THE INTERNAL REVENUE TAX "SCANDAL" IS NOT WHAT OPPORTUNISTS CLAIM IT IS

Harry Targ

Heritage Action for America is a unique combination of top-notch conservative policy analysis, a widely respected government relations team and dedicated grassroots activists that advance conservative policy. 

…As a 501(c)(4) organization, Heritage Action for America allows unprecedented coordination and communication with concerned citizens who want to be part of their national dialogue. We speak directly to the American people and help them break through the establishment in Washington. (from Heritage Action for America website).

According to the Internal Revenue Code organizations may apply and be eligible for tax exempt status under Section 501 (c) (4) if they engage primarily in “social welfare activities.” Contributors to 501 (c) (4) organizations need not disclose their names.

In a recent website update on legislative issues being debated in the House of Representatives, Heritage Action for America, a 501 (c) (4) advocated the repeal of the Affordable Care Act; endorsed the Full Faith and Credit Act, which would prioritize debt payment before financing federal spending; and supported legislation, the Preventing Greater Uncertainty in Labor-Management Relations Act, suspending the National Labor Relations Board from acting until such time as the Senate approves appointments to the Board. 

Indiana Congressman Todd Rokita (4^th Congressional District) wrote his constituents on May 17, 2013 that “…the IRS had specifically targeted legally-established non-profit conservative groups by singling them out for extra scrutiny when they applied for tax-exempt status.”  Heritage Action for America assigned Rokita a grade of 79 (out of 100) for his legislative record in the last session of Congress, not far behind long-time right-winger Dan Burton and new Indiana governor Mike Pence. Conservative former Democratic Congressman, now Senator, Joe Donnelly received a score of 23.

The principle of granting tax exemptions for groups that engage in social welfare was introduced in the Revenue Act of 1913 and revised in the tax code of the 1950s. Once groups are declared eligible, such as the Heritage Foundation’s  Heritage Action for America, donors can contribute anonymously.  Meanwhile the organizations so approved can advertise on television, radio, and the print media against programs advocated by those with different political orientations. Ironically groups like Heritage Action for America define their political advocacy for tax purposes as social welfare. And, most importantly, organizations supporting the candidacy of right-wing Republicans such as Todd Rokita are receiving tax exemptions. 

In short, Rokita has a high Heritage Action for America favorability score for opposing affordable health care for most Americans; federal programs for childhood nutrition, education, and emergency health services for the elderly; and government protection for worker rights. 

If the Internal Revenue Service is to be criticized, the attacks should be leveled at the government’s inadequate scrutiny of political lobbying groups who are granted tax exempt status contrary to the intention of the law. Those of us who are concerned about the undue intrusion of big money in politics should be working to insist that the tax code be applied as it was intended so that politicians like Rokita cannot get away with railing against “big government” while they benefit from how it has been applied to them.

THE CONTINUED ATTACK ON ASSATA SHAKUR IS AN ATTACK ON THE AFRICAN-AMERICAN COMMUNITY, ALL PROGRESSIVES, AND CUBA

Harry Targ

My name is Assata Shakur, and I am a 20^th century escaped slave. Because of government persecution, I was left with no other choice than to flee from the political repression, racism and violence that dominate the US government’s policy toward people of color. I am an ex-political prisoner, and I have been living in exile in Cuba since 1984….

People get used to anything. The less you think about your oppression, the more your tolerance for it grows. After a while, people just think oppression is the normal state of things. But to become free, you have to be acutely aware of being a slave.” (from “An Open Letter from Assata Shakur: ‘I Am Only One Woman,’ ” Colorlines, May 6, 2013)

To the credit of The National Conference of Black Lawyers, The National Lawyers Guild, The Black Commentator, The Nation, Democracy Now, The Huffington Post, and an array of blog essays the FBI decision to place Assata Shakur on its “Most Wanted Terrorists” list and the State Department decision to keep Cuba on the list of “state sponsors of terrorism” have been roundly condemned.

