CommentsACCORDING TO LIZ - There has been a lot written about how the plutocracy has used its money, power and connections to reshape our country’s laws for its benefit.
These are the very wealthiest Americans and most powerful corporations, who are often one and the same like the Waltons and Walmart.
Trump’s 2017 tax bill allowed the well-heeled to keep even more of their money, transferring the burden of running the government down onto the backs of the middle-class and poor Americans.
That is the obvious, as is the ability of both companies and individuals with significant assets to pay for accountants to squirrel their money away in offshore havens, protected from when the taxman cometh.
But there are more insidious abuses of this power.
The U.S. government was established to be of the people and for the people. That set it apart from England and other European countries which were of the royals and for the aristocracy.
And even in the Nixon years, laws were being enacted to protect the people from the abuses of corporate power. The Environmental Protection Agency was created for the people.
Since then, however, all three branches of government have increasingly participated in removing protections for Main Street in favor of profits on Wall Street.
These are protections for health, for labor, for women and children… and for equal access to the American dream.
Companies threaten workers with off-shoring their jobs if they don’t capitulate to management demands. And then move their manufacturing overseas anyway.
Amazon and Starbucks have driven a business model that exploits workers as endlessly replaceable to keep their costs down and reduce the chance of unionization. Even while paying above the minimum wage in times of high unemployment, their employee turnover reached 150%/year.
Uber and Lyft profit off of not paying their workers’ employment fringes
Banks charge stiff fees to customers after being bailed out by tax dollars. Lax regulations allow payday lenders to act as legal extortionists, charging what amounts to over 400% and more per year on short term loans. For those who can’t pay, this mafia may not break bones but are entitled to charge even more additional exorbitant fees.
Don’t try and blame the consumer who has nowhere else to turn in an economy set up to make bankrupting people easy and collection from miscreant corporations far more difficult. And expensive.
Trump’s 2017 tax plan also created Opportunity Zones – a program of tax incentives to encourage investment in low-income communities purportedly to help build up their local economies and develop local-owned and controlled businesses but just let more corporate opportunists in to claim those tax dollars and further empty out neighborhood resources.
Big Ag and east coast investors have appropriated the water rights in California’s Central Valley, draining the water table and diverting what should be public water to their profits.
With the expansion of corporate agriculture, the aquifers have been drained below the level of traditional wells and the only way to continue is to drill deeper.
This has forced out the family farmer who can’t afford these costs and allowed Big Ag and out-of-state investors to further expand their takeover of California farmland and water.
It has also led to increased exploitation of imported Mexican labor, legal and otherwise, to work in the fields and orchards. The “otherwise” often come through labor contractors so the boss-man can keep his hands clean while those pesky workers don’t dare challenge abuses.
These people sweat away each day to generate wealth for the investors and food for our tables work and work, but have no opportunity to achieve the American dream
Water privatization is occurring around the world but is especially dangerous in drought-prone areas of the West, and places where groundwater has been polluted by cattle effluvia, fracking fluid, and percolation from garbage dumps such as Scholl Canyon in northeast Los Angeles.
Stewart Resnick irrigates almost 200 square miles of arid California land using more than 400,000 acre feet of water to produce his almonds, pistachios and pomegranates. This is more than any other person in the west. Los Angeles uses 587,000 for all the needs of over 4 million people. Whose rates go up and up.
The current approach is to continue to allow private industry take over the public’s right to clean water so profiteers can take their cuts before the people pay. And pay and pay.
In addition to causing colony collapse of over 50% of bees imported annually to California to pollinate crops, pesticides and chemical fertilizers used to increase yields for Big Ag also affects human embryo development. People living near or downwind of these operations are particularly at risk and are less likely to have access to medical and other resources.
There are all too many stories to tell about individual profiteering in other industries to the detriment of the common good - fossil fuels, trucking, chemical and forestry among them - polluting our air and poisoning our water, especially in and adjacent to disadvantaged communities.
But in no other area has there been such scandalous abuse than in education. What’s that you say?
Yes, the GI Bill built the economic power of the United States after the Second World War but now public schools are not properly funded to help lift up the lives of those who now fill their halls.
Charter schools are siphoning off money, and dueling school boards and politicians with multiple agendas are, for the first time in memory, creating a generation less well off than their parents.
A good idea in the broad strokes, the charter school concept has been seriously abused because there is an awful lot of money to be made.
Absolutely, there are idealistic people involved trying to provide a better education to students than is available in the public schools in too many areas. But while “public” – available to any child – is how charter schools sell themselves, their profits do not go back to the public.
Whether they take it off the top as fees or spin off other ways of making money such as “renting” buildings they own to the charter entity, it end up in their investors’ bank accounts.
Make no mistake, these are private, for-profit enterprises capitalizing on the huge pool of money provided by state and federal government to educate America’s children. All the children.
An investigation by USA Today found charter schools received over $1 billion in Paycheck Protection Program loans, loans that were to only be available to private companies impacted by the pandemic.
What has happened is that charter schools are “public” when they want to scoop up the money which goes with each student, and private when they can make a buck as a private enterprise.
Student loan lenders and servicers as well as monopolies on textbook publishing are eating up resources and lathering further debt on students who are trying to achieve the American dream.
Most likely this debt will mean a lifetime without the wherewithal to purchase that other part of the American dream, a home of their own.
(Liz Amsden is an activist from Northeast Los Angeles with opinions on much of what goes on in our lives. She has written extensively on the City's budget and services as well as her many other interests and passions. In her real life she works on budgets for film and television where fiction can rarely be as strange as the truth of living in today's world.)
