Author Archives: G.S. Griffin

How Capitalism Destroys Itself Using Monopolies

Posted on by under Socialism

In April 2016, oil giant Halliburton announced it would fight Department of Justice efforts to stop its merger with fellow oil giant Baker Hughes.

These are two of the largest corporations in the industry. The merger is valued at $35 billion, and would leave Halliburton-Baker Hughes in control of a huge percentage of the market share. As U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch said, “The proposed deal between Halliburton and Baker Hughes would eliminate vital competition.”

The march toward monopolization (the ownership of an industry by one company) is a self-destructive inevitability of capitalism. The unregulated pursuit of profit destroys competition itself. This is the natural trend of capitalism throughout its history, of larger firms taking over smaller firms to increase their share of a market.

To quote French politician and economist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, the first self-described anarchist: “Competition kills competition” (see Guerin, Anarchism). 

And once the competition is devoured or driven out of business, prices can be raised and even more profit can be made. Further, innovation and quality can decline, and workers won’t be able to find higher wages for the same positions at competitors because there are none.

Howard Zinn wrote in A People’s History of the United States of the monopolization of the Industrial era:

And so it went, in industry after industry—shrewd, efficient businessmen building empires, choking out competition, maintaining high prices, keeping wages low, using government subsidies. These industries were the first beneficiaries of the “welfare state.” By the turn of the century, American Telephone and Telegraph had a monopoly of the nation’s telephone system, International Harvester made 85 percent of all farm machinery, and in every other industry resources became concentrated, controlled. The banks had interests in so many of these monopolies as to create an interlocking network of powerful corporation directors, each of whom sat on the boards of many other corporations… [J.P.] Morgan at his peak sat on the board of forty-eight corporations; [John D.] Rockefeller, thirty-seven corporations.

Even Woodrow Wilson—no anti-capitalist—lamented in his time that his country was “a very different America from the old…no longer a scene of individual enterprise…individual opportunity and individual achievement.” But rather, “small groups of men wield a power and control over the wealth and the business operations of the country” (Chomsky, Hopes and Prospects).

A 2011 Monthly Review article, “Monopoly and Competition in Twenty-First Century Capitalism,” points out, “Wherever one looks, it seems that nearly every industry is concentrated into fewer and fewer hands. Formerly competitive sectors like retail are now the province of enormous monopolistic chains; massive economic fortunes are being assembled into the hands of a few mega-billionaires sitting atop vast empires.” Economic recessions, we must note, provide an even easier opportunity for the largest, richest firms to swallow up smaller ones in dire financial straits. Fewer and fewer companies control all sectors of production.

By the 1970s, 100 companies owned nearly 50% of industrial assets in the U.S., and 100 companies controlled the same in Britain (Harman, Economic of the Madhouse).

In 2000 the Global Policy Forum found that the largest 200 international corporations accounted for more than a quarter of humanity’s economic output, greater than the economies of 182 nations combined. The top five auto manufacturers had a 60% global market share; the top five oil companies 40%; the top five steel companies 50%.

No one argues this trend isn’t dangerous. The elimination of competition prompts governments to pass legislation, such as the U.S. Sherman Anti-Trust Act, to ban monopolies. But regulations are not nearly strict enough. Just ask the six banks that now control 74% of banking resources in the U.S. Or the four major airlines in this country, down from 10 in 2000, which see 83% of air traffic. Or ask Disney, GE, CBS, Time Warner, Viacom, or Newscorp. These six corporations own and control 90% of what we read, listen to, and watch. Newscorp, chaired by conservative billionaire Rupert Murdoch, owns Fox News, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Post, Harper-Collins books, Zondervan (look at your Bible), The Times (London), and many more. Murdoch also owns 21st Century Fox. Six percent of U.S. companies make 50% of U.S. profit.

The existence of global corporations, which have no borders, make the problem of regulation even more difficult.

The crisis of monopoly is worsened through private industry-driven economic planning. Michael Harrington wrote in Socialism: Past and Future, “By the end of the nineteenth century, laisser-faire—where entrepreneurs obeyed the ‘invisible hand’ of the market—turned into corporate capitalism, where the ‘visible hand’ of professional executives sought, with assistance from the government, to dictate to markets rather than to follow them.”

In pursuit of profit, corporations lobby to undercut the free market. Economist Garrett Baldwin writes, “While traditional lobbying once centered on altering tax rates and encouraging legislation to liberalize and deregulate the economy, it has now evolved into a competitive weapon for companies trying to box out competitors and raise barriers to entry in their markets.” People often complain (rightly) that the government makes it excessively difficult for new businesses to get off the ground, and this is largely due to bigger, established corporations influencing government policy. 

Monopolization makes economic crises (recessions) worse. Competition over time eradicates small businesses in a given market. A few corporate giants increasingly dominate each sector of the economy. Harman writes:

If any one of these giant firms goes bust, there is enormous damage to the rest of the economy. Banks that have lent it money are very badly hit. So too are other industrial firms which expected to sell it machinery and raw materials or to sell consumer goods to its workers. Suddenly their profits are turned into loses. Such is the scale of the damage that the ability of other firms to buy up machinery and raw materials on the cheap does not nearly begin to compensate for it. Instead of the destruction of some firms benefiting others, what threatens to develop is an economic black hole that sucks into it profitable and non-profitable firms alike…each giant that collapses knocks over others in a domino effect.        

