04.04.11
Taxavoidination
Here’s what always happens when a big corporate shibboleth has really bad publicity.
About a week later a couple reporters from the ruling class will publish something contradictory. It was all a product of crappy reporting, they’ll indicate. And this will be used to stir the pot, get lots of eyeballs, and work toward guaranteeing that once again nothing can be done about the deeply immoral in corporate America.
Today it was the Huffpost, posting “the truth about ge’s taxes.”
The New York Times had it all wrong, said the reporters — Jeff Gerth (who used to be a top investigative reporter at the New York Times but who was now publishing this through the much lesser auspices of ProPublica) and Allen Sloan of Fortune.
Here are the best lines:
Why should you care about this? Because we all have a stake in how this plays out. Thanks to the uproar over GE, we now risk ending up with legislation that targets GE but produces all sorts of unintended consequences. Public rage can make for bad law.
Public rage can make for bad law. Savor the hypocrisy of it. Public rage is perfectly OK in the guise of the Tea Party and the November elections sweeping into power extremists who are now in full on war against the working class. But public rage against GE is bad. Public rage over layoffs (front page headline in today’s LA Times: Teacher hiring hard because of layoffs) and deprivation for everyone but corporate America, which deserves more bribing, is bad.
Read the entire thing — I’m not providing a link, it’s easy enough to find through Google — and you have the case of reporters who were also working the story and are now doing their best to grab their pieces of glory.
Except it won’t move the down marker. I’ve found that after a promising launch, ProPublica sucks. It’s a place where famous reporters who’ve been encouraged to move on or jumped a sinking ship go to die.
Anyway, even with Huffington Post’s eyeballs, the venue doesn’t have the muscle to change the argument.
Plus, it’s a bad pairing. You can’t be the front for the intellectual hoity-toity wealthy liberal and then expect some relatively brief piece defending General Electric to make people wince.
The rage over General Electric, from where I stand, can’t hurt.
Realistically, nothing much moves the corporate masters of universe of the US, anyway, not even tens of thousands of people, say, protesting in Madison, Wisconsin.
They know they can just shovel more money into political opposition work and lobbying and wait people out.
For example, Jeff Immelt isn’t going to leave Obama’s economy and jobs advisory board over any amount of shame heaped on him by current events. Forced to show up in the news, he tells people the equivalent of “Let them eat cake.”
And the President isn’t going to do anything unless it becomes so hot he’s forced to act. Jeff Immelt will need a solid boot in the pants and a firm “Good riddance!” to guarantee he’s put out the door. I won’t be surprised if our President never dumps him.
It’s wrong for GE C.E.O. Jeffrey Immelt to get a 100 percent raise while asking middle-class workers to take major pay cuts — and all while leading President Obama’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness.
Because we united on this issue, ABC and NBC did national television news reports on our push to boot Immelt. Mainstream news outlets like the Washington Post, The Nation, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, and Reuters syndication wrote stories. Insider Washington publications, like Politico, National Journal, Roll Call, and The Hill, reported on it, too.
Immelt himself was even forced to respond to us in an interview.
To get this much attention in corporate media over an issue of corporate influence in politics is a big moral victory by itself. But we’re not going for a moral victory. We’re going for an actual victory …
[The 200,000 who signed the ImmeltMustGo petition] got us a bunch of attention. But to get a victory, we’re going to need even more.
Surprisingly, over the weekend a much larger number of people than expected tuned into “GE and Jeff (Taxavoidination).”
Click the “watch on YouTube” button to see the view count.
In related news, this odious article on what work to get out of in the US.
The message — “everything.”
The masters of corporate America shipped all non-military domestic manufacturing overseas. The only middle class making-stuff jobs remaining are those in artisan work for the plutocracy and the corporate socialism of arms manufacturing, still being underwritten by the people who’s jobs and livelihoods are being destroyed.
As for the rest of America’s work, the Internet has destroyed or grossly undervalued much of it.
