Click here to access article by Shamus Cooke from Workers Action.
The author describes another capitalist tax avoidance scam to secure the wealth for the ruling One Percent. There seems to be no end to these scams.
I find his framing of tax avoidance issues quite problematic. "US Capitalism" has not been reinvented, it has only reached a higher plateau of sucking wealth out of society. In other words, the system of capitalism has evolved by gradually creating ever more effective methods to exploit their control over society and to extract its wealth.
Originally, the capitalists came to power with the aid of working people by promising a "social contract" and the "rule of law" (see my remarks at this post). The latter two components make up the "liberal" part of what is referred to as "liberal capitalism", or sometimes simply "liberalism" used in the classic sense. What has occurred over time is that the system has created greater concentrations of wealth (which it was designed to do), thus overwhelming power, in the hands of a ruling capitalist class who are becoming global in their outlook.
Now that they command so much power, they are steadily abandoning the "liberal" part of capitalism and devising ever more effective ways of escaping taxation. To replace this lost tax money, the government has to borrow ever more money from them and other governments. We, of course, are stuck with the debt. Meanwhile, we are seeing severe cutbacks to all government programs that serve the needs of working people. Government expenditures that serve the interests of the ruling class such as CIA, NSA, military, equipping militarized local police forces, etc are protected from any significant cuts.
Like the noted capitalist Warren Buffet declared, "There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning." So, the question remains: although we clearly have lost many battles in this war, can we still win the war?
By framing the issue as a reinvention of capitalism suggests that we need to re-gain some measure of control merely by eliminating these new inventions instead of constructing a totally new socioeconomic system that can co-exist with a stable, healthy environment. Once again we see a social critique implying that our problems can be solved by reforming the system. This sort of thinking is symptomatic of much of the current left who fail to realize that time is running out on the human race.