We saw this very recently with the 2008 housing market crash. Banking giants saw huge loses as borrowers couldn’t repay their subprime loans, which meant banks couldn’t repay their debts, and thus began to fall by the hundreds: Lehman Brothers, Wachovia, Washington Mutual, all bankrupt. Other banks bought up some failed banks, but this did not ease the crisis. The stock market crashed, and trillions upon trillions of dollars disappeared as company stocks became worthless. Banks could no longer offer loans to consumers, and thus industrial powers such as the auto manufacturers no longer had a credit bubble on which to reap profits. General Motors and Chrysler went bankrupt, and their collapse would have cost the nation millions of jobs. The government spent trillions in taxpayer funds to prop up both the big banks and the auto industry, in hope of avoiding economic collapse.

The concentration of production into monopolistic entities indeed created a black hole, a situation that severely damaged nearly every economic sector of American society and dragged the economies of the world down with it, leading everywhere to spikes in unemployment and poverty, and at the same time slashes to vital social welfare programs.

Surely even free market conservatives can support the role the State must play if monopolies (and their predecessors, oligopolies) are to be avoided. Without strong anti-trust laws, capitalism can reach a point where competition dies and the free market becomes the market of corporate kings.

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Killing Dr. King

Posted on by under Race Relations

Was the U.S. government involved in the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King?

His wife, Coretta Scott King, believed so.

A sniper’s bullet tore through King’s face as he stood on the balcony of his motel room in Memphis, Tennessee on April 4, 1968. He was in Memphis to support the strike of local sanitation workers.

A man named James Earl Ray of Illinois was hunted down and arrested in June. He was on the FBI’s Most Wanted Fugitives list before the assassination, having escaped from a Missouri prison in 1967. Ray got a room at a boarding house (the shot’s origin) near King’s motel on the day of the killing, witnesses saw him running from the location, and investigators said his fingerprints were found on the rifle used to kill the civil rights leader.

Ray pleaded guilty, avoiding the death penalty. Yet he almost immediately recanted his plea, claiming he was framed, and spent the rest of his life fighting for a new trial. He later had help from the King family. In 1977, they met publicly with Ray and began to push for the investigation to be reopened.

(Only a year later, the House Select Committee on Assassinations concluded that it was likely Ray killed King as part of a conspiracy, but not one involving local or federal authorities.)

Though Ray died in prison in April 1998, a civil court jury in Memphis (made up of 6 blacks and 6 whites) ruled on December 8, 1999 (King v. Jowers) that the U.S. government was complicit in the killing of King.

In 1993, Lloyd Jowers, the owner of a restaurant below the boarding house where Ray stayed, claimed he had been paid by the Mafia to hire a Memphis policeman to kill King — he didn’t hire Ray. 4 weeks of testimony from 70 witnesses convinced a jury that Ray was not the one who killed King. Details and transcripts of the trial can be found at The Martin Luther King, Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change website.

Coretta Scott King, on whose behalf the civil lawsuit was filed against Jowers, declared after the verdict,

The civil court’s unanimous verdict has validated our belief… The Mafia, local, state and federal government agencies were deeply involved in the assassination of my husband.

Dr. King’s son, Dexter, said:

It’s been painful and also has been bittersweet. Bitter because of the tragedy, obviously, but liberating in the sense and sweet that we have been vindicated and ultimately that the significant of this historical verdict that really rewrites history is liberating. Now we can move on with our lives, have a sense of closure and healing.

The New York Times reported that

One juror, David Morphy, said after the trial, ”We all thought it was a cut and dried case with the evidence that Mr. Pepper brought to us, that there were a lot of people involved, everyone from the C.I.A., military involvement, and Jowers was involved.”

Those who agreed with him wondered why a convict on the run would commit so serious a crime, or if government complicity was necessarily out of character during the civil rights era. For instance, the FBI worked with the Chicago police to assassinate Fred Hampton of the Black Panther Party, and in general worked to undermine and destroy civil rights groups. The FBI “tapped [King’s] private phone conversations, sent him fake letters, threatened him, blackmailed him, and even suggested once in an anonymous letter that he commit suicide. FBI internal memos discussed finding a black leader to replace King. As a Senate report on the FBI said in 1976, the FBI tried ‘to destroy Dr. Martin Luther King’” (see Zinn, A People’s History of the United States). 

The King family lawyer argued King was a special target for his fierce opposition to the Vietnam War and the Poor People’s March on Washington he was planning, which would push for massive redistributions of wealth and political power. According to Probe Magazine,

James Lawson, King’s friend and an organizer with SCLC, testified that King’s stands on Vietnam and the Poor People’s Campaign had created enemies in Washington. He said King’s speech at New York’s Riverside Church on April 4, 1967, which condemned the Vietnam War and identified the U.S. government as “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today,” provoked intense hostility in the White House and FBI.

Hatred and fear of King deepened, Lawson said, in response to his plan to hold the Poor People’s Campaign in Washington, D.C. King wanted to shut down the nation’s capital in the spring of 1968 through massive civil disobedience until the government agreed to abolish poverty. King saw the Memphis sanitation workers’ strike as the beginning of a nonviolent revolution that would redistribute income.