Assata Shakur was an activist in the Black Panther Party, the student and anti-war movements, and human rights causes in the 1960s. Her activism made Shakur a prime target of the violent FBI COINTELPRO program designed to arrest, convict, and assassinate those who worked against U.S. racism, classism, and war. She was stopped in a car on the New Jersey turnpike on May 2, 1973. Police engaged in a shooting which led to the death of a passenger in the car. Also a police officer was killed in the shootout.

Shakur and another comrade were charged with the police killing even though she also was shot and was incapable of shooting a weapon because of her injuries. Shakur was subsequently charged and convicted for killing the police officer, though she was unarmed, and sentenced to life plus 33 years. On November 2, 1979 she escaped from the New Jersey prison where she was serving her sentence. In 1984 she fled to Cuba, was granted political asylum, and has been living there ever since.

Expressions of outrage about the policies toward Assata Shakur and the government of Cuba need to be raised again and again because these policies get to the heart of racism, repression, and imperialism. The United States government, from civil rights organizing against Jim Crow in the South to urban Black liberation movements in the North sought to divide, repress, and crush demands for an end to institutionalized racism.  The same police and federal security apparatuses complicit in the hosing of protesters in the South, refused to vigorously investigate racist murderers in Alabama and Mississippi. State and federal authorities launched a nationwide campaign during the Nixon administration to falsely charge, arrest, sentence, and murder militants fighting racism. From Chicago, to Oakland, California, to Detroit to the New Jersey turnpike police and FBI shootouts were initiated to eliminate those who were challenging the political and economic status quo. At the ideological level activists for change were labeled  “communists,” “terrorists,” common “criminals,” and foreign agents. Let’s be clear: the Federal Bureau of Investigation and many police departments were agents of a policy of state terrorism. The first targets were African Americans.

In addition, what happened to Assata Shakur and untold thousands of others sent a clear message to activists, particularly young ones, that public protest would lead to violent repression. In 1970 the killings at Jackson State and Kent State Universities communicated to college students that protest might be life threatening.

Raising the issue of “terrorism” again in reference to Cuba and now Assata Shakur also serves to link the COINTELPRO violence against the people of the 1970s to the “war on terrorism” in the 21^st century. Everyone knows that as economic crisis grows, demands for change are likely to increase. From a systemic point of view the tools of repression must be reinvigorated.  Raising the case of Assata Shakur now and framing it as an issue of terrorism links the political mobilizations of the 1970s to the Occupy Movement, the horrific bombings in Boston to the demands for change all around the world. Putting Shakur on the terror list and keeping Cuba on a similar list is a metaphor for all that economic and political elites regard as a threat. It seeks to reinforce the theme of the linkage of terrorism and people of color.

Finally, adding Assata Shakur to the terrorism list, and keeping Cuba on the state list, provides ready cover for a possible future military strike against targets on the island. It is conceivable that, unless massive voices are raised to protest these lists, some adventurist administration could launch a drone strike against targets in Cuba. And, in the short run, associating Assata Shakur and Cuba with terrorism continues the argument that the U.S. blockade of Cuba needs to be maintained, which many of us would regard as a real act of terrorism against eleven million Cubans.

Lennox Hinds, Shakur’s lawyer and National Lawyers Guild member, summarized the current meaning of the Shakur case. “Clearly, the federal government is continuing the unrestrained abuse of power by which it attempted to destroy Assata Shakur and other Black individuals and groups by surveillance, rumor, innuendo, eavesdropping, arrest and prosecution, incarceration, and murder throughout the sixties and seventies.”

MAY DAY BRINGS THOUGHTS OF SOCIALIST ALTERNATIVES

(This essay first appeared on  May,1, 2009)

Harry Targ

Sketching Today’s Global Political Economy

During the latest phase of monopoly and finance capital (1945- to the present) enormous changes occurred in the global political economy. First, the United States emerged as a superpower and in an effort to crush the threat of socialism around the world committed itself to constructing a “permanent war economy.” This permanent war economy would create the military capacity to destroy alternatives to global capitalism, stimulate and maintain a high growth manufacturing economy, justify an anti-communist crusade to crush the left in the United States, and co-opt and/or repress working class demands for change. In addition, the permanent war economy would occasion the perpetuation of racism and patriarchy in public and private life.

