Tax “Reform”, Blue Green Alliance, Net Neutrality

GOP Tax Reform a Scam Harming Working Families and the U.S. Economy
Interview with Frank Clemente, executive director of Americans for Tax Fairness, conducted by Scott Harris

Now that the Republican-controlled House and Senate have both passed their different versions of tax reform legislation, a conference committee is tasked with reconciling the differences between the two bills, after which the measure will be brought back to both chambers for a final vote. Although President Trump and congressional Republicans predict that they’ll succeed in final passage and have their tax bill signed into law by the end of the year, public opinion polls reveal that the measure is overwhelmingly unpopular. A recent Gallup poll found that 56 percent of those surveyed disapproved of the tax bill, while only 29 percent supported it.

At least one Nobel prize-winning economist has labeled the GOP tax bill the biggest scam in U.S. history. According to various objective analyses, the bill would hurt most Americans, with the only big winners being the wealthiest one percent. That’s because the core of the legislation transfers wealth from low-income and middle-class families to corporations and business owners. What’s worse, due to the elimination of various deductions in the bills, almost two-thirds of middle class taxpayers will find themselves subject to significant tax increases. And the Republican tax plan could also trigger an automatic $25 billion cut to Medicare because of a steep rise in the federal deficit.

Between The Lines’ Scott Harris spoke with Frank Clemente, executive director of Americans for Tax Fairness, who assesses how the two versions of Republican tax reform bills will impact working families and the U.S. economy.

FRANK CLEMENTE: Well, I’d say there’s three big things to think about in the tax legislation. One is how much of the tax break is going to wealthy people, especially the top one percent, we say. Those are people who make, depending on whose doing the estimating, anywhere from $500,000 to $700,000 a year in taxes. So, they’re pretty much millionaires. The Senate bill that just passed, about 60 percent or so is going to those folks in 2027 when this thing is fully implemented. And in the House, it’s about half. So you know, they’re sort of close. A little bit more is going to the rich in the Senate bill.

The second big thing is sort of, what happens with middle-class families. Folks in the middle, as you know. The Trump administration and probably the Congress are promoting it as major tax break for middle-income people. And what you find in the Senate bill about – once this thing is fully implemented again, after 10 years, you have to look at certain things expiring along the way – 87 million people, about half of the middle-income people are going to be paying more in taxes under this plan. In the House, it’s about 40 million people. So, they touted it as being a huge middle-class tax break, but for tens of millions, up to 87 million people, it actually will be a tax increase once the tax breaks are fully phased in and the tax increases are fully phased in.

Another big thing to think about is what happens to the corporate tax rate. Basically both bills are very similar to how they treat big corporations. That is where the most big chunk of the revenue is lost in these bills. In the Senate bill, about half of the tax break goes to businesses and corporations and three-quarters of the tax break in the House bill goes to them.

So, you can see roughly the shape of these things are pretty similar. They’re both giving big tax breaks to the people at the top. The reason most of the tax breaks go to the people at the top is because most of the tax breaks go to businesses and corporations and those are the people who tend to own corporate stock. They get dividend payouts from corporations or they own what are called pass-through businesses: law firms, doctors’ offices, accounting firms. Even Donald Trump. The Trump organization has 500 pass-through businesses. Pass-through businesses are businesses that don’t pay taxes at the corporate tax rate. They pay taxes at the individual tax rate so essentially, the profits flow through to the owners and they pay them as individuals, not as corporations. So they get big, big tax breaks in this bill. So both of these pieces of legislation are very heavily tilted toward the wealthy and to corporations.

BETWEEN THE LINES: Frank, I wanted to ask you about the debt. Estimates are that this tax reform bill, in one version or another will bring about $1.5 trillion in debt to the United States. And there are those out there who believe the Republicans are consciously and purposely ramping up the debt so they can justify deep cuts to federal programs. Social safety net programs, entitlement programs like Medicare and Social Security and the like. What can you say about the debt and it being used as really a Trojan horse to justify major cuts to federal programs?