“I have no doubt,” Lawson said, “that the government viewed all this seriously enough to plan his assassination.”

However, the Department of Justice issued a report calling the trial a sham, insisting no further investigation of the assassination was necessary. It can be found at the Department of Justice website. The Department wrote:

The evidence introduced in King v. Jowers to support various conspiracy allegations consisted of either inaccurate and incomplete information or unsubstantiated conjecture, supplied most often by sources, many unnamed, who did not testify. Important information from the historical record and our investigation contradicts and undermines it. When considered in light of all other available relevant facts, the trial’s evidence fails to establish the existence of any conspiracy to kill Dr. King. The verdict presented by the parties and adopted by the jury is incompatible with the weight of all relevant information, much of which the jury never heard.  

Jowers’ testimony was doubted:

Jowers…has never made his conspiracy claims under oath… In fact, he did not testify in King v. Jowers, despite the fact that he was the party being sued. The one time Jowers did testify under oath about his allegations in an earlier civil suit, Ray v. Jowers, he repudiated them. Further, he has also renounced his confessions in certain private conversations without his attorney… For example, in an impromptu, recorded conversation with a state investigator, Jowers characterized a central feature of his story — that someone besides Ray shot Dr. King with a rifle other than the one recovered at the crime scene — as “bullshit.”

The assistant district attorney of Memphis, John Campbell, who was involved in the earlier criminal proceedings against Ray, said, “‘I’m not surprised by the verdict. This case overlooked so much contradictory evidence that never was presented, what other option did the jury have but to accept [the King family lawyer’s] version?” The New York Times wrote in 2000, “Mr. Campbell has quoted several of Mr. Jowers’ associates as saying he hoped to get a movie or book deal.” Two associates recanted their corroboration of his story and said Jowers made everything up for profit.

But like the King family, others still suspect government involvement. Jesse Jackson, who was with King when he died, told Democracy Now:

The fact is there were saboteurs to disrupt the march. But then our own organization, we found a very key person who was on the government payroll. So infiltration within, saboteurs from without and the press attacks… I will never believe that James Earl Ray had the motive, the money and the mobility to have done it himself. Our government was very involved in setting the stage for and I think the escape route for James Earl Ray. A very painful day.

Just after the Memphis trial, a former FBI agent claimed to have found evidence supporting Jowers’ story in Ray’s car right after the assassination (a claim the Justice Department also disputes), and that he was harassed by the FBI after finally speaking up about it. The agent said he had stayed quiet to protect himself:

I knew that the FBI would go to any lengths to accomplish its ends: assassination, murder, anything. But after I saw Coretta King on television talking so passionately about finding the truth, I decided to step forward.

In 2002, Minister Ronald Wilson in Gainesville, Florida said his father, Henry Clay Wilson, had killed Dr. King. The King family lawyer said

he had been contacted by many people making claims similar to [Ronald] Wilson’s but had discounted most as having no value. ”I have heard from Reverend Wilson over the last couple of years or more but have never seen any hard evidence to justify the allegations now being made.”

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The Last Article on Abortion You Will Ever Need to Read

Posted on by under Politics

When addressing the complex and controversial issue of abortion, there are three central questions to consider: Will criminalizing abortion put an end to abortions?, How immoral is abortion?, and Are there effective ways of reducing the number of abortions that don’t relate to criminalization?

Answering such questions through a serious study of history and sociological research is key, because only through those methods can abortion be made a thing of the past. Despite the fact some conservatives are deeply offended by pro-choice people, and slander them as “baby killers,” it is of great importance, to this liberal and I’m sure to many others, to reduce the number of abortions — to save infant lives.

The answer to the first question is without question no. The choice between abortions and no abortions, at least predicated on the law, is a false choice. After all, there was a time in the U.S. when abortion was illegal. Many conservatives wish to return to this era of righteousness, a time free of the holocaust of the unborn.

Unfortunately, abortions occurred throughout the country despite their illegality. In 1967, for example, it was estimated 829,000 illegal abortions took place. In the decade before Roe v. Wade, the U.S. saw as many as 1 million illegal abortions a year. Over 330,000 women were hospitalized annually due to the unsafe nature of “back-alley abortions” (Zinn, A People’s History of the United States). Thousands died, particularly before certain medical advancements.

As Rachel Gold writes,

In 1930, abortion was listed as the official cause of death for almost 2,700 women—nearly one-fifth (18%) of maternal deaths recorded in that year. The death toll had declined to just under 1,700 by 1940, and to just over 300 by 1950 (most likely because of the introduction of antibiotics in the 1940s, which permitted more effective treatment of the infections that frequently developed after illegal abortion). By 1965, the number of deaths due to illegal abortion had fallen to just under 200, but illegal abortion still accounted for 17% of all deaths attributed to pregnancy and childbirth that year. And these are just the number that were officially reported; the actual number was likely much higher.

Poor women and their families were disproportionately impacted. A study of low-income women in New York City in the 1960s found that almost one in 10 (8%) had ever attempted to terminate a pregnancy by illegal abortion; almost four in 10 (38%) said that a friend, relative or acquaintance had attempted to obtain an abortion. Of the low-income women in that study who said they had had an abortion, eight in 10 (77%) said that they had attempted a self-induced procedure, with only 2% saying that a physician had been involved in any way.

