We the People, call Pulitzer Prize winner David Cay Johnston to testify on “how big companies use “plain English” to rob you blind.”
[Notre: thre following comes from Johnston’s book, “The fine Print.”}
Johnston: “How the promise of cheap, competitive and unlimited telecommunications service has ..turned into a reality of expensive, monopolistic and limited service is just one part of the larger transformation in the American economy sunce the late 1970s. A host of large industries, including banks, credit card lenders, electric utilities, health care, oil Pipelines, Hollywood studios, property insurance, railroads and water companies, all..worked quietly to rewrite America’s economic playbook in their favor.”
”..legislatures have rewritten basic business laws, some whose principles date back thousands of years. Too often the goal..to thwart competition, artificially inflate prices, hold down wages by decimating unions, reduce worker benefits and then restrict or bar access to..courts by those aggrieved. Businesses have gotten policies adopted that..allowed some managers to run corporations as, effectively, criminal enterprises, something..criminologists have a name for: control fraud.”..
Johnston: ”The worst of these laws in 19 states..let companies pocket..state income taxes withheld from their workers’ paychecks for up to 25 years.”..
”From the corporations’ point of view, the best part is that..workers are left in the dark. None of these states requires..workers be told..their state income taxes go to their employers..in effect being taxed by their bosses.”
Johnston: “What are todays’ bank costs for processing a bounced check? BofA won’t tell customers, but research papers on costs in the digital era suggest it could be less than a penny, making..markup by BofA in the neighborhood of 470,000%. But corporate values now so infuse our society..price gouging is easily brushed off as a function of competition, regardless..whether that’s..truth or an ideological fantasy.”
Johnston: ”No other modern country gives corporations the unfettered power found in America to gouge customers, shortchange workers and erect barriers to fair play. A big reason is..so little of..news..addresses the private, government-approved mechanisms by which price gouging is employed to redistribute income upward. When news breaks about one company buying another, the focus is almost always on the bottom line and how shareholders will benefit from higher prices and less competition; much less is said about added costs for customers..”
Johnston: “In Citizens United..the court went far beyond..narrow issues before it, holding..no law may constrain..spending by corporations, unions, nonprofits or others to influence elections and..names of those spending money can be kept secret. The notion is one..the framers of our Constitution would never have embraced, yet Roberts and his confreres insist..their guiding principle is strict adherence to the original intent of the framers..No honest originalist could possibly have signed on to Citizens United, but intellectually corrupt justices who worship corporatism, disdain the poor and enjoy ..perks of power did so..Citizens United is to..extension of corporate power what the big bang was to the beginning of existence – it is the whole universe.”
[NOTE: rules changes – and corrupt referees – THIS. is how YOU. get robbed blind !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!]
Johnston: “..a few years back, Oregon passed a law requiring..electricity and natural-gas utilities taxes must be paid over to government or given back to consumers. As soon as irt was enacted, Buffett’s lobbyists began working to restore the system that let Berkshire Hathaway’s PacifiCorp..pocket taxes, diverting them from public coffers to Berkshire Hathaway’s accounts. In 2011, they had spread around enough money that the law was repealed.”
Johnston: “University of Texas law professor Johnson and his colleagues “have shown how Congress, by closing loopholes, could raise $1 trillion each year without any new taxes or tax rate increases.” [2012]
[Read this again!!!!!!! – if right-wingers in congress really want to lower the debt – THIS is all they’d need to do!!!]
Johnston: “..relaxation and removal of sound laws took more than two decades of campaign donations and favors for politicians. As chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, Phil Gramm..did all he could to remove laws and regulations that ensured prudent conduct and protected taxpayers. Gramm then left office and became a vice chairman of UBS, the big Swiss bank..”
Johnston: “Laws weakened over many years changed America from a land where bank failures were almost unheard of from 1945 until the early years of Reaganism. With prudent rules and actual regulation fading into history, we began to get the bill..just weeks before the George W. Bush administration was to end..Treasury Secretary Henry..Paulson demanded..Congress give him $700 billion, no questions asked, so he could bail out the firm he had run before coming to Washington..deemed too big to fail.”
”Congress gave Paulson the money..The Bloomberg news agency, after analyzing..concluded..Wall Street bailouts put taxpayers at risk for $14.7 trillion..roughly one year of..all..economic activity of the entire nation.”..