FRANK CLEMENTE: Yes, well, we feel their agenda right now is to get big tax breaks to the wealthy and corporations. We’ve talked about this constantly with our work. Republicans were fine to not worry about the deficit this year because they wanted to give away trillions of dollars in tax breaks. They will turn around next year without any embarrassment, any shame and they will say, “Well, all of a sudden because of the tax cuts we passed last year, the deficit now isn’t 75 percent of Gross Domestic Product, it’s now 90 percent of Gross Domestic Product, and so we’re going to have to cut a trillion or $2 trillion from the places where you can actually get the money, which is Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.” Remember, the budget resolution that both the House and Senate passed just two months ago called for $1.5 trillion in cuts – half a trillion dollars in cuts to Medicare and a trillion dollars in cuts to Medicaid. So, that’s what their agenda is.

They’re already talking about how they want to enact welfare reform and entitlement reform and so we’re expecting them to come around.

BETWEEN THE LINES: Lastly, I’d ask you this: What is your group and a coalition of organizations across the country doing to oppose this Republican tax reform legislation. What are you all doing in the coming weeks as the House and Senate have this conference committee where they’re supposed to negotiate and hammer out a final version of the bill that needs to pass both houses again, the House and Senate?

FRANK CLEMENTE: The real fight is in the House now, since it just passed the Senate and the House is more likely to take up the Senate bill, which the House has not yet voted on. We’re expecting that vote to occur within the next week or so. We have 13 people in the House who voted against the tax bill the first time around. And we need to add 11 people to that. The place to add them are from people who voted against repealing the Affordable Care Act. And there’s about 18 people who voted against repealing the Affordable Care Act. Eighteen members of Congress. So, we’ve got about 13 people who voted against repealing the Affordable Care Act. We need to win 11 of those people. A lot are in New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania and California.

We would love you to call your representative to make sure that you register your position, which is that you are against the tax bill, the Republican tax bill that will soon be voted on in the House. The phone number to use – our toll-free number is 877-795-7862.

For more information, visit Americans for Tax Fairness at americansfortaxfairness.org.

Climate Activists and Labor Must Work Together to Build a Clean Energy Future
Posted Dec. 6, 2017

MP3 Interview with Pedro Cruz, with Sierra Club’s Labor and Economic Justice Program, conducted by Melinda Tuhus

energy
At a conference focused on the struggle to rein in and roll back oil and gas infrastructure, more than 300 activists gathered in Pittsburgh Nov. 17th-20 at the People vs. Oil and Gas Infrastructure Summit for communities fighting back. There, they discussed the harms caused by various forms of fossil fuel production and use, including fracking, pipelines, oil trains, LNG export facilities, fracked gas power plants, refinery expansion and more. The current infrastructure boom, summit organizers say, will lock in fossil fuel production for decades to come, threatening the global climate and harming people’s air, water, and health.

At the summit, activists from across the U.S. who are challenging oil and gas infrastructure projects debated strategies on how to fight back both through legal means, direct action and artistic expression. One of the Summit workshops was titled “Climate Justice and Jobs,” and featured two presenters, one from the Service Employees International Union and Pedro Cruz, senior representative of the Sierra Club’s Labor and Economic Justice Program.

After the workshop, Between The Lines’ Melinda Tuhus spoke with Cruz about the challenges climate activists face in working with labor unions and the critical need to forge closer ties in order to work toward building a clean energy future. [Rush transcript.]

PEDRO CRUZ: In the U.S. we have two progressive forces, which are the environmental movement and the labor movement. There have been cases in the service sectors where national unions like SEIU, UNITE HERE, where they march together with environmental activists and the other way around. You have other progressive unions like ATU – that’s the transportation union – basically, their claim is that their jobs are green jobs because most of them are bus drivers and work in public transportation. Therefore, they see more investment in public transportation means more jobs and a cleaner environment, so we have those commonalities.

Unfortunately, with the building trades, it’s kind of a mixed bag because when you talk about pipelines and gas and oil infrastructure, it’s the kind of thing we’re fighting on a day-to-day basis. But my point is, we don’t have to fight for that; we shouldn’t be having that fight. Probably that’s an area where we can agree to disagree. We also need water infrastructure and the same set of skills you need to lay down pipe for oil and gas is the same set of skills you need for water infrastructure, and that’s an area that we can be working together.

What other area? Electrical workers. Electrical workers are the future, basically, of the new economy, because electrical workers are the ones doing EV [electric vehicle] infrastructure, the one doing the retrofit of buildings, the one dealing with the installation of solar and wind energy. So there are so many areas where we can be working together and some areas where we start to see that partnership and hopefully it will grow as the renewable sector grows, too.