The fact that modern medicine would mean fewer deaths if abortion was outlawed today does not necessarily justify its illegality, as abortions would still occur, some women would likely still be hospitalized and die, and State power over our personal decisions would still be increased, as discussed below. It may be tempting to think that sacrificing a few mothers a year would be worth it to save a far greater number of infants, but this may not be the reality — the holocaust of abortions would continue despite fewer maternal complications and deaths.

In Texas, which has slashed funds to abortion providers, ensuring that today fewer than 20 abortion clinics serve the entire state, women are buying a drug (misoprostol) smuggled in from Mexico to self-terminate their pregnancies, as documented in an important piece from The Atlantic. Dealers sell it illegally at flea markets in small Texas towns, and it is popular because it works. Misoprostol (combined with mifepristone) is prescribed by doctors for early pregnancy abortions. “In 2011, it accounted for 36 percent of all abortions before nine weeks of gestation” in the U.S.

The article also takes a look at the past conditions of women in Brazil who wanted an abortion but were barred due to the power of the conservative Catholic church over government policy: “They listened to old wives tails, ramming sharp objects into their uteruses and guzzling drug cocktails, and visiting clandestine, unsafe abortion clinics.” That is, until misoprostol came along; today half of Brazil’s 1 million annual abortions are due to the drug, which is sold on the black market, making drug dealers wild profits.

This is the story of many women in nations that restrict abortion rights. “More than 21 million women annually have unsafe abortions worldwide, which account for nearly 13 percent of all maternal deaths.”

This is not to say that some women won’t give birth because having an abortion is illegal. Criminalizing things, making things harder, can “work” to a degree, reducing abortions. But you have to think about the consequences of its failures, and weigh that in your moral calculus.

Pro-life individuals have very little to say in response to these facts. Take for example a Life News article entitled “Legalizing Abortion Did Not Stop Women From Dying in Abortions” (as if that somehow makes it acceptable to again criminalize it, which would increase maternal deaths). The author writes:

Pro-choice advocates would have you believe [the death toll from illegal abortions was] a monumental figure; some claim that prior to Roe, a whopping 17 percent of maternal deaths were related to unsafe abortions. Surely we would want to avoid this tragic loss of life, wouldn’t we? But those figures are inaccurate and misleading. According to the National Center for Health Statistics, in 1972, the last year before Roe, 39 women died in illegal abortions.

That is literally the only attempt in the article to refute the historical information presented by pro-choice advocates. Simply call it wrong, then offer additional knowledge (39 deceased women) and pretend it somehow contradicts the fact thousands more died before those 39.

Not only will outlawing abortion not stop abortion, only endangering women, neither will it stop natural abortions. 70% of conceptions are lost prior to live birth, in a natural way. Most of the failures, which include both early failures to implant and later miscarriages, occur before a woman misses her period and even knows she is pregnant. Even after she is aware she is with child, she has a 10-20% chance of losing her pregnancy before week 20. True, this is not the same as the willful destruction of a fetus by conscious adults, nor is it meant to say nothing should be done to reduce the number of abortions, but it does provide perspective. Nature, evolution, and our imperfect reproductive systems are responsible (or is it God who is responsible?) for a holocaust far greater than our own.

How immoral is abortion? That is a far more complex question than it seems. You have to ask a lot of questions. Mull over various factors and wrestle with many of them; I certainly do. It’s not enough to say “It’s the same as if I murdered you right now.” Obviously, those are not identical things. They’re not literally the same. All ethics are situational. If a situation changes, even slightly, the ethics of an action may change too. A lie is unethical, unless a killer is asking where your family is hiding. Perhaps you think killing is wrong, unless it’s for your country or in self-defense. And so forth. Right and wrong are not black and white; they exist on a spectrum, where the same action can be less moral or more moral dependent upon the situation. Abortion, no matter where you fall on it, is an exceptionally unique issue with unique, complex moral questions.

For example, is it less immoral to commit abortion if the pregnancy was the product of rape? Is it right to force someone to give birth to a child that was forced upon her through sexual violence? Even many conservatives find it more morally acceptable to terminate a pregnancy in this case. Likewise, what if giving birth puts the mother at serious risk of death (still an issue even in more advanced nations like ours)? Is it then less immoral to commit abortion than it might be otherwise? Shouldn’t the person who already exists have the preeminent right to life in that case? Personally, I think abortion is in fact less immoral in these contexts, among others. Should 11-year-olds be forced to give birth by the State?

If abortion is more morally acceptable in some circumstances, what about others? Is it more unethical to abort as time goes on and birth draws closer? Does age, developmental stage, matter at all in the moral equation? Many people think it does, and only consider abortion in the first or second trimester to be morally permissible. Fortunately for them, in 2014, “91.5% of abortions were performed at ≤13 weeks’ gestation; a smaller number of abortions [7.2%] were performed at 14–20 weeks’ gestation, and even fewer [1.3%] were performed at ≥21 weeks’ gestation,” to quote the CDC. Personally, I tend to agree that it’s less ethical to commit abortion later on. Note that one can believe this while holding that all abortions, regardless of developmental stage, are either morally acceptable (somewhere on the right side of the spectrum) or morally unacceptable (somewhere on the wrong of the spectrum). I fall more in the latter category; I don’t view abortion as a moral thing to do, as it is taking a human life, and likely wouldn’t have one if men could give birth. But while I do not judge it to be as moral (or ethically neutral) as the Left often does, I do not believe it to be quite as immoral as the Right suggests — and ethics and law are at times divorced for good reason. There are various factors you have to take into account when 1) deciding if it should be criminalized and 2) deciding just how immoral it really is.

