spent billions of taxpayer dollars to bail out companies — but CEOs still made a killing in 2008. More captains of industry got pay raises than had their pay cut in 2008. Of 946 companies in the Russell 3000 index that the labor group surveyed, 480 execs got pay raises, while 463 took a cut. Not bad for one of the worst economic climates since the Great Depression.

 

U. S. Losing Billions to Offshore Tax Havens – A Senate report estimated in 2008 that the United States loses up to $100 billion a year in tax revenue to offshore tax havens (PDF). In a report released Wednesday, the U.S. Public Interest Research Group offers a state-by-state breakdown of the cost to taxpayers of tax revenue lost to “shell companies and sham headquarters” in places like Switzerland and the Cayman Islands.

The practice soaks dutiful taxpayers in every state for hundreds of millions of dollars, according to U.S. PIRG. The citizens of New York and Texas shoulder over $8 billion a year, and the good people of California are on the hook for an extra $11 billion.

 

Tea Party Protests Being Orchestrated by the Rich – It’s the rich and out-of-power Republicans who are organizing these events, and it’s not an accident. They are trying to kick-start a broken conservative movement by making a huge effort to tap into the 25% of people who hate President Obama. Roger Ailes (Fox News Chief) has gone “all in” and is waiting for the river card as he uses Beck, Cavuto and his merry band of disenfranchised conservatives to lead them on their disingenuous mission.

Despite these attempts to make the “movement” appear organic, the principle organizers of the local events are actually the lobbyist-run think tanks Americans for Prosperity and Freedom Works. The two groups are heavily staffed and well funded, and are providing all the logistical and public relations work necessary for planning coast-to-coast protests:

• Freedom Works staffers coordinate conference calls among protesters, contacting conservative activists to give them “sign ideas, sample press releases, and a map of events around the country.”
• Freedom Works staffers apparently moved to “take over” the planning of local events in Florida.
• Freedom Works provides how-to guides for delivering a “clear message” to the public and media.
• Freedom Works has several domain addresses — some of them made to look like they were set up by amateurs — to promote the protests.
• Americans for Prosperity is writing press releases and planning the events in New Jersey, Arizona, New Hampshire, Missouri, Kansas, and several other states.

This type of corporate ‘astroturfing‘ is nothing new to either organization. While working to promote Social Security privatization, Freedom Works was caught planting one of its operatives as a “single mom” to ask questions to President Bush in a town hall on the subject. Last year, the Wall Street Journal exposed Freedom Works for similarly building “amateur-looking” websites to promote the lobbying interests of Dick Armey, the former Republican Majority Leader who now leads Freedom Works and is a lobbyist for the firm DLA Piper.

Americans for Prosperity is run by Tim Phillips, who was Ralph Reed’s former partner in the lobbying firm Century Strategies. The group is funded by Koch family foundations — a family whose wealth is derived from the oil industry. Indeed Americans for Prosperity has coordinated pro-drilling ‘grassroots‘ events around the country.

(Yes, rich people are getting poor people to protest about raising taxes on the super-rich. Have you checked your withholding on your paycheck recently? Unless you’re making over a quarter-million dollars per year, your taxes just went down. Most of these people at these tea parties just got a tax break and yet they are protesting. How dumb are they to let themselves be used by the rich? – JLV)

Regards,

Jim