A recent article at OurFuture.org has the answer to this question. You know who the parasites are. They don’t pay their fair share. They have undermined our nation’s economy. In addition to their profligate tax breaks, garnered by their K-Street connections and their phony “think tanks,” they are indirectly responsible for much of our budgetary deficits. They cost us indirectly in excessive defense spending on far away wars. But they spin their parasitic ways by turning day into night.
The wealthy and corporate elite are perfectly typified by Jim Mulva, CEO of Conoco Phillips, who says that eliminating oil subsidies is “UnAmerican.” Pardon me while I laugh. Not paying your fair share is UnAmerican. He also says “they have shackles on us.” Poor baby. Mulva has it backwards. The Seinfeldian-named Jim Mulva should take a look in the mirror.
It is corporations and their corporate elite leaders which should be called Parasites-Are-Us. They suck the earth dry. They take the oil and mineral reserves of this land (and many others) for nary a fee. The lay claim to offshore waters and pay little-to-nothing for the rights to do so. When something goes wrong, as in the Gulf disaster, they try to minimize their responsibility.
Every write-off has a cost to the rest of us. Also, they have shackled us with oil guzzlers, most likely helped kill electric cars for a generation (see film, “Who Killed the Electric Car”), buying and shelving alternative technologies. By back-burner-ing solar power for decades, and inventing demand as an excuse for jacking up oil prices even in an economy in which people are already strapped and demand isn’t up, they’ve manipulated markets and us. They have made record profits.
(Ironically, most of the very programs they attack are programs every single American benefits from at some point.) They overcharge/bilk us at the pump and in the marketplace. They manufacture goods and drugs that don’t work, design new banking “products” to sucker us, and scams to get everything we have. They pollute the earth we live on and the air we breathe. They get their wealth on the backs of workers. And then they say we are the parasites.
Parasites piggy back on the work of others taking nearly all of the value of that labor for themselves. They skim off the wealth of companies, depriving stockholders whose 401ks earn a fraction of what they once did because the parasitic CEOs and top management are allowed to take too much of the proceeds, build golden parachutes, seize other companies in hostile takeovers and pick those bones dry too. And those 401ks? They were big business’s private sector “solution” to offering pensions. On your ownership in old age is their game. The average 401k is anemic as hell.
The Cato Institute purports that the rich produce and the rest of Americans are parasites too. You might ask why a so-called think tank is even paid to “come up with” words already in the lexicon due to their sociopathic source, the late Ayn Rand. There are parasites, all right. But Cato has it backwards. And it, Cato, is part of the problem. But we’ve got news for them. As Dave Johnson at The Campaign for America’s Future wrote yesterday, the rich don’t create jobs, the rest of Americans do.
Lots of regular people having money to spend is what creates jobs and businesses. That is the basic idea of demand-side economics and it works. In a consumer-driven economy designed to serve people, regular people with money in their pockets is what keeps everything going. And the equal opportunity of democracy with its reinvestment in infrastructure and education and the other fruits of democracy is fundamental to keeping a demand-side economy functioning.
When all the money goes to a few at the top everything breaks down. Taxing the people at the top and reinvesting the money into the democratic society is fundamental to keeping things going.
Could not have said it better. I’ll end with Dave Johnson’s words:
The conservative “producer and parasite” anti-tax philosophy is fundamentally at odds with the concepts of democracy (which they proudly acknowledge – see more here and here and should be understood and criticized as such. Taxes do not “take money out of the economy” they enable the economy. The rich do not “create jobs,” We, the People create jobs.
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