Regarding the first point, we’ve already seen how criminalization is ineffective. Terminating a pregnancy may be unethical, but surely the termination of a pregnancy with lower risk to a woman’s life and health is less unethical than the termination of a pregnancy with a higher risk to a woman’s life and health. Yes, I think it would be most ethical to give birth to the child. But that is simply not a choice I, you, or the government can make. It is the woman’s choice; it always has been and always will be, regardless of the law. That’s just the reality in which we live, so you have to go from that starting point. While it is compelling to argue that anything unethical must be made illegal, there are some unethical actions we do not outlaw (lying to hurt someone, cheating on a spouse, even suicide, and so on), for various reasons. Not all unethical things are or should be illegal; you have to weigh a lot of unique factors for each case, which may result in different conclusions. It isn’t necessarily hypocritical to believe an unethical act should be legal — you may feel that way about a host of issues (being rude is wrong, but should you be hauled off to prison?). Conversely, it’s sometimes said, “Well, if abortion should be legal because a ban doesn’t work, why not make murder legal? The ban on that doesn’t work either.” This is a good point, but again the situations aren’t precisely the same — there may be important reasons to keep abortion legal that don’t apply to making murder legal. If you’re a conservative who makes that point, consider that you already believe avoiding bans on war, firearms, torture, the death penalty, or other things that end up killing innocent people may not justify lifting a ban on murder. (See more here.)

As for the second point, while abortion in my view is immoral, I do not consider it as immoral as infanticide or the killing of an innocent person who’s been born. That’s not meant to celebrate abortion or advocate for having one! It’s simply to say that ethics are on a spectrum and not all scenarios sit on top of each other. A thought scenario that is sometimes raised has merit: if a fetus in a tube and a baby in a nursery were both about to die but you could only save one, which should you choose? Surely the moral choice would be to save the baby. Which would you choose? Letting a fetus in a tube die does not have the same moral weight as letting a baby die, in my view. Ethics are situational, so, likewise, abortion and murder (or infanticide) are not identical situations and do not carry the same moral weight. They each have unique moral questions and answers. Circling back to whether the age of the baby in the womb has any sway over the moral equation, the idea that infanticide is less moral than abortion fits with the idea that later abortions are less moral than earlier ones. You could even revise the thought experiment: if you had to choose between saving a fetus the size of a finger and a fetus at eight months, which would you choose? If you choose the latter, you’re accepting the idea that some innocent deaths are simply worse, simply less ethically tolerable, than others. And that others are more tolerable.

We’ve mostly covered this, but another moral decision to make: should the government force you to give birth against your will? For many conservatives, if the alternative is killing a baby in the womb then yes. Not exactly “small government” and keeping Big Brother out of our lives, but it’s understandable. The State outlaws theft, murder, rape, and so on, to curb or punish behavior. Liberals and conservatives tend to agree on these things. But personally, while I view abortion as wrong, I don’t believe giving the State the power to force women to give birth is desirable. It’s certainly not something I would wish upon myself. (And, again, it simply fails as a policy: women have dangerous black market abortions.) And to reject such a disturbing State compulsion, such tyranny, is to invite punishment! Some women who’ve illegally had abortions will be arrested and — what? How should we punish women who break the law and commit abortion? A fine and community service? Prison time? A life sentence? Execution?    

As for the final question posed in the beginning, we already know the most effective means of reducing abortions: preventing accidental pregnancies.

Research overwhelmingly shows safe-sex education prevents accidental pregnancies and abortions. Abstinence-only education simply does not work: students in such programs begin exploring their sexuality just as early (often earlier) and with as much enthusiasm as control groups. But, unsurprisingly, they are one-third less likely to use contraceptives. Thus, one recent study showed teens who received safe-sex education were 50% less likely to become pregnant than teens who received abstinence-only education.

Studies show sex education accomplishes what conservatives, and many liberals, most desire: a longer delay in becoming sexually active, fewer partners, less unprotected sex, lower pregnancy and STD rates, and fewer abortions. This is why those who hate abortion the most should also be the most vocal supporters of safe-sex education. To make abortion history, the Right must put aside its hysteria over sex and join the Left on this issue, broadening sex education in the home, at school, in healthcare clinics, etc.

Even while the U.S. has over 3 million unintended pregnancies a year (teen girls are double the rate of women, due to lack of sex education and access to contraception), the rate of abortions has declined dramatically since Roe v. Wade. Today it’s under 700,000 a year. Planned Parenthood, and groups like it, are central to this reduction effort, because they provide safe-sex information and contraceptives (in 2009, 35% of patient care at Planned Parenthood had to do with contraceptives; compare this to its abortion services: in 2011, only about one in every 10 clients received an abortion).

In 2009, the Guttmacher Institute estimated federal funds given to places like Planned Parenthood in 2006 prevented 1.9 million unintended pregnancies, thus preventing some 810,000 abortions. 2013 research told a similar story, 345,000 abortions prevented. Planned Parenthood estimates it helps prevent a half-million unintended pregnancies, and thus 216,000 abortions, a year. As a writer for the New Yorker said with a heavy dose of sarcasm:

If only we could find an organization that educates young girls, and boys, about the dangers of early and unwanted pregnancies; a group that distributes contraceptives but also stresses the fact that sexual abstinence is safe, free, and, when used continuously, always prevents pregnancies. That group could really lower the abortion and teen-age pregnancy rates in this country. Oh. Wait. We have that organization.

Yet because Planned Parenthood and other healthcare organizations also perform abortions, they are rightwing targets that must be protested, defunded, shut down, slandered with deceptively edited videos, or terrorized with violence like destruction of property and the murder of doctors.

Planned Parenthood receives $500 million a year from the Federal government, yet since it is illegal (due to conservative activism) to use those funds for abortions except in cases of rape or to protect the mother’s life, that money is used for other health care services, like STD testing, cancer screening, contraception, safe-sex education. Things that prevent the spread of diseases, death by cancer, and abortion itself.

Americans serious about ending abortions should be the most enthusiastic supporters of such groups, maybe even cutting a check themselves.

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Giant Corporations Are Not Paying Taxes

Posted on by under Politics

When Bernie Sanders proposed using American tax wealth to cover all citizen medical and college tuition expenses, debates exploded over how much this would cost and how it could theoretically be paid for.      

Covering all state university tuition fees would cost the government an estimated $63 billion a year, which is actually far less than the State currently spends on Pell Grants, loans, and other financial assistance for higher education. Universal healthcare would cost $1-2 trillion a year, not too different from what the government currently spends ($1.3 trillion annually) to cover Medicare and Medicaid.

Sanders plans to enact a tax on Wall Street speculation, increase income taxes on the wealthy by 5-7%, on everyday citizens by 2%, increase capital gains, dividend, and estate taxes, and close tax loopholes for the wealthy (the wealthiest Americans are supposed to pay a tax rate of nearly 40%, but in reality some only pay 18%, sometimes 15%).

Sanders would also close corporate tax loopholes. Many large corporations don’t pay federal taxes.

Corporations employ armies of lobbyists to bribe politicians with campaign funds or promises of future executive positions to deregulate industries and place tax exemptions in the U.S. tax code, while armies of lawyers and accountants make sure companies are using the loopholes most effectively to whittle down their taxes (see Nader, The Seventeen Solutions for a detailed look at this topic).

This has been underway for decades, and now the largest companies pay no federal taxes — and sometimes even get tax refunds.

For instance, “From 2008 to 2010, GE made $7.72 billion in profit in the United States, paid no federal income tax, and got $4.73 billion back from the U.S. treasury” (Nader). In 2011, the nonprofit research group Citizens for Tax Justice released a report showing 30 major U.S. companies (like GE, Verizon, and Wells Fargo) paid no net federal income taxes from 2008 to 2010. 26 of them enjoyed negative tax rates. Instead of paying 35% of their income (that’s supposed to be the corporate rate), they got a refund. These companies alone left the government short $78 billion in revenue over the course of 3 years.

In 2014, 13 major Fortune 500 companies, including Time Warner, Ryder, Priceline, Prudential, Mattel, and CBS, paid $0 in federal taxes, instead receiving rebates. Two others, GE and JetBlue Airways, paid less than 1% in taxes. These companies made $23 billion in profits in 2014, but tax loopholes left these fortunes untouched.

In the second quarter of 2014, 20 large companies, such as GM, Merck, and News Corp., paid $0 in federal taxes or got a government check, despite all making huge profits. Merck’s income soared 52% during the quarter.  

Of 258 top U.S. companies, 18 paid no federal taxes from 2008-2015, with 100 companies enjoying at least one tax-free year. Averaged, the actual rate was closer to 21%, and the loopholes and subsidies amounted to over half a trillion dollars in lost revenue for the country. Amazon made nearly $6 billion in 2017 but paid no federal income taxes.

Amazon made nearly $6 billion in 2017 but paid no federal income taxes.

Over the years, corporate tax revenue has not kept up with economic output, a huge favor to wealthy corporate owners and their firms. According to the Tax Policy Center, 60 years ago, revenue from corporations was 5 to 6% of the GDP, but by 2010 it was a mere 1.3%. 

The tax burden rests heaviest on individuals. The Federal government collected $2.2 trillion in revenue in 2010. 82% came from individual income taxes and payroll taxes, while only 9% came from corporate taxes. In 2015, the government collected nearly $4 trillion in revenues and borrowed funds, taking $1.5 trillion in individual income taxes and $1 trillion from Social Security and Medicare taxes, but only $342 billion from corporate taxes.

(Naturally, the burden of taxes on wealthy individuals has also lightened. In the 2013 tax bracket, any income you made over $400,000 was taxed at 39.6%, down from 70% in the 1960s and 94% during World War II, averaging 81% from 1932-1980, according to Thomas Piketty in Capital. At least, that’s the way it’s supposed to work. In 2008, the IRS reported the 400 richest Americans only paid 18%. A third of these 400 paid less than 15%, the same rate as someone making $36,000 a year. At the same time tax rates fell, the richest 1% saw its share of the national income double since 1979; the share of the richest 0.1% almost tripled.)