As the years passed corporate rates of profit began to decline as a result of rising competition among capitalist states, over-production and under-consumption, an increasing fiscal crisis of the capitalist state, and rising prices of core natural resources (particularly oil). With a growing crisis, global corporate and finance capital shifted from investments in production of goods and services to financial speculation. Thus capitalist investment steadily shifted to financialization, or the investment in paper-stocks, bonds, private equity and hedge funds and other forms of speculative investment. Financial speculation was encouraged by state tax policies, “free trade” agreements, an expanded international system of indebtedness, and increased reliance on consumer debt.

Multinational corporations which continued to produce goods and services sought to overcome declining profit rates. This, they concluded, could only be achieved by reducing the costs of labor. To overcome the demand for higher real wages, health and other benefits, and worker rights, manufacturing facilities were moved from core capitalist states to poor countries where lower wages were paid. Thus, in wealthier countries millions of relatively high paying jobs were lost while production of goods increasingly moved to sweatshops in poor countries. Wealthy capitalist states experienced deindustrialization.

Finally, assisted by technological advances, from computers to new forms of shipping, financial speculation and deindustrialization fueled the full flowering of globalization, or the radically increased patterns of cross border interactions-economic, political, and cultural. Globalization began to transform the world into one integrated global political economy.

In short, we may speak of a four-fold set of parallel political and economic developments that have occurred since the end of World War II, in which the United States has played a leading role: creating a permanent war economy, financialization, deindustrialization, and globalization.

Should We Be Thinking About Socialism Today?

A rich and vital set of images of a socialist future comes down to us from the utopians, anarchists, and Marxists, the martyrs of the first May Day, and the variety of experiments with socialism attempted in Asia, Eastern Europe, Western Europe, Africa, and the Caribbean. Extracting from the multiple reasons why individuals and movements chose socialism one reason stands out; that is, that capitalism historically is and has been a cruel and inhumane system, a system borne and fueled by slavery, genocide, super exploitation of workers, tactics of division based on race and gender, and an almost total disregard for the natural environment that sustains life. Building a permanent war economy, financialization, deindustrialization, and globalization are merely extensions of the cruel and heartless pursuit of profit which has been the fundamental driving force of the capitalist mode of production.

Drawing on the history and the images of a better future coupled with the brutality of the capitalist era, we might conceive of a 21st century socialist future that has four main dimensions.

First, we need to create institutions that are created and staffed by the working classes and serve the interests of the working classes. While scholars and activists may disagree about what “class” means in today’s complicated world, it is clear that the vast majority of humankind do not own or control the means of production, nor do they usually have an instrumental place in political institutions. Therefore, socialism involves, in the Marxist sense, the creation of a workers’ state and since most of us are workers (more than 90 percent of the US population for example), a state must be established that represents and serves the interests of the many, not the few.

Second, our vision of socialism is a society in which the working classes fully participate in the institutions that shape their lives and in the creation of the policies that these institutions develop to serve the needs of all the people.

Third, socialism also implies the creation of public policies that sustain life. Socialism in this sense is about good jobs, incomes that provide for human needs, access to health care for all, adequate housing and transportation, a livable environment, and an end to discrimination and war.

Fourth, socialism is also about the creation of institutions and policies that maximize human potential. A socialist society provides the intellectual tools to stimulate creativity, celebrate diversity, and facilitate writing poetry, singing and dancing, basking in nature’s glow, and living, working, and loving with others in humanly sustainable communities.

Today we remain terribly far from any of these dimensions of socialism. But paradoxically, humankind at this point in time has the technological tools to build a mass movement to create a socialist future. We can communicate instantaneously with peoples all over the world. We can access information about the world that challenges the narrow ruling class media frames about the human condition. We have in the face of brutal war, environmental devastation, enduring racism, super exploitation of workers everywhere mass movements of workers, women, people of color, indigenous people, and youth who are demanding changes. Increasingly public discourse is based upon the realization that our future will bring either extinction or survival. Socialism, although it is not labeled as such, represents human survival.

