MULTINATIONAL CORPORATIONS PILLAGE THE PUBLIC TREASURIES

— Interview of David Cay Johnston on Reality Asserts Itself with Jay Paul of The Real News Network

Click for Video Interview of Pulitzer-Prize Winner David Cay Johnston on The Real News Network

Mr. Johnston says to ordinary Americans: You elected these people, you chose these people who are destroying your families, destroying your life, who are making the lives of your future generations worse off – September 4, 2014

David Cay Johnston “one of this country’s most important journalists” — The Washington Monthly says his work is the equal of the great muckrakers Lincoln Steffens, Ida Tarbell and Upton Sinclair. — Johnston won a Pulitzer Prize in 2001 for his exposes of tax loopholes and inequities. After 40 years at San Jose Mercury and the Detroit Free Press, Los Angeles Times, Philadelphia Inquirer, and the New York Times, where he got his Pulitzer.

His trilogy: “Perfectly Legal” + “Free Lunch” + “The Fine Print” revealed from official government and corporate materials the massive upward redistribution of income and wealth over the last 33 years.

For last five years he has taught business and tax law at Syracuse University College of Law and Whitman School of Management.

PAUL JAY, SENIOR EDITOR, TRNN: Shocking numbers behind corporate welfare, David Cay Johnston writes, “Such burdens are especially hard on the poor. The bottom fifth of households in all but one state pay a larger share of their income in state and local taxes than the top 1 percent of earners. This means that corporate welfare effectively redistributes from the poor to those rich enough to own corporate stock.” So wealth is being Transferred to the EXTREMELY RICH from everyone else.

JOHNSTON: That’s right. So let me start with the bottom end here, Social Security, alright? That’s described all the time by the right in America as a redistribution program. No, it’s a time transfer program. I worked since I was 13 years old and paid Social Security taxes so that in a couple of years I’ll start collecting my Social Security, and it will be paid for by workers who came after me. That isn’t a redistribution of any significant amount. There is a little bit of downward redistribution ’cause low-paid workers like my brother in manual labor get relatively more than me, somebody who’s paid the top Social Security tax every year. But that’s a minor amount of money. And it’s a time transfer.

JOHNSTON: But corporate subsidies and tax policies are doing what the Bible calls evil: we are taking from the widow and the poor and giving to the rich. Boeing got $13+ Billion of welfare from state and local governments. Not for research done on better jets, but you don’t pay property tax = We’ll give you free land + We’ll build a building for you.

JOHNSTON: Walmart: 90% of Walmart distribution centers are built with your tax dollars + 33% of all Walmart stores. Home Depot, Lowe’s, Cabela’s, are all build with your tax dollars = Taken from the local schools and the police and the fire department. [“Free Lunch” explains all of this].

JAY: The counterargument’s is they bring jobs.

JOHNSTON: Bring the jobs with your own capital by EXTRACTING WEALTH FROM THE PEOPLE. Main Street Americans don’t get $1+ million in SUBSIDIES to start a small business — They could do a really great business if they’d had $Millions of dollars of subsidies.

JOHNSTON: Why can’t these MULTINATIONAL GIANT Companies stand up on their own two feet and earn their way in the world? I thought we lived in a country of capitalism and markets. This is corporate socialism = Privatize the profits for the RICH + You socialize the losses and the costs BURDER on the 99%. Bloomberg business news calculates we are subsidizing the too-big-to-fail banks to the tune of $83 Billion/year. = GREATER THAN the cost of the food stamps in America where 2% exist on food stamps and nothing else. = GOP wants to cut FOOD STAMPS but NOT BANKSTER’S WELFARE.

FACT: Boeing is getting 12% of all the state and local welfare in this country.

FACT: We give American’s money to Deutsche Bank, a German bank.

FACT: 2,900+ USA MULTINATIONAL Companies, including foreign companies, keep state income taxes withheld from their workers’ paychecks. The workers state income taxes are withheld: you get your paycheck, but the Company gets the TAXES YOU PAID — sliced off. The state lets them keep it hundreds of thousands of workers tax payments. They claim that creates jobs, but it simply is a TRANSFER OF WORKER WEALTH TO THE CRIMINAL RICH WITHOUT WORKERS KNOWLEDGE OR CONSENT. = Being taxed by the bosses.