BETWEEN THE LINES: There are so many more jobs in renewables – and they’re not going to be exported, because they need to be done here – than there is in the fossil fuel sector. It’s also true that for the most part, those jobs don’t pay nearly as well as jobs in the coal industry or building pipelines. They sometimes pay maybe a third as much. And maybe they’re mostly not organized, not unionized. Do you think the solution to that is to have another whole wave of union organization like happened in the 1930s where people who were in jobs that were not highly skilled jobs still got organized and got decent pay for the work they do?

PEDRO CRUZ: I couldn’t be more emphatic in my “Yes, yes, yes!” Not only organizing in those sectors, but we climate defenders, we have such an important role in that organizing process, because in the same way we organize boycotting X or Y product because it’s bad for the environment, if we can use that same energy to ask for the organizing in the clean energy sector and the renewable sector, it would make such a big impact.

We have a lot of bad actors in the clean energy sector and it’s for us also to denounce them and to force them to do the right thing. I can mention the example of the Nissan plant in Mississippi that they were trying to organize into a union. That plant was supposed to be doing electrical cars that everybody would agree that they are better for the environment than the cars we have today, but at the same time those cars are being assembled under conditions where the workers are making way less money than other unionized plants in the northern part of the country.

When you add to that that it’s in Mississippi, in a black, impoverished community, that makes things even worse because it’s not just an issue of jobs or an issue of the environment, but it’s also an issue of economic justice that everyone should have the same economic opportunities. I think that’s something that we in the climate/environmental area should be aware, that we want to move forward with a cleaner environment and justice for all, but also not making the same mistake we made in the past and trying this time to integrate people who were left behind economically, people who were affected by environmental injustice. Those are the people who should be getting the good jobs in a renewable economy. Those are the people who should have access to affordable, clean energy, too. And that’s something we should be advocating for.

For more information, visit People vs. Oil and Gas Infrastructure Summit, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Nov. 17-20, 2017 at peoplevsoilgas.org; on Facebook at facebook.com/events/647465608976552; People vs. Oil & Gas at actionnetwork.org/ticketed_events/people-vs-oil-gas.

National Coalition Gears Up to Oppose Trump FCC Net Neutrality Repeal
Posted Dec. 6, 2017

MP3 Interview with Steven Renderos, organizing director with the group the Center for Media Justice, conducted by Scott Harris

internet
President Trump’s appointed chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, former Verizon attorney Ajit Pai, has from the beginning of his tenure at the FCC pledged to reverse consumer protections initiated during President Obama’s eight years in office. Now, Pai and the Republican majority on the FCC are expected to vote on a resolution to kill net neutrality on Dec. 14.

Net neutrality, which was ratified by the FCC under President Obama in February 2015, prevents big Internet service providers like AT&T Comcast and Verizon from charging extra fees, engaging in censorship, or controlling what consumers see and do on the web by slowing down or denying access to websites, apps, and other online services. A nationwide protest is planned for Dec. 7, when activists opposed to the scrapping of net neutrality will demonstrate at Verizon retail stores, demanding that members of Congress take action to stop Trump’s FCC from eliminating net neutrality protections.

Between The Lines’ Scott Harris spoke with Steven Renderos, organizing director with the group the Center for Media Justice, whose mission is to address inequities in media access and coverage in diverse communities. Here, Renderos discusses his group’s campaign to stop the FCC’s plan to repeal net neutrality and explain how that action would negatively impact Internet freedom and the ability of marginalized communities to freely communicate.

STEVEN RENDEROS: The FCC, under the Obama administration, passed these rules in 2015. And under the two years we’ve had net neutrality as a general law, they’ve been challenged in court and won. But essentially, we’ve maintained the Internet as we’ve always had it. And in fact, it’s been the strongest set of rules that protect the Internet, that we’ve seen anywhere in the world. So it’s really like the shining example of the absolute most of what you can do with net neutrality – is to treat the Internet more like public utility because it is for those of us on a day-to-day basis that are using the the Internet to search for jobs, or pay our bills or search the Internet for our education. We experience it more as a utility than we do as a commodity.

BETWEEN THE LINES: Steven, could you describe for our listeners a bit of the impact of repealing net neutrality on political speech, and in particular, for marginalized communities. People of color, people with disabilities, etc.