Where do we who believe that socialism offers the best hope for survival stand at this critical juncture? We are weak. Many of us are older. Some of us have remained mired in old formulas about change. Nevertheless we can make a contribution to building a socialist future. In fact we have a critical role to play.

We must articulate systematic understandings of the global political economy and where it came from: permanent war, financialization, deindustrialization, and globalization. We need to articulate what impacts these processes have had on class, race, gender, and the environment. In other words, we need to convince activists that almost all things wrong with the world are connected and are intimately tied to the development of capitalism as the dominant mode of production.

We need to take our place in political struggles that demand an expanded role for workers in political institutions. We need to insist that the working classes participate in all political decisions.

We need to work on campaigns that could sustain life: jobs, living wages, single payer health care, climate change etc. Our contribution can include making connections between the variety of single issues, insisting that participants in mass movements take cognizance of and work on the other single issues that constitute the mosaic of problems that require transformation. We must remember that in the end the basic policies that sustain life require building socialism. Most struggles, such as those to achieve living wages or a single payer health care system for example, plant the seeds for building a broader socialist society. We can incorporate our socialist vision in our debates about single issues: if we demand a living wage, why not talk about equality for example?

We need to rearticulate our belief that human beings have a vast potential for good, for creativity, and given a just society, we all could move away from classism, racism, and sexism. We could pursue our talents and interests in the context of a sharing and cooperative society.

By working for institutional incorporation (empowerment) and life-sustaining and enhancing policies we will be planting the seeds for a socialist society.

“In our hands is placed a power greater than their hoarded gold,
Greater than the might of armies, magnified a thousand-fold.
We can bring to birth a new world from the ashes of the old.
For the union makes us strong”

From “Solidarity Forever,” Ralph Chaplin lyrics, 1915.

SPEAKING TRUTH ABOUT VIOLENCE

Harry Targ

Establishing causal connections between “variables” and violence is a form of mystification. The reality of this world is that of grotesque inequalities in wealth, power, respect for humankind and the environment, a world awash in instrumentalities of death, and a global culture that celebrates it. Recent reports from the World Bank and the World Economic Forum (of all places) document the continuing and growing inequalities in wealth and income on a worldwide basis. Could it be a surprise that seemingly indiscriminate acts of violence occur all across the globe? Only a humane global movement for fundamental change can radically transform the world we live in but movements of protest can make constructive changes along the way (Harry Targ, Facebook, April 23, 2013).

Each violent tragedy in the United States brings an outpouring of wrenching and “expert” analyses of what was behind the acts that led to so much pain and suffering. Most of the soul-searching about tragedies from Arizona, to Colorado, to Connecticut, to Boston is about domestic events (the repeated killings of Iraqis, Afghan peoples, Pakistanis, Yemenis and others generate much less empathy). Explanations usually involve deranged “others,” usually poor “others,” “others” of color, and “others with fundamentalist religious beliefs.” Their crimes are described as perpetrated against victims who are the “normal” people. Make no mistake about it, violence against any individuals, communities, and nations must be opposed, even among those, who in the end are the root cause of it. But we need to be clear about the economic, social, political, cultural and military/police context in which violence occurs. And, in no small measure, violence itself is celebrated in the societies where it is most prevalent.

Peace researchers have written about “direct,” “cultural,” and “structural” violence for years. While each of these is seen as having its own characteristics and causes for the most part analysts regard the three as inextricably interconnected. Direct violence refers to physical assault, shooting, bombing, gassing, and torture. It is about killing people.  Cultural violence refers to dominant cultures whose apparatuses, such as the media and laws,  portray their own institutions and values as superior to others and rituals that seek to honor the violence engaged in by one’s own country or group while demeaning other countries or groups. What is most vicious about cultural violence is its effort to make the victimized groups hate themselves.