JOHNSTON: I first exposed this three years ago, and the audiences say it sounds absolutely impossible to believe. But the facts and actual statutes were passed to allow these crazy subsidies. + We giving this to a communist Chinese bank from Beijing + To the Swiss + To European banks that set up the tax shelters that cheat all the rest of us but HIDE WEALTH FOR THE RICH. = Not just bailout money, but let them keep the state income taxes of the Americans they HIRE.

JOHNSTON: Rupert Murdoch gets a huge deal in New Jersey (The biggest place this SCAM is done) = Chris Christie lets MURDOCH keep the people’s taxes paid to the STATE. The people have no idea that the biggest companies are allowed to keep state taxes for themselves coming from workers’ wages in New Jersey.

JOHNSTON: The only company I know of that’s told the workers about it is General Electric in Ohio. Here’s how GE works it — GE made one of those deals in Ohio for a $100 million modernization of its factories to build jet engines. 92% of the money will come from the taxpayers + ONLY 8% percent from GE’s money = So if the factory makes an 8% profit on the total investment = 100% annual profit for GE. = No wonder they’re fabulously rich. + They KEEP THE WORKERS TAX PAYMENTS!

JOHNSTON: GE WELFARE IN THE $MILLIONS BUT Our children can’t have better schools; we can’t afford it. We’re going to have to get rid of police and firefighters. We’ll have to close the library. Why? Well, because we need to build a new store for Walmart, we need to build a new store for Lowe’s.

JOHNSTON: Lowe’s store was built on one of these deals = LOWE’S PAYS $1/year in RENT = NO OTHER COSTS! = ALL COSTS PAID BY TAXPAYERS! You know what Lowe’s then did? They closed the store one weekend and loaded everything up in trucks and drove to the next town line, where they got the same deal.

JAY: So these big companies are playing states off against each other, playing cities off against each other.

JOHNSTON: And picking your pocket by taking your tax dollars and using them for private gain instead of public purposes.

JAY: So concentrated wealth comes with concentrated political power. And the politicians are not pushing back in this. They are getting their campaigns financed by these people.

JOHNSTON: They can’t push back, because first of all, if you don’t play ball, they’ll run somebody against you.

And I made the statement one night to a number of friends that really rich people can just push speed-dial and get their congressman on the phone, whereupon one of the guests reached in, flipped his phone open, pushed one button, and was talking to our congressperson. NOW — Do you think you could get a meeting if you just call up and say, hi, I’m a constituent, I’d like to talk to my Congressman? Just try.

JAY: No, I was in the office of a television magnate in Canada who owns a bunch of TV stations. Just to prove how powerful he was to me, he picked up the phone and called the prime minister and got him on the phone.

JOHNSTON: Right.

JAY: So, concentrated ownership, concentrated political power, your father grew up thinking this is fixable. You’re an investigative journalist — Do you still do believe this is fixable? Without changing how things are owned and who has power?

JOHNSTON: Not without a revolution. Exposés I wrote in the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s that showed $Millions in corruption by local governments caused things to happen and people got fired and contracts got changed. For 20 years since I have exposed numerous $Billion + $Multi-Billion ripoffs and nothing happens and in all but one of those cases Congress has done nothing.

JOHNSTON: I keep telling people, you’re getting ripped off here for so many billion dollars. Nothing happens. That makes be pessimistic.

JOHNSTON: I try to keep things in perspective. Our constitution enshrines the ownership of human beings, but we finally got rid of slavery with 638,000 people dying, including 40,000 black Americans in a Civil War. Plus 120 years ago we ENDED child labor despite ministers, the Jerry Falwells and Pat Robertsons of the day, who went around saying, those who want child labor laws are the agents of the devil, for it is God’s plan that these children should be working in these factories.

JOHNSTON: There is no evil that I can’t find you somewhere a supposedly religious person will support just like child labor laws or the Triangle Shirtwaist factory, where these hundred young women leaped to their deaths after they were locked in by their employer–who, by the way, continued after that to do the same thing. We got workers compensation laws. We can fix any problem we have. If you don’t believe that, then you don’t believe in the Constitution, which sets forth the six noble purposes of this country. But the problem is we have to decide we’re going to fix it.