However, readers will have noticed by now that the Internet’s work of crushing record companies, video production, newspapers, magazines and what not did not spark an alternative revolution in which the jobs and opportunity just transferred to others more intellectually lively.
What has actually happened is a great condensation. The wonderful magic of Google and social networking didn’t actually empower lots and lots of little guys. It just empowered the same old giants who dominate the top of search engines or who attract the most celebrity groupies on Twitter. Occasionally there has been room made for newcomers, just like the old-comers, except cheaper — like Huffington Post.
The winners, or the biggest, get the majority of the spoil ever more efficiently thanks to Google and the habits of human beings which predicate anything past results halfway down the first returned search page don’t count. Alternatively, whoever has the most followers or friends, just like back in high school, wins everything.
Tom Tomorrow made a comment on this last week on his shift of position to the DailyKos.
Tomorrow blogged that the potential of the Internet for cartoonists didn’t quite pan out:
Too many papers have decided that they no longer have any use for this art form which grew in their stead, adapting itself entirely to their rhythms, and as that market contracts, there’s been no simultaneous expansion online. The niche that editorial cartoons filled in newspapers is almost entirely occupied by Daily Show clips online. Why do so few political sites feature political cartoons? Why did the Huffington Post, with verticals devoted to almost any topic you can imagine, never launch a comics section?
I’ve got a chance to help counter that trend, in some small way..
The biggest names, in this case he has to mean Jon Stewart, get all the spoil from a landscape that should have supported a lot more.
Jon Stewart was great two years ago. Now that you don’t even need a tv to see him several times a day — that it’s impossible to miss him for even a couple hours while randomly browsing — he’s sickening.
Boy it’s great that Jon Stewart’s omnipresence has shoved everyone else into the dumper, isn’t it? It’s just right and proper that one person in a country of 300 million should get absolutely all the spoil in his niche.
Anyway, back to the news story on all the businesses to leave — everything — because it’s all dying here:
Most of the industries share common reasons for their bleak prospects, including damage from advances in technology, industry stagnation and external competition, he says.
Because labor costs and regulations are high domestically, many manufacturers send their production to foreign countries. Downward price pressure from domestic wholesalers, retailers and consumers forces U.S. producers to cut costs to offer a competitive price. Many firms that cannot outsource have a difficult time competing …
Video post-production is another industry done in by the do-it-yourself opportunities presented by new technology. Once requiring specialized expertise, many of these tasks can be done on even an average home computer.
Companies such as Technicolor have suffered as a result. Industrywide, revenues have fallen 25% in the past decade to just north of $4 billion, with another 11% decrease predicted by 2016.
In terms of video post-production, here’s how technology worked. Exactly the same as it did for making music.
The software for doing it got into everyone’s hands. Every residence can make its own videos.
Like “Taxavoidination,” done here in Pasadena on the desktop.
In the old days, I would never have been available to afford video production for DD & the Highway Kings. That was for people with major record label contracts. But those contracts and businesses supported jobs.
Even if you cursed the structure and whims of the recording industry, it still furnished middle class work. Lots of upper class, too.
Now everyone, like me, can make a video and upload it to YouTube.
But “everyone” still can’t make any money from that.
A very smaller number of people, still associated with very big entertainment business, can. And people at YouTube, because they work for a company that provides the only pipe through which everything flows, can make money, not only from the eyes added from everyone who can’t make money on it, but also from the smaller number of very big players from the old industry. Those who’ve survived the great culling.
Case in point, YouTube pimping dogshit ‘promoted’ video at the tops of your vid’s ‘suggestions’ column. With “Taxavoidination” it’s been “What’s ‘Lemonade Mouth’?” by one of the old giants, Disney.
It’s enraging.
So there has been a drastic net loss in jobs and a concentration of riches in a smaller number of players, some of them only slightly different, thanks to the Internet and “technological” revolutions.