The government hands out $1.3 trillion a year in tax breaks and subsidies, the majority of which benefit the top 20% of Americans and their businesses. $250 billion a year goes to the richest 1%. The Socialist Appeal reports, “It has been estimated that between subsidies, corporate tax underpayments and deductions, offshore tax havens, and various corporate tax loopholes, the wealthiest Americans avoid as much as $3 trillion in taxes every year. This is 3 times the U.S. annual budget deficit.” Oxfam found in April 2016 that the top 50 U.S. companies alone had $1.4 trillion hidden in tax havens.

Clearly, while free college tuition and healthcare are expensive endeavors, the possibility of cracking down on tax dodgers, rewriting tax laws to benefit ordinary working people instead of corporations, and ending the corporate welfare comprised of subsidies, deductions, and refunds, very much exists.

Doing so would go a long way toward funding programs that serve human needs.

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The “Black War on Whites” is Another White Myth

Posted on by under Race Relations

Several weeks ago, in response to one of my writings critical of racist rhetoric, I received the following message from a stranger named “Jeff,” whom I can only assume is white:

All over America, Black on White Hate crimes, “Face Slashings in New York, The “Knock Out Game”, “Polar Bear Hunting”, Beat Whitey Night at the Iowa and Wisconsin State Fair, 10 to 14,000 Black on White Sexual Assaults every year, while White on Black Sexual Assaults are less than 10, drive by murders, assaults, riots, Flash Mob beatings the list is f*cking endless. The Black on White Intifada is the most underreported story in the history of this country.

Only Pat Buchanan, Colin Flaherty and Jack Cashill have the nerve to post the numbers and commentary which reveal a low level civil war in this country on whites, sponsored and supported by the President, the 4th Estate, Colleges and politicians. But oh dear!!!! Quelle Horreur!!! Harsh language is what the nation should focus on.

Shut the f*ck up you piece of sh*t.

I am still dead, in a local Black on White Hate Crime a couple of months ago, when two blacks walked up to me in my drive way while I was working on my truck and shot me in the back of the head. Harsh language my f*cking ass.

Whether or not other whites who today believe in the “Black on White Intifada” and “low level civil war” can relate to being shot dead months ago, this line of thinking is all too popular among extremely conservative whites.

These ideas are largely fictional, easily dispelled with even a cursory look at FBI and Justice Department data on crime, and clearly questionable from the outset considering America’s fairly segregated living arrangements. It also carries on a century-old white tradition of vilifying blacks as having an innately special appetite for rape, theft, murder, drug use, and so on.

Whites commit the most crimes in the U.S., quite predictable considering whites make up nearly 70% of the population, versus only 13% for blacks.

Looking at the FBI’s Crime in the United States report, in 2012 whites were charged with 69% of crimes, blacks 28%. Whites led in categories like rape (65%), assault (63%), and burglary (67%), while blacks led in murder charges (49%, a lead of 1%) and robbery (55%). More minor categories were dominated by whites. Looking at all violent crimes lumped together, blacks committed about 20% of them. If we look at mass shootings in America, some 64% of them were committed by whites since 1982, verses 16% by blacks.

Now to the important question of who is committing crime against whom:

In 2014, about 82 percent of murders involving white victims were committed by other white people, while only 14 percent were committed by black people, according to the FBI.

Among murders involving black victims, just under 90 percent were committed by other black people, while 7 percent were committed by white people.

Crime experts have concluded that homicides are most likely to occur among people of the same race because people are usually murdered by someone they already know, and most people primarily know people of their own race.

Blacks kill blacks 89.9% of the time, whites kill whites 82.3% of the time. A 7% difference somehow does not seem to merit the descriptors “Black on White Intifada” (intifada, by the way, is an Arabic word for uprising against oppressors — probably not a word whites who think that anti-black prejudice is fictional should use), “low level civil war,” or “the most underreported story in the history of this country.”

Looking at Department of Justice data from 1980 to 2008, the percentage difference rises slightly, to 9%. In this period, 84% of white victims were killed by whites, 93% of black victims were killed by blacks. This of course does not mean whites not killed by whites were exclusively killed by blacks, nor that blacks not killed by blacks were exclusively killed by whites. Offenders are sometimes other races — Asians, Hispanics, and so on. In reality, the rate of black-on-white murder was only about 5% higher than that of white-on-black murder:

Screen Shot 2017-11-17 at 9.58.57 AM

via Bureau of Justice Statistics

That there is only a 5% difference is foreseeable. Blacks tend to live and work with other blacks, whites with other whites. So for example, The Civil Rights Project in 2012 found that three-quarters of black students attend minority-majority schools. The most diverse Americans cities tend to be the most segregated. Thus whites tend to rape, kill, and steal from each other; blacks do the same mostly to other blacks.

This does not mean that reverse racism (anti-white racism) does not exist or cannot manifest itself in violence. Yet ultraconservatives take incidents of blacks intentionally targeting whites for crimes like assault (i.e., the “Knockout Game”) and say there’s an “intifada” or “war” being waged! (And of course they use trends that don’t neatly fit a black-on-white narrative: “Face Slashings in New York” actually seem diverse, with black victims and Hispanic attackers, even if a black man did credit his victim’s white race as a motivating factor for an attack.)