Johnston: “..Congress and the Supreme Court are systematically destroying a crucial tenet of commercial law..The beginnings date to a 1925 law, the Federal Arbitration Act..The record from 1925 shows no intention to apply the law to consumers and workers, only to corporations..courts have..stretched the law into a parody of its original intent. In doing so they have encouraged misconduct by all businesses..As reinvented by the Supreme Court..the 1925 arbitration law now applies..in ways that eliminate consumer and employment rights in favor of business interests..and ignore the Constitutional right to jury trial in civil disputes..”
Johnston: “Massey Energy contributed more than $3 million to help elect Brent Benjamin to the West Virginia Supreme court..against another candidate..Blankenship feared would vote against Massey..the duly elected Justice Benjamin did indeed vote in favor of his political donor..In 2009, the Supreme Court found..Justice Benjamin should have reecused himself. The impropriety here is so obvious..it is hard to understand why the ruling was 5-4 instead of unanimous.
The dissenting opinions are revealing. Justice Scalia belittled the majority.”….
“Far more troubling was the dissent by Chief Justice John Roberts, who saw nothing amiss because the Massey funds went not to Justice Benjamin’s campaign but to an “independent” organization..Roberts wrote: “It is true..Don Blankenship spent a large amount of money..But this point cannot be emphasized strongly enough: Other than a $1,000 direct contribution..Justice Benjamin and his campaign had no control how this money was spent..a third party might distort..even though..”
”What chance..does a solitary victim..have in a rigged system in which someone as intellectually corrupt as John Roberts sits as the chief justice of the United States.”
[!!!!!!!!!!!! read this section again – “intellectually corrupt..chief justice of the United States.” And it gets worse,
the CORRUPT “Citizens United” decision comes next – legalizing bribery by “campaign contribution”]
Johnston: after the 2004 “American Jobs Creation Act,” 843 corporations brought $312 billion back to the United States, ”escaping almost $80 billion in taxes” – and American companies destroyed 100,000 jobs.
Johnston: former Treasury Department economist Sullivan calculated in 2008 American drug companies reported about 80% of their profits were earned in tax-favored offshore jurisdictions, up from 1/3 in 199.7. Problematic because foreign sales increased only from 38% to 52% of revenues !!!!!!!!!!!!!
Johnston: ”The core problem is with oligopolies and monopolies and their excessive prices, lower quality services and reduced innovation. They are the principle means, enabled by government, to redistribute income and wealth from the many to the politically connected few.”..
“..since Reagan’s presidency, with gains going entirely to the top 20% and very heavily to the top tenth of 1%. Contrast this with the economics of Adam Smith..”
Johnston: ”If trickle-down is such a great philosophy, how do we explain the fact..after spending more than 40% of all the money in the world devoted to health care, we rank 37th in the quality of our health care and we still have roughly 50 million without health insurance? In 1981, when Ronald Reagan took..office, per capita health-care costs equaled 23% of the average salary of the bottom 90%.. By 2007 it had risen to 49% with all signs pointing to a growing share of the economy going to big, inefficient but stunningly profitable health companies.”
Johnston:: “..America, under the twin guises of Reaganism and the Chicago School, has allowed concentrated and largely unaccounted power, with only the most cursory government refereeing.. The result has been minimal competition, oligopolies everywhere, and removal of regulations that foster candor, integrity, and a reasonable connection between cost and price.”
Johnston: ”America’s corporate and political elites now form a reign of their own and they’re privatizing democracy. All the benefits – the tax cuts, policies and rewards – flow in one direction; up.” [Bill Moyers quote; page 247]
Johnston: $3830 is the estimated annual cost for a family of four because of artificially inflated prices due to corporate and government policies.
[Note; the above is a SMALL sample of the evidence Johnston details in this one book. How dumb are YOU??? Can there be any doubt the 2024 inflated prices YOU pay are largely due to CORRUPTION ???????? How many CROOKS have YOU voted for who obfuscated their true intent with bogus “culture war” and other scare tactics?????????
[Again – note – mush/most of YOUR discontent has happened since 1980!!!!!!!! The reason is “Reaganism” and all the wacko economic policies the Far Right imposed on YOU!!! Lower 90% income/wealth is down; top 5%, especially top 1% income/wealth is hugely up – because they used government to screw YOU over. The NUMBERS. all show this }
With Justice For All 