The next time someone suggests that the problem in the country right now is that there’s not enough bipartisan cooperation, show them what bipartisanship actually looks like.
It looks like the Fix the Debt campaign, and the face of that campaign is Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein.
Fix the Debt is a public relations campaign that appears as a very sensible, very bipartisan effort. But at its core, all of it is window dressing for a very ideological, partisan policy position, which is the lowering of corporate taxes and the hollowing out of government programs like Social Security.
Listen to Blankfein in the CBS interview: Social Security “wasn’t devised to be a system that supported you for a 30-year retirement after a 25-year career.” “You’re going to have to do something, undoubtedly, to lower people’s expectations of what they’re going to get. . .the entitlements, and what people think they’re going to get, because they’re not going to get it.”
Kevin Roose explains how Fix the Debt won over Wall Street.
Fix the Debt prefers to keep its behind-the-scenes operations under wraps. Most on-the-record comments are a mishmash of platitudes about shared sacrifice and working together for the good of the country. But interviews with a number of organizers and CEO council members point to a massive networking effort among one-percenters — one that relies on strategically exploiting existing business relationships and appealing to patriotic and economic instincts.
The Institute for Policy Studies explains both how the Fix the Debt campaign’s corporate tax agenda works, especially the windfalls the campaign’s member corporations would reap from a territorial tax system, and the savings the Fix the Debt campaign’s CEOs have derived from the Bush tax cuts.
The 63 Fix the Debt companies that are publicly held stand to gain as much as $134 billion in windfalls if Congress approves one of their main proposals — a “territorial tax system.” Under this system, companies would not have to pay U.S. federal income taxes on foreign earnings when they bring the profits back to the United States.
The CEOs backing Fix the Debt personally received a combined total of $41 million in savings last year thanks to the Bush-era tax cuts. The top CEO beneficiary of the Bush tax cuts in 2011, Leon Black of Apollo Global Management, saved $9.9 million on the Bush tax cuts. The private equity fund leader reaped $215 million in taxable income last year just from vested stock.
Of the 63 Fix the Debt CEOs at publicly held firms, 24 received more in compensation last year than their corporations paid in federal corporate income taxes. All but six of these firms reported U.S. profits last year.
“Think about the arrogance of these guys on Wall Street who were bailed out by the middle class of this country when their greed and recklessness nearly destroyed the financial system,” said Sanders. “And now they come to Capitol Hill to lecture Congress and the American people about the need to cut programs for working people. This is what class warfare is all about.”
What appears to be bipartisanship in the midst of the Second Gilded Age is actually nothing more than class warfare of the 1 percent against everyone else.
