Tag: Oligarchy

Tax Exemption for Churches (Is the Wrong Question)

For the many-th time, I see a repost from Twitter on some other social media site, complaining about the wealth of mega-church pastors, and trying to rile people up about how churches should NOT be tax exempt. And, sure, Joel Olsteen’s lifestyle is a mockery of Jesus’ life, but there are only a handful of “mega” churches and “mega church” pastors in this country. Meanwhile, many, many thousands of the so-called 1% in this country pay a lower tax rate (and sometimes, ACTUAL tax) than the average, blue- or white-collar person does.

As a country swimming in debt, we would get a lot more mileage out of calling for meaningful taxation of billionaires and multi-hundred-millionaires before we start worrying about removing tax exemptions for churches and pastors. I think those posts and reposts on Twitter are probably jointly paid for by The Koch Brothers and George Soros, for the class-warfare angle. And maybe Bill Gates, for the anti-religion angle.

Joel Osteen pays taxes on his income. How much of it he has managed to shelter from the IRS is a game played just like all the rest of the 1%. The church, as a non-profit, does not pay taxes, because the money being received in donations cannot be considered a profit to tax. That’s the definition of how non-profit organizations work.

Churches are supposed to be prevented from getting involved in politics. It’s part of the deal in being religiously tax-exempt. (How this works when Presidents and candidates go to churches and make speeches from the pulpit is quite beyond me, but I digress.) If you start taxing churches, then there’s no reason for them not to get heavily involved in promoting particular candidates, and forming political action committees, just like corporations, taking an active role in getting people elected, and lobbying government for favorable treatment.

You may retort that large, corporate churches like the Catholics or Mormons already exert a huge influence on government, and I’d say you’re right, but it’s still less than the average Fortune 100. If we open the floodgates here… With the “war chests” accumulated by both of those organizations? As they say: you ain’t seen nothing yet.

Do the people calling for the removal of tax exemptions for churches really understand what they’re asking for? I don’t think they do.

How The Total State Circumvented The Constitution

Oligarchs, with their financial ability to influence mass media, education, and marketing, quickly proved to be the social force most able to manipulate the public will. With all three branches now functionally subject to the same democratic selection pressures it is no surprise an oligarchy came to achieve hegemonic social force in the United States.

Source: How The Total State Circumvented The Constitution

Combine that with this (spoken of Reagan’s effect on anti-trust, via Robert Bork’s influence):

It was obvious from the start that “consumer welfare” was a scam, a ruse designed to let monopolies flourish and to install “autocrats of trade” on their thrones. Despite its ideological bankruptcy, “consumer welfare” was able to repel its critics for decades, because it had deep-pocketed backers – no different from tobacco-cancer denial or climate denial.

Source: Pluralistic: 15 Sep 2022 California’s antitrust case against Amazon – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

And we have all the elements we need to conclude that the US is now a complete corporatocracy, under the control of our oligarchs, or billionaires.

I remember reading a post on Reddit, a long time ago, by a guy who claimed he was friends with a half-dozen billionaires. The thing that stuck out at me was that Congressmen ask, “How high?” when asked to jump by a billionaire, because the checks they can write for campaign contributions can swing an entire election.

Lisa Kahn may make some headway with modern trustbusting, if given the time to get moving with a second Biden term, but with the Citizens United ruling, it’s only a matter of time until the powers that be get her out of their way through a sympathetic administration.

 

We’re Already Past the Point of No Return

From the Left
From the Right

These were literally back-to-back posts on Imgur’s “front page.” The underwritten war of the political class being waged by PAC’s and foreign governments on social media is literally saying the exact same things about each other, and make it seem like they are trying to tip the party balance in this country. It makes no difference.

I also see that ZeroHedge has posted a graph about sharply-increasing inflation, which I’ve been predicting for awhile now. To wit, it’s nearly doubled in just the last 6 months. The supply chain issues in every sector are the problem. They’ve all been strangled for short-term profits for at least a decade, and there’s nothing stopping the continued accretion of power through mergers in every industry.

The oligarchs have taken over this country, and are extracting all the profits from every financial sector. The top 1% own more than half the wealth in the country, and this situation can only get worse, exponentially. The tipping point has been passed. The most galling part of this is that they’ve gotten the rest of us to bicker about which party has doomed us to economic collapse, when they own both of them, top to bottom.

The oligarchs, through their media channels, will tell us that COVID has brought about this inflation, and the looming disaster to follow, but it was their profit taking which has stretched our supply infrastructure so thin that it couldn’t handle a predictable world-wide stress to begin with.

I don’t think the average person can see the utter futility about arguing Right-vs-Left politics when we’re living in a reincarnated feudalistic society, with modern-day versions of kings and lords, and vassals and serfs. Make no mistake: The idea of a democratic republic put forth in the US Constitution is dead and buried. Whatever we have right now, it is no longer a democracy nor a republic. It makes no material difference which “party” controls the government. Everyone in Washington is there to do the bidding of the largest corporations (and their officers) and the richest people (and their business interests), and they will, without fail, defer to them over the common man on every issue.

The reason we haven’t gotten socialized medicine yet is because the people running the largest health insurance companies haven’t figured out how to make even more money in such a system. As soon as they do, we’ll get an American version of the UK’s NHS the very next day.

Bill Allowing Big Tech To Form “Techno-Governments” To Be Announced Today – The Debrief

Nevada Governor Steve Sisolak will be announcing legislation today that will allow major technology companies to effectively form techno-governments.

Gov. Sisolak first mentioned the proposal of creating “Innovation Zones” in Nevada during his State-of-the-State address on January 19. “New companies creating groundbreaking technologies can come to Nevada to develop their industries. This will be done without tax abatements or public financing.”

While the legislation wouldn’t provide subsidiaries or public funding, according to a draft of the Bill obtained by the Las Vegas Review-Journal, major technology firms would be granted authority to form their independent techno-governments within Nevada. “[They] would carry the same authority as a county, including the ability to impose taxes, form school districts and justice courts and provide government services, to name a few duties,” Las Vegas Review-Journal reports.

Source: Bill Allowing Big Tech To Form “Techno-Governments” To Be Announced Today – The Debrief

On the path of our regression from a representative republic to a modern fuedalism-by-oligarchy, apparently we’re traveling back past the robber-baron days of companies running entire towns, with private police and fire departments — and their requisite taxation — and perhaps even paying people in scrip for buying things in the company store.

And all of this is made possible by the magic of…