JOHNSTON: People who wanted to get rid of slavery were willing to go to war–and ultimately did–over it. The people who fought for unions, who sat down in the Flint, Michigan, plant, knew and were told General Motors may machine-gun you the way the Rockefellers machine-gunned women and children in Colorado in 1905. People took that risk and eventually won. We can fix this problem of the government creating this oligarchical class that is not accountable, that is trying to get us to pay for all the public services that make them rich, but we have to choose to do it.

JOHNSTON: We have to wake up and everybody should vote. Nobody should stand in line for more than a couple of minutes to vote. And remember, the current Congress is controlled by the Republicans, and yet the Democrats got–I think it was 1.4 million more votes than the Republicans. We have to be citizens — AND CHANGE THAT ROBBERY.

JOHNSTON: We should not have gerrymandered districts where you put everybody who’s black or everybody who’s a union member in a district so that you concentrate their voting power and dilute the Congress.

JOHNSTON: If we don’t want to be citizens, I can tell you where we’re going to go. You’re going to be worse and worse off economically unless you are in the servant class to the rich–doctors, lawyers, accountants, managers of enterprises. Your children are going to be worse off. Your public health is going to deteriorate. But the really wealthy are going to do just great, because you’re going to be subsidizing them.

JAY: Americans have to become electoral and political. But don’t you have to change how things are owned? If you have a 425 Billionaires owning the economy and politics = Dominating with ownership and NOW estate taxes are virtually nonexistent so generation after generation of $Billionaires essentially control life.

JOHNSTON: The founding fathers put forth a solution for this in One of its first laws Congress passed in 1792 was a subsidy law for the cod fishing industry, which the British Navy had been harassing. To get the fishing subsidy, you had to have a contract with your crew of sailors ahead of time giving them almost 70% of the subsidy = Like modern collective bargaining with 30% going to the owners of the fleet. If we simply got back rules that allowed workers to organize and have unions the way all of our economic competitors do–in Germany = Executives would ha e to change. = See Johnston’s piece in Newsweek, “Why Thomas Jefferson Favored Profit Sharing”.

JAY: Ralph Nader says the politics today is so dominated by this concentrated wealth that you can’t make the kinds of reforms he created. So, if you want to take on the power of finance, which is so dominant, is there any way to do that other than some kind of publicly owned banking?

JOHNSTON: Publicly owned banking is a GREAT IDEA. But the government must prosecute the white-collar criminals. = See my case for this in Newsweek several times about Eric Holder…Or, Schneiderman could as attorney general of New York. Now it is extremely difficult to do these RIGHT-MINDED things, but the answer to that is people have to become active and organized and their numbers will overcome these problems.

JOHNSTON: The founding fathers wanted, everybody to be a capitalist, to be either a farmer, or to at least own your own tools if you were a worker, to not be entirely wage-dependent–it’s why in New Jersey they call the county supervisors freeholders. If we went back to that idea, we would find a much different country if all workers were paid partly in securities. That’s why these executives are so rich. It’s all the stock that’s given to them. And it should be widely distributed.

JAY: But that horse has left the barn.

JOHNSTON: NO! NO! We can change anything we want to change. The problem is we don’t choose to. And I’m sorry if I sound like I’m telling a bunch of ordinary Americans it’s your fault, but you know what? It’s your fault. You elected these people. You chose these people who are destroying your families, destroying your life, who are making the lives of your future generations worse off. When people come to realize that–and all the polls indicate that that’s changing.

JOHNSTON: A majority of Republicans now favor a minimum-wage coparable to 1960s ($20/ Hour). A majority of Republicans now favor a whole group of things, like progressive tax policies.

JOHNSTON: We need to simply get back to doing the work of CITIZENS and GET INVOLVED. But we spend our time watching Dancing with the Stars and going to games, instead of doing the hard work of making a change — Saying, oh, there’s nothing I can do about it, then we don’t get anywhere. All Americans MUST STAND UP AND BE COUNTED and be a citizen, get involved, and we can change this.