Trickle Down Tyranny (13 page)

Microsoft mogul Bill Gates seems to be taking a lesson from Immelt. Gates is in discussions with the China Nuclear Corporation to have his company, TerraPower, locate a manufacturing facility in China and co-operatively develop Generation IV nuclear power reactors there.
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Under jobs czar Immelt’s leadership, GE has laid off 21,000 of its American workers and closed 20 of its factories from 2007 to 2009. Less than half of GE’s workforce remains in the U.S.
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The stenographers who pose as journalists in the new Obama Government-Media Complex never bothered to question either Immelt’s appointment as jobs czar or the transfer to China of the very jobs he is supposed to protect.

They haven’t questioned GE’s tax status, either. Although the company declared $14.2 billion in profits in 2010—up 77 percent from the previous year
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—more than $9 billion were earned offshore and were not subject to the 35 percent U.S. corporate tax rate, the highest in the world.
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GE wasn’t taxed at the 35 percent rate.

GE wasn’t taxed at all for its U.S. earnings.

In fact, not only did GE pay no taxes on the $5.1 billion it earned in the United States in 2010, but it actually got a
$3.2 billion corporate tax credit
.

GE maintains the largest and best corporate tax department in the world, and manages to navigate the maze of corporate tax regulations better than any other multinational company. It also manages to buy the support of the Obama administration as one of the president’s favored crony capitalists.

Did you think the corporate giant got away with murder in 2009? Its 2010 corporate tax return was 57,000 pages long!

Its profit was $14 billion, nearly three times the year before.

And once again GE paid no corporate taxes.
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Immelt’s GE benefits immeasurably from Obama’s selective Leninist tax strategy, which is built on providing political favor to the administration’s allies. That Obama would even consider appointing an anti-American, anti-jobs mogul like Immelt to the position of jobs czar should be an impeachable offense.

Immelt and General Electric aren’t alone in their ability to evade taxes. Dozens of other companies, from Pacific Gas and Electric to Wells Fargo, paid no federal taxes for the past three years. Wells Fargo also received a number of tax subsidies. Hewlett-Packard, Yahoo, and Levi-Strauss paid taxes at less than half the 35 percent corporate tax rate. In all, the companies listed for tax avoidance in a report issued by the Citizens for Tax Justice received more than $200 billion in taxpayer-funded subsidies.
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The crony capitalism doesn’t stop with Immelt’s position as Jobs Czar. Lewis Hay, the chairman and CEO of green energy company NextEra Energy, sits on the president’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness. His company has received nearly $2 billion in federally guaranteed loans. The situation is no different from Immelt’s. It’s a clear conflict of interest.
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But the Obama administration’s crony capitalism goes way beyond simple conflict of interest and avoiding corporate taxes.

Do you understand that it’s now bordering on treason?

Obama’s science “czar” is a committed leftist named John Holdren. He’s one of about 40 Obama czars—nobody knows the exact number—more than Lenin’s government ever had. Holdren’s the traitor who said that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) produces the “most important conclusions” about climate change.
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He’s also committed treason by giving U.S. technology to China. Holdren has visited China several times in order to participate in talks about having NASA cooperate with the Chinese People’s Liberation Army, which controls China’s space program. In doing this, Holdren had defied legislation that specifically prohibits this kind of information exchange.
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Do you understand what I’m saying?

Holdren is committing what amounts to treason under U.S. law.

Giving U.S. technology to China—as both Holdren and Immelt are doing—is part of the Obama administration’s attempts to undermine the private economy, and it’s unprecedented in its scope.

It’s driving us rapidly toward bankruptcy.

The list of economic failures includes the first debt downgrade in U.S. history, and the highest budget deficits, federal spending, and federal debt as a percentage of GDP since World War II. Under Obama home ownership has declined to its lowest level since the 1960s. The number of Americans paying taxes is the lowest in the modern era, while those dependent on the government for aid is the highest in history.
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On top of this, Obama has announced that he will veto any bill containing spending cuts that are not accompanied by a $1.5 trillion tax increase on the “wealthy.” This is the so-called Buffett Tax, named after multibillionaire Warren Buffett, who traded his support of Barack Obama’s millionaire tax and Obama’s assurance that the Fed would not allow BofA to fail for a chance to buy Bank of America preferred stock that will net him billions over the next few years, even as the bank flounders.

Warren Buffett has repeatedly claimed that he pays less in taxes than his secretary and that millionaires like him should pay their fair share of taxes. As I’ve told you, the reason Buffett pays a small percentage of his income in taxes is that he takes a very small salary—less than $100,000 annually by some reports—as income. The rest of the proceeds from his investments stays in his company, where his tax accountants take advantage of every loophole to keep their tax bite very small.

Like every one of Obama’s policy initiatives, Obama’s millionaire tax is based on false information. In this case, Obama is insisting that “millionaires pay a lower percentage of their incomes in taxes than their secretaries do.” They’re taxed, Obama says, at a much lower rate than the middle class.

In general, ordinary millionaires pay much more than the rest of us in taxes as a percentage of their income. People whose incomes are higher than $1 million annually pay about 29.1 percent in taxes, while people with incomes between $50,000 and $100,000 pay about 15 percent.
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Warren Buffett’s income from wages falls in the second category.