STEVEN RENDEROS: Well, first the biggest impact is going to be “what is Internet going to look like without net neutrality?” Imagine that. We don’t have to step too far away from what we already experience. For those of us who are unfortunately having to pay for cable TV, the experience of paying for access to certain content feels very familiar.

When it comes to a pay-for-play Internet, your Internet service provider is in the driver’s seat about what content you can access. And believe me, getting access to the latest protest against Trump for the GOP tax plan or latest information about the Russia investigation or the organizing against police violence that Black Lives Matter activists are engaging in, the protests over the Keystone Pipeline – those are not things that are going to rise up to the surface as priorities for a pay-for-play Internet. So, the things that we depend on to find out about the resistance that is happening under this current administration, those voices would essentially be silenced under an Internet in which who has the most amount of money gets to determine what content you have access to.

The Internet ecosystem where you have conservatives that are running a lot of the cable TV and news information that we see out there – it’s a very dangerous world. And for communities of color in particular, it’s a very familiar experience.

BETWEEN THE LINES: You’re part of a large coalition, your group, the Center for Media Justice. What is being planned to effectively oppose the move by Donald Trump’s FCC to repeal net neutrality? What can be done both on the grassroots level as well as legal challenges in court to what the FCC has planned?

STEVEN RENDEROS: As much as the chairman of the FCC has demonstrated that he’s unwilling to listen to the public, we still feel we have a pretty good shot at saving the Internet. So a lot of what you’ve seen over the last couple weeks is a massive uprising of people generating calls into Congress because even though the FCC is an independent agency, Congress still oversees the FCC. And so they have a role to play in providing leadership in this moment to demonstrate that we don’t want to see net neutrality go away.

So, since the chairman announced that he was going to move forward on a vote in December to repeal net neutrality, in the last week and a half, two weeks, 750,000 calls have gone into Congress. And this is both to hit Democrats and Republicans in Congress. And we’ve seen a steady stream of Republicans coming out and publicly voicing opposition to what Chairman Pai is trying to do at the FCC.

In addition to that, there are a set of nationwide protests that are being organized for Thursday, Dec. 7, targeting the largest Internet service provider in the country, Verizon, who has been actively lobbying to repeal net neutrality.

At the same time, there’s a legal strategy to this. While our coalition is considering our legal options, including lawsuits after Dec. 14 when the FCC votes, we’re also seeing attorney generals stepping in, like in New York. Attorney General Eric Schneiderman is pushing forward a lawsuit – really calling out the fake comments that have come into the FCC from bots and possibly even from Russia trying to populate the FCC docket with fake comments that support net neutrality repeal.

Tell your friends about this issue. It’s vastly important that people know that this is an issue that we could very well lose over the coming weeks. But with people’s support and their action, there’s a really good chance that we can win.

For more information, visit the Center for Media Justice at centerformediajustice.org.
This week’s summary of under-reported news

Compiled by Bob Nixon

The Trump administration is deploying hundreds of military advisors to Afghanistan as part of a renewed campaign against the insurgent Taliban. There are now 14,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan, up from 8,400 soldiers there at the end of the Obama administration in January 2017. The Pentagon has also ramped up the U.S. bombing campaign targeting the Taliban. (“As Advisory Role Grows in Afghanistan, So Does Risk to U.S. Troops,” Washington Post, Nov. 28, 2017; “Trump’s Afghan Policy Causing a Rethink on both Sides in Conflict,” Christian Science Monitor, Oct. 20, 2017)
Weeks before Hurricane Maria ravaged Puerto Rico, 100 lawyers crammed into a federal court room in San Juan to debate the restructuring of $75 billion dollars in Puerto Rico’s debt. The lawyers represented various groups of bond investors, hedge funds and vulture funds. (“100 Years of Colonialism: How Puerto Rico Became Easy Prey for Profiteers,” In These Times, Nov. 13, 2017)
Even as Donald Trump continued to stoke the nation’s culture wars, Evangelical Christians are losing followers and experiencing a growing generational divide as younger Evangelicals reject hot button issues like same-sex marriage. According to the Public Religion Research Institute, only 11 percent of evangelicals are under 30. (“Amid Evangelical Decline, Growing Split between Young Christians and Church Elders,” Christian Science Monitor, Oct. 10, 2017)

---

Share This Episode