Structural violence occurs when economic, political, cultural and military institutions create relationships in which some human beings gain disproportionately from the labor, the talents, and the pain and suffering of others. Structural violence is institutionalized violence most often organized around class exploitation, racism, and patterns of gendered forms of domination and subordination.  The key concepts that shape efforts to understand the causes and effects of structural violence are class, race, and gender.

Ironically reports issued this year, between the Newtown and Boston massacres, by the World Bank and the World Economic Forum tell us much about the fundamentals of structural violence on a worldwide basis. These reports clearly describe why we do not live in a better world, why people do not treat each other with more respect, and why vast majorities of humanity and their natural habitats are in danger of extinction. And they imply that violence engendered by the rich and powerful and responses from the poor and powerless are embedded in the system of structural violence.

The World Bank Report

The World Bank issued a press release on April 17, 2013 summarizing “The State of the Poor: Where are the Poor and Where are the Poorest?” It reported that the number of the world’s citizens living on less than $1.25 a day has declined markedly between 1981 and 2010 from half the world’s population to 21 percent. But still, they say, 1.2 billion people live in extreme poverty (below $1.25 per day). Sub-Saharan Africa accounts for more than one-third of those who live in such poverty worldwide. A World Bank spokesperson noted that “We have made strides in cutting down poverty, but with nearly one-fifth of the world population still below the poverty line, not enough.” (This particular World Bank report does not include data on those living just above the poverty line. For example, another twenty percent live on $2 per day).

Oxfam Reports on the World Economic Forum’s “Global Risk Report”

In an Oxfam Media Briefing (January 18, 2013), the authors site a recent World Economic Forum warning that rising global inequality constitutes one of the top “global risks of 2013.” Oxfam points out that lifting masses of people out of absolute poverty has been the goal of economic elites over the last decade but “inequality and the extreme wealth that contributes to it were seen as either not relevant, or a prerequisite for the growth that would also help the poorest, as the wealth created trickled down to the benefit of everyone.” 

The Oxfam Media Briefing suggests reasons why the WEF might correctly regard growing global inequality as a “risk.” They highlight the following:

Extreme wealth and inequality are reaching levels never before seen in history and are getting worse. Inequality is growing in the industrial developed countries such as the United States and Great Britain, rapidly developing economies such as China and South Africa, and many of the poorest countries in the world. The incomes of the top 1 percent have increased by 60 percent over the last twenty years. The top 100 billionaires added $240 billion to their wealth in 2012. “The IMF has said that inequality is dangerous and divisive and could lead to civil unrest.”

Extreme Wealth and Inequality is Politically Corrosive. Oxfam makes the obvious but important point that growing inequality in wealth and income relate to growing inequality in political power. They quote economist Joseph Stiglitz who contends that financial deregulation in the largest capitalist countries led to greater economic inequality and further consolidation of political power by financial elites.

Extreme Wealth and Inequality is Socially Divisive. For Oxfam, the consolidation of wealth and power reduce the life chances and even human sustainability of the vast majority of populations. People work harder for less and suffer more. “If rich elites use their money to buy services, whether it is private schooling or private healthcare, they have less interest in public services or paying taxes to support them.” And, as Oxfam reminds us, inequality is linked to growing alienation, mental disorders, crime, anomic violence, and shear desperation.

Extreme Wealth and Inequality is Environmentally Destructive. Oxfam reiterates the fact that rising inequality increases demands by the rich for access to and consumption of scarce resources that the earth can no longer provide. “Those in the 1 percent have been estimated to use as much as 10,000 times more carbon than the average US citizen.” 

So if you grow up in urban American or rural Africa, the Middle East or almost anywhere else and you are young, intelligent, and experience the world through the globalization of a racist, sexist, violent media, does your view of the world look bright? No job, no respect, hungry, alienated and imbued with the cultural values about violence and racism that are used to define you, you may act in the same ways the rich and powerful act against you and your people. 

The conversation that should come out of Newtown, Boston, and West, Texas or Baghdad,  Kabul, and Gaza or almost anyplace else is how to change the structural violence that gave rise to direct and cultural violence. This discussion should lead to the mobilization of progressives to create a just society, one in which people will not want to kill each other.