People who earn most of their income from their job tend to pay taxes at a higher rate than those who earn a high percentage of their income from investments. But the differences still don’t result in millionaires paying a smaller percentage of their income in taxes.
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It’s just more of the same lies Obama repeatedly tells in order to perpetuate class warfare and his assault on “the rich.”

Most Americans think that America’s economic failures are occurring because the Obama economic team is blindly committed to Keynesian economic policies and that the president’s economic team doesn’t realize—or won’t admit—that Keynesian economics simply doesn’t work.

I don’t buy that.

I think the situation is much more serious.

I have no doubt that the Obama administration’s intent is to weaken our economy in order to further a crisis of the international financial system and facilitate its takeover by a U.S./global financial elite on the scale of the Leninist postrevolutionary takeover of the Russian economy.

I’ll explain what I mean.

Roots of the Current Crisis

In
Trickle Up Poverty
, I showed you how the stock market crash of 2008 was engineered in large part by hedge fund managers in order to insure that Barack Obama was elected president. Just before the economic collapse, the largest Wall Street banks came running to Washington, begging to be spared the consequences of the risky investments they’d made. Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson handed them hundreds of billions in Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP) money to cover losses they were incurring because of their investments in risky housing derivatives and collateralized debt obligations.

What wasn’t revealed at the time was that that money didn’t scratch the surface.

Did you know that after TARP, the Federal Reserve secretly loaned another $1.2 trillion to U.S. and international banks in order to avoid a further catastrophic meltdown of the global financial system?

Take a look at some of the financial institutions involved:

Morgan Stanley: $107 billion

Citigroup: $99.5 billion

Bank of America: $91.4 billion

Royal Bank of Scotland: $84.5 billion

Goldman Sachs: $69 billion

JPMorgan Chase: $68.6 billion
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As one official put it, “These are all whopping numbers.”
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It took three years for the numbers to come to light, but during that time—despite the fact that they would have gone bankrupt without the Fed loans—I didn’t see the banks in question slowing down their suicidal practices.

Instead, they continued to engage in high-risk lending and hedge-fund trading. Even though our country is on the brink of bankruptcy, they’re still following the same strategy and pushing the same agenda today. Their ongoing treachery continues to put the savings and livelihoods of American middle-class citizens at risk, because it’s the middle class they’re counting on to bail them out again.

The treachery is going to be hard to prove, though.

The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has been accused by one of its employees of destroying more than 9,000 files related to investigations of the very financial giants—Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers, Citigroup, Morgan Stanley, Wells Fargo, and Bank of America—who played a large part in causing the 2008 crisis and who benefited enormously from the TARP bailout and loans from the Fed.
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I’m the only one I know of who’s telling you that the secret loans made to these financial giants as part of the Obama administration’s strategy are for the purpose of transforming the U.S. capitalist economy into a managed economy, controlled by the government in league with the world’s largest financial institutions.

As big as the numbers I’m citing are, the “official” U.S. federal debt represents only a fraction of our total debt obligation. Unfunded liabilities—what we’ve promised to pay to retirees in the form of Social Security and Medicare benefits—add an additional $100 trillion to our debt. The Social Security trust fund had accumulated $3 trillion from those paying into it, but the federal government has borrowed every penny of that and issued “special-interest bonds” to Social Security, so there’s no cash available in the trust fund.

Add in another several trillion dollars for other unfunded liabilities such as federal employee and military retirement benefits and federal guarantees through such agencies as TARP, Fannie Mae, and Freddie Mac, along with the projected Obama 2012 budget deficit of more than $1.5 trillion, and you start to get an idea of our true economic condition.
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Our national debt and unfunded liabilities amount to nearly ten times the U.S. annual GDP, and there’s no sign the know-nothings in Congress have the will to do anything about it.

But let me give you the larger picture of what’s happening.

It goes way beyond the thievery committed by the Obama administration and the crony capitalists who run America’s banks and brokerages.

The annual world gross domestic product—in other words, when you add up the GDPs of every nation on the planet—amounts to about $60 trillion. The United States, even though we have less than six percent of the world’s population, generates 25 percent of the world GDP, or about $15 trillion.

Keep those numbers in mind when you read what I’m about to say next.

I’ve explained to you in
Trickle Up Poverty
how financial crooks like George Soros engineered the economic crash that carried Barack Obama to the presidency. One of the reasons that crash happened was financial “derivatives,” debt instruments created in order to spread the risk of loss, especially in the mortgage market. The reason we haven’t been able to recover from the current recession—and the reason that European banks and sovereign governments haven’t been able to stabilize the risk of economic collapse in Greece, Italy, Spain, Portugal, and Ireland—is that almost every big bank and every government carries those derivatives on its books.

Do you know what those derivatives are worth?

Six hundred trillion dollars.

Ten times the GDP of the entire planet.

More money than the world generates in ten years by legitimate economic activities like manufacturing, services, and sales.

The world economy is a prisoner of the debt instruments the big banks and sovereign governments created, and there’s no way to avoid it.

There’s not enough money in the world to stave off the coming economic crisis.
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Who’s on the hook for all this?

They’ve rigged the game in their favor to the point where
U.S. taxpayers are responsible for the crooked dealings of the banksters who have taken over the U.S. and global economy and are using it as their ATM
. They’re getting rich beyond imagination by manipulating every single market in the world—from commodities like gold, silver, oil, and corn to the bonds that sovereign nations use to finance their debt.