FBI data from 2014 shows about 63% of hate crime victims were targeted due to their blackness, 23% targeted due to their whiteness. There were 701 anti-white incidents, 145 committed by other whites, 337 by blacks. There were 1,955 anti-black incidents, 57 committed by other blacks, 1,165 committed by whites. In other words, 48% of anti-white hate crimes are committed by blacks, while 60% of anti-black hate crimes are committed by whites. Clearly, calling 337 black hate crimes in a nation of 200 million whites a “war” reeks of hyperbole — and of course, the fact that whites were guilty of three and a half times more hate crimes will be politely ignored.

In a nation like the United States, it seems understandable that reverse racism would exist. This is not to excuse it, but to explain it. Most blacks are well aware of the realities of modern anti-black discrimination, documented elsewhere on Weekend Collective:

Resumes with “black” names are 50% less likely to earn an interview than identical ones with “white” names… Blacks are less likely to be offered a quality home loan than whites with the same (sometimes worse) qualifications and income levels. Whites receive better medical care than blacks with identical diagnoses, medical histories, healthcare coverage, and so on. Blacks even earn, on average, less than equally qualified white workers in the same occupational positions.

Blacks are more likely to receive longer prison sentences and the death penalty than whites who commit the same crimes. They are more likely to be pulled over and searched while driving lawfully than whites driving lawfully. Unarmed Americans killed by police are usually twice as likely to be black than white. Unsurprising, as experiments show whites in simulations are much quicker to shoot both armed and unarmed blacks than armed and unarmed whites…

About 60% of whites will openly admit to trusting negative stereotypes about lower intelligence, higher aggression, and greater laziness in blacks. 25% of whites say an ideal neighborhood would be free of them. Nearly 90% of whites hold subconscious anti-black biases.

That is on top of a barbaric history of oppression:

There was the savagery of slavery: kidnapping, hunger, torture, execution, degradation, and rape. After the Civil War, white employers refused to pay blacks the same wages as whites, or hire them for more skilled, higher wage positions; white banks refused to provide home loans to blacks; school districts gerrymandered attendance zones to keep black and white schools distinct; white businesses fled from budding areas of black commerce; white producers charged black stores more for goods.

White residents fled from black neighbors; white real estate agents steered blacks far away from nicer homes in white areas; white city councils, city planners, and developers refused to invest and build in black areas; white voters rejected tax increases that would benefit black schools and neighborhoods; white landlords refused to properly maintain property inhabited by black families; white doctors declined to treat black patients. Black history was nowhere to be found in standard history textbooks.

White policemen beat and abused blacks merely suspected of committing crimes against whites, but refused to investigate or prosecute black on black crime; white judges and juries handed black criminals longer prison sentences and more frequent executions; white terrorists shot, hung, burned, beat, mutilated and bombed innocent African Americans to keep them out of stores, schools, public facilities, neighborhoods, voting booths, and political positions. Peaceful protesters exercising First Amendment rights were attacked and killed by police and white vigilantes alike.

Again, this is not to excuse black-on-white hate crimes, but rather to show how history can explain present social conditions — how an ugly, oppressive past might cause a great deal of anger toward whites, whether personally guilty of prejudice and discrimination or not.

“But 13% of the population committing half the murders? How do you explain that barbarism?” some conservative whites will exclaim, inwardly confident that blacks are simply by nature more aggressive, violent, prone to murder and criminality.

These are also fictions. Higher black crime rates are a product of American race relations past and present. Whether black or white, poverty breeds crime, as any study of history conclusively demonstrates. And American blacks have been and are disproportionately poor — four times more likely to grow up poor than whites.

The American landscape is characterized by crime-ridden slums in inner cities dominated by minorities surrounded by wealthier white suburbs. It isn’t exactly a stretch of the imagination to suppose, as the American Psychological Association shows, that children who grow up in poverty are more likely to experience high-stress homes, absent parents, abandonment, displacement, homelessness, hunger, violence and sexual abuse, exposure to alcoholism, drug use, and crime, poor health, depression, developmental delays, decreased concentration and memory capabilities, and a host of other health problems — all issues that contribute to crime rates.

Attorney General Ramsey Clark put it best:

Mark the part of your city where crime flourishes. Now look at the map of your city. You have marked areas where there are slums, poor schools, high unemployment, widespread poverty; where sickness and mental illness are common, housing is decrepit and nearly every site is ugly–and you have marked the areas where crime flourishes… Poverty, illness, injustice, idleness, ignorance, human misery, and crime go together. That is the truth. We have known it all along. We cultivate crime, breed it, nourish it. Little wonder we have so much.

Denying this truth perpetuates racist myths. As I wrote in an article on how black poverty keeps white racism alive: “If one cannot accept that our history led to disproportionate poverty, which led to disproportionate crime, the only alternative is to attribute black crime to innate deviancy and bloodlust.”   

I told “Jeff” that if our places had been reversed — if whites had been enslaved, oppressed, and impoverished in the manner blacks were (and to a dangerous extent are) — it would be whites disproportionately poor and thus disproportionately committing certain crimes.

Obviously, any other belief flirts with very old, racist ideas about blacks being fundamentally inferior to whites.

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