According to the latest polls, most of you believe that anti-white racism – or “reverse racism,” as many of you refer to it – is now a bigger problem than anti-black racism. That, apparently, is the majority view in White America.

The view looks very different, however, in Black America.

In Black America, the unemployment rate is 16.8 percent, twice the unemployment rate in White America. 35 percent of black households have zero or negative net wealth, compared with 15 percent of white households — and the gap is growing. The average white household is 20 times richer than the average black household — the largest gap since the government started recording this data a quarter century ago.  

The recent recession widened these gaps. In the twentieth century, most blacks had trouble getting mortgages. Banks discriminated against poor black neighborhoods. During the housing bubble, this discrimination took the opposite form: predatory lending. The void left by mainstream lenders was filled by pawn shops, payday lenders, and check cashing services that charged high fees and usurious interest rates. Blacks were far more likely to receive subprime loans and then to experience foreclosure. Even if a black household had the same creditworthiness, default risk, employment, income, and demographics as a white household, the black household usually received much riskier, more expensive loans.

But it’s not just the recession. The unemployment gap has existed as long as blacks have been free to find jobs, even among blacks and whites with the same education level. Employers are far more likely to call back job applicants with white-sounding names. They are significantly more likely to hire white job applicants with a criminal record than black job applicants without a criminal record.

In Black America, infants are twice as likely to die as in White America. That gap has also grown over the last three decades. Even if blacks had the same background characteristics as whites — maternal age, educational attainment, etc. — two-thirds of that gap would still exist. If Black America were its own country, it would rank 67th in infant mortality, just below Qatar and Uruguay.

In Black America, 4 percent of the male population is in jail, compared with 0.7 percent of men in White America. Blacks comprise 40 percent of prisoners in America, though they comprise only 13 percent of the general population.

And it’s not because they’re more likely to commit a crime. According to recent research, blacks are significantly more likely to be arrested than whites for the exact same crime. On average, a black criminal who murders a white victim will receive a significantly harsher punishment than if the murder had been committed by a white criminal, regardless of the characteristics of the victim or the quality of legal counsel.

White drug users outnumber black drug users four-to-one. According to one study, “White students use cocaine at seven times the rate of black students, use crack cocaine at eight times the rate of black students, and use heroin at seven times the rate of black students.” Another study reported that “white youth aged 12-17 are more than a third more likely to have sold illegal drugs than African American youth.” Yet blacks are three times more likely to be arrested on drug charges.

As a result, blacks are unfairly disenfranchised more than whites. In the recent case Farrakhan v. Locke, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals openly admitted that “the statistical disparity and disproportionality evident in Washington’s criminal justice system arise from and result in discrimination,” yet they did not uphold the Constitution’s prohibition of racial discrimination in voting.

No wonder Congress won’t take their calls. Literally. Just like employers, legislators are less likely to respond to requests from blacks than from whites.

And they need to be heard. In a country where 13 percent of the population is black, only 10 percent of the House of Representatives is black, and there are zero black Senators.

In Black America, equal representation, the cornerstone of democracy, does not exist.

So while I understand your distaste for affirmative action and other diversity programs that seem like “reverse racism,” I urge you to remember that whites receive affirmative action too — only, we call it by a different name: everyday life in America.

Your fellow White American,
Anthony W. Orlando

==========

This op-ed was published in today’s Hazleton Standard-Speaker.

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Until now.

First, let’s see what I’m responding to:

A high corporate tax rate moves jobs overseas. Currently American companies are sitting on more than $2 trillion of cash overseas, which is used for hiring and investments in foreign operations.

The United States has the second highest corporate tax rate in the world. Two things we must do to spur job growth and expand the taxpayer base in the America: Cut the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 20 percent, the median tax rate for the developed countries, and eliminate the taxes on repatriation of foreign earnings.

Wow. Every sentence there is either wrong or very misleading.  

Prof. Mishra is talking about “statutory” tax rates, but corporations hardly ever pay statutory rates. They use all sorts of deductions and exemptions and loopholes to pay a lot less than “the second highest corporate tax rate in the world.” When you measure what they actually pay — a.k.a. “effective” tax rates — you find that the United States has low corporate taxes, compared to the rest of the world:

According to Prof. Mishra, this “high corporate tax rate moves jobs overseas.” But, as tax journalist David Cay Johnston reports, “that is not General Electric’s experience”:

GE’s disclosures show that over the last decade it paid much lower tax rates in America than offshore, just the opposite of the Washington political mantra. Even more puzzling, the U.S. corporate giant chooses to take more of its profits in other lands despite the higher tax rates there.

Prof. Mishra never explains how high taxes move jobs overseas or why it’s a bad thing that “American companies are sitting on more than $2 trillion of cash overseas.” (I’m glad I’m not in his class.) My best guess is that he’s trying to say the following: If those companies bring that cash back to the U.S., they will use it for “hiring and investments” here.

Only one problem: American companies already have lots of cash, and they’re not using it for “hiring and investment.”

In late 2008, they started receiving more cash than they were investing:

As a result, American companies are no longer borrowing cash. They have so much excess that they’re lending it:

They don’t need more cash. If American companies do bring that $2 trillion back to our shores, they won’t use it “for hiring and investment.” They’ll buy back stock, pay bigger dividends, park it in Treasuries and other financial securities — nothing that will “spur job growth and expand the taxpayer base.”

It’s just another Trojan horse. Make corporate owners pay less taxes, and you’ll only enrich corporate owners. It won’t trickle down to the rest of us.

That’s what happened in 2004, when Congress temporarily allowed companies to repatriate foreign-earned income at a discounted rate of 3.7 percent. Usually, they have to pay the full rate, but they can “defer” that payment as long as they want. That’s why they’re “sitting on more than $2 trillion of cash overseas.” If they “repatriated” it to America, they’d have to pay more taxes. They’re hoping Congress will grant them another “holiday” like in 2004:

A study of the impacts of the tax break by Dhammika Dharmapala, C. Fritz Foley, and Kristin J. Forbes found, however, that “[r]ather than being associated with increased expenditures on domestic investment or employment, repatriations were associated with significantly higher levels of payouts to shareholders, mainly taking the form of share repurchases. Estimates imply that a $1 increase in repatriations was associated with an increase in payouts to shareholders of between $0.60 and $0.92, depending on the specification.” The authors suggest that companies were able to make these distributions to shareholders without violating the terms of the repatriation legislation by using the repatriated funds “to pay for investment, hiring, or R&D that was already planned, thereby releasing [domestic] cash that had previously been allocated for these purposes to be used for payouts to shareholders.”

And what little hiring they did do was quickly reversed:

• Hewlett-Packard…”announced a repatriation of $14.5 billion, layoffs of 14,500 workers, and stock buybacks of more than $4 billion for the first half of 2005 – about three times the size of its buybacks in the period a year earlier.”
• Pfizer, which repatriated around $37 billion (the largest amount of any firm) shortly before eliminating around 10,000 American jobs and closing U.S. factories in 2005;
• Ford Motor Company, which repatriated around $850 million under the holiday and then laid off more than 30,000 U.S. workers in 2005 and 2006;
• Merck, which repatriated $15.9 billion and announced layoffs of 7,000 workers in 2005;
• Honeywell International, which repatriated $2.7 billion and laid off 2,000 workers in 2005 and 2006.

According to the Congressional Research Service, “most of the largest beneficiaries of the holiday actually cut jobs in 2005-06.” Congress lowered their taxes, and it didn’t help the economy one iota.

But that’s nothing new. As Robert McIntyre, Director of the nonprofit Citizens for Tax Justice, recently told Congress:

Over the years, my group has done numerous studies on corporate tax subsidies and their effect on corporate investment behavior and job creation. In all of these studies, we found no positive correlation between the amount of subsidies that companies received and their investment and jobs performance.

Wait. It gets worse.

In order to “expand the taxpayer base” and reduce the budget deficit, Prof. Mishra says we should “eliminate the taxes on repatriation of foreign earnings.” So riddle me this: How does eliminating taxes help us reduce the budget deficit?

Think about that until your head explodes.

Therein lies the most profound problem with Prof. Mishra’s argument: It all depends on the assumption that lowering tax rates will increase economic output so much that it increases tax revenue.

Historically, that’s completely false. The effective corporate tax rate has been falling for over fifty years:

Yet corporate tax revenue (as a percent of GDP) has been plummeting at the same time:

Enough for one day. I’ll talk more about tax rates-versus-revenue tomorrow.

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Iran’s views of the Taliban have changed considerably since 2001. Iran did not recognize the Taliban government and considered them an ideological nemesis and a major security threat that was created by Pakistan’s ISI, with generous financial support from Saudi Arabia partly for the purpose of spreading Wahhabism and undermining Iran. When the Taliban were in power in the 1990s, Iran, along with India and Russia, provided significant support to the Northern Alliance, which was the principal opposition force to Taliban rule and eventually dislodged them. Iran also contributed to dismantling the Taliban regime and to establishing a new government in Kabul in 2001.

Ironically, the strategic interests of Tehran and Taliban have converged today, as each, independent of the other and for different reasons, oppose the presence of foreign troops in Afghanistan and demand their immediate and unconditional withdrawal.

A Taliban-dominated government is clearly not in Iran’s long-term interests, since it would generate considerable tension and conflict between Iran and Afghanistan and would inevitably lead Pakistan, and to a lesser extent Saudi Arabia, becoming dominant foreign powers in Afghanistan, which Tehran vehemently opposes. At the same time, Tehran has for many years maintained that political stability in Afghanistan can be achieved only if the government reflects the rich ethnic and sectarian diversity of Afghanistan itself. Iran, more than anything else, wants to see a stable and friendly government in Kabul. Tehran now seems convinced that without Taliban participation in the government, as a partner but not as the main force, stability would be unattainable.

Tehran has attempted in vain to convince Karzai to call for the withdrawal of Western troops. Tensions between the two neighbors are likely to increase if there is a new agreement between Washington and Kabul about establishing permanent U.S. military bases in Afghanistan.

Mousavian: Iran Is Ready to Negotiate…If — Semira Nikou

The supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei,…does not object to transparency because he already issued a fatwa in 1995 against weapons of mass destruction. But he is against discrimination, suspension [of uranium enrichment], and the deprivation of Iran’s rights under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).

On the nuclear issue, the end state for the Iranians is full rights under the NPT, without discrimination over enrichment. Other countries enrich but do not face sanctions. The nuclear impasse will not be resolved as long as U.N. resolutions are enforced because they require Iran to indefinitely suspend enrichment and provide access to sites and scientists for an indefinite period. These conditions extend beyond the framework of NPT.

Iran views indefinite suspension as a way for the P5+1 (five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council plus Germany) to buy time for a long-term ban on Iran’s enrichment program and ultimately its discontinuation.

Iran and al-Qa’ida: Can the Charges Be Substantiated? — Flynt Leverett & Hillary Mann Leverett

[The] Iranians raised, almost immediately after the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, the problem of al-Qa’ida personnel trying to make their way from Afghanistan into Iran…

…Tehran documented its detention of literally hundