Don’t Buy The Tariff Lie

BY THOMAS KNAPP

 JUNE 24, 2024
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Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

“If he returns to the White House,” Bloomberg reports, “Donald Trump has pledged to enact a 10% across-the-board tariff on imports that he says will raise billions of dollars in revenue to pay for more tax cuts.” He’s even floated the idea, per CNBC, of an “all tariff policy” and elimination of the federal income tax.

Think tanks of pretty much every stripe — from the “left-wing” Center for American Progress to the “centrist” Peterson Institute for International Economics to the “libertarian” Cato Institute agree: The math doesn’t work. It would take some pretty insane tariff levels to “pay for” elimination of the income tax. And you’d likely pay more in tariffs than you used to pay in income tax.

Republican National Committee spokesperson Anna Kelly wants you to believe that “the notion that tariffs are a tax on US consumers is a lie pushed by outsourcers and the Chinese Communist Party.”

She’s the one who’s lying. “Protectionism” doesn’t “protect” you — it protects the revenues of domestic businesses with friends in Washington, and it does so at the expense of anyone and everyone who buys the “protected” items.

A 60% tariff on a $1 Chinese item means you either pay $1.60 for that Chinese item … or $1.59 for the American version that used to cost $1.29 (if American companies bothered to make it at all). Tariffs make you, and foreign manufacturers, poorer so American manufacturers can get richer without having to compete for your patronage on price.

But let’s get to a bigger lie: The notion that tax cuts have to be “paid for.”

When a politician uses that phrase, he or she means that if the government isn’t taking a dollar from you, it must get that dollar somewhere else.

That’s not a “cost.” The dollar in question doesn’t belong to the government in the first place. It’s a dollar the government wants, not a dollar it has.

If I don’t break into your car and steal your stereo, I don’t have to find a way to “pay for” not having your stereo. My lack of a stereo is not a “cost” to me. It’s just you keeping what’s yours instead of me taking it.

Then there’s the biggest lie: The notion that “tax cuts” are really even on the table.

The only way for taxes to go down is for spending to go down … and the politicians bragging about “tax cut” proposals clearly have no intention of reducing their spending.

The “national debt”  stands at not quite $35 trillion, with another $2 trillion to be added this year. Every dollar of debt and deficit represents taxes the government has promised to take out of your hide, and your descendants’ hides, in perpetuity, with interest. It’s just another tax,  with payment partially deferred.

Government spending is a lot like the three-card monte card, without the prospect that you’ll even occasionally be allowed to win. And Trump’s proposals are just another variant of that game, not a plan to reduce the amount he and his cronies steal from you.

Thomas L. Knapp is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

Property Law, Settler-Colonialism, and the Vatican

BY STEVE KELLY

 JUNE 25, 2024
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Photograph Source: Dietmar Rabich – CC BY-SA 4.0

Newsflash!  Property law in the U.S. is not rooted in the Constitution. America’s legal foundation for property law (possession), “anti-Indian law,” and the concept of nation-states is religious, not secular.

Where did this deep sense of entitlement, hierarchy, and dominion over unknown lands and its original sovereign peoples originate?

How was this wilderness continent, upon which its people depended – for millennia – for survival, end up being converted into “real estate” by a bunch of European Christian princes and pirates?

Most people who own real estate, work and live on this settler-colonized land we now call “America,” cannot answer the question.  So, how can we discern a proper answer?

U.S. Supreme Court chief justice John Marshall, the fourth, and longest-serving chief justice (1801-1835), told us so – over 200 years ago.

The Doctrine of Christian Discovery originated in Europe in the 15^th Century and is melded into the U.S. Supreme Court’s precedent case, Johnson v. McIntosh (1823).

Careful decoding of the imaginative legal language in this seminal U.S. Supreme Court case reveals the fascinating history that informs present legal thinking and how we arrived at this place and time.

To grasp a deeper comprehension of how the age-old doctrines of settler-colonialism, religious discrimination and wars of conquest influence our lives today, Steven T. Newcomb’s book Pagans in the Promised Land: Decoding the Doctrine of Christian Discovery (2007) is essential reading.

Old Testament stories provide the underpinnings, retold in the Roman Church’s 15^th Century papal bulls.  Centuries later, these Vatican policy documents helped to ‘legitimize’ the conceptual source of U.S. government legal doctrine that persists today to define nation-states, property, and anti-Indian law.

Legal precedents written in the early 19^th Century remain hidden under opaque strata of human imagination, cultural conditioning, and consciousness.

In 1493, the bull Inter Caetera, issued by Pope Alexander VI, granted the monarchs of Spain ownership of roughly half the “discovered” world.  Representatives contracted by Spanish and Portuguese monarchs exploited that official church license to claim “discovered” lands, with extensive state military backing to guarantee success.

“English Royals” crafted their own (legal) rights of imagined ownership, certified by its homegrown Anglican form of “civilized Christianity.”  In 1578, Sir Humphrey Gilbert was granted a charter from the Crown authorizing him to

“…discover and take possession of such remote, heathen, and barbarous                                                                                                   lands, as were not actually possessed by any Christian prince or people…”

Decades later, the Crown granted others charters to conquer, loot and plunder unclaimed territory in the “New World.”

Comprehending the relationship between settler-colonialism, Old Testament stories, European monarchs and the Vatican’s holy decrees is essential to understanding the chaos and war in the world today. What is most important to understand is how the Doctrine of Christian Discovery impacts our world, here and now.

This 500-year-old religious dogma is still being used.  In the 21^st century the U.S. Supreme Court continues to rationalize the “dominion” and “chosen people” dogma and mindset of the Old Testament and 15^th century Christendom.

Property:

The exclusive right of possessing, enjoying and disposing of a thing; ownership. In the beginning of the world, the Creator gave to man dominion over the earth, over the fish of the sea and the fowls of the air,and over every living thing. This is the foundation of man’s property in the earth… Prior occupancy of land and of wild animals gives to the          possessor the property of them.   Webster’s (1828).

This is the pathology of the hierarchical dominating mentality that moves all settler-colonizer societies.

“Their god was on their side.”  Where have we heard that lately?  Enough of this nonsense!

Steve Kelly is a an artist and environmental activist. He lives in Bozeman, Montana.  

Victory for the Disposables: The Sentencing of the Hindujas

BY BINOY KAMPMARK

 JUNE 25, 2024
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Prakash Hinduja, Chairman Europe, Hinduja Group. Photograph Source: Richter Frank-Jurgen – CC BY-SA 2.0

In his seminal work on modern slavery, Kevin Bales does away with certain, antiquated concepts.  In its insidious, older form, one focused on the concept of natal alienation, slaves were chattels and assets, outrightly owned.  Each slave system was distinct and protean, if marked by certain universal features.

The universal feature of ownership, at least when it comes to its modern iteration, has little role to play in the modern slave system.  The modern slave can be found in abundance.  Disposability is its vital feature, abundance of vulnerable persons its source.  Care for human welfare is of secondary concern.  Bales, in Disposable People, offers up five studies with a specific focus on a relevant industry or trade: prostitution in Thailand; the water sale market in Mauritania; the charcoal industry in Brazil; brickmaking in Pakistan; and indentured farm labour in India.

Such work, for all its stately horror, focuses on the dynamics and practices of specific industries in selected countries. Another feature, as terrifying, is the international market for such disposable people, who pullulate the economies of developed countries, working in conditions unseen and undocumented.  The modern slaver, in such instances, is obscured behind regulatory opacity, a hidden puppeteer often protected by a vast fortune and public ignorance.

On June 21, four members of the Hinduja family, the UK’s wealthiest according to the 2024 Sunday Times Rich List with an estimated value of £37.196 billion, were convicted in a Swiss court of first instance for exploiting staff at their Geneva mansion with “slave like treatment”.  They include Prakash Hinduja and his wife Kamal, their son Ajay and his wife Namrata.  The first two received sentences of 4.5 years; the latter, sentences amounting to 4 years.  The family business manager, Najib Ziazi, faces an 18-month suspended sentence.

The convictions arise from a case stretching back to 2018, when Swiss prosecutors raided the Hinduja villa in Geneva’s Cologny municipality, offices of the Hinduja Bank, and various associated local businesses belonging to the Hinduja group.

A number of accusations were levelled against the family in exploiting the workers.  Passports had been seized.  They were confined to the villa.  They laboured for long hours with minimal pay (less than one-tenth the standard rate for equivalent local jobs) – in some cases up to 18 hours a day, seven days a week.  The Hindujas, claimed prosecutor Yves Bertossa “spent more for one dog than one of their servants.”  The budget with the title “Pets” was allocated somewhere in the order of 8,584 Swiss Francs a year.

Speaking only Hindi, the workers were paid in rupees wired to Indian accounts inaccessible to them in Switzerland. They had little in terms of vacations and were accommodated in rudimentary conditions.

Lawyers representing the Hinduja family were keen to point out that the convictions were not commensurate with the findings.  Their clients had been “acquitted of all human trafficking charges”.  For that reason, they were “appalled and disappointed by the rest of the decision made in this court of first instance, and we have of course filed an appeal to the higher court thereby making this part of the judgment not effective.”

Other qualifying points were also noted.  The Hindujas had not been detained and should still be presumed to be innocent pending final judgment by the highest adjusting authority in the country.  Various plaintiffs had also withdrawn their complaints expressing the view that they had never intended to be involved in the legal proceedings.  (A confidential out-of-court settlement has been reached with three of them.)

One of the lawyers representing the Hindujas, Robert Assael, proposed that the exploited employees “were grateful” for the offer of “a better life” by the family.  Yaël Hayat, who represents Ajay Hinduja, further argued that using discrepant salaries as a measure of ill-treatment said little about the perks of board and lodgings.

In a clumsy attempt to diminish the serious conditions afflicting the workers in the villa, Hayat casuistically suggested that “When they sit down to watch a movie with the kids, can that be considered work?  I think not.”  With the vulgar callousness of a neoliberal economist, she further pointed out that the staff pay for one of the villa employees was “good” relative to what she received in India.  The prosecutors had conflated the goals of justice with social justice in attempting to “break the rich to make the poor less poor”.

No finer, odious statement can be made about the modern, exploitable conditions of the disposables.  They are mistreated, but things can always be worse.  And if they are willing to present their labour to parties keen to exploit them, why the fuss?

Thankfully, at last when it comes to conditions in Switzerland, the Hindujas are not the only ones being placed under prosecutorial scrutiny.  Last year, four domestic workers from the Philippines took legal action against one of Geneva’s diplomatic missions to the United Nations, claiming non-payment over a number of years.  It was a brutal reminder that migrant domestic workers remain a seemingly endless quarry of the disposable and exploitable.

Such cases also bring to mind the wisdom noted in Honoré de Balzac’s Le Père Goriot (1835): “The secret of a great success for which you are a loss to account for is a crime that has never been found out, because it was properly executed.”

Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne. Email: bkampmark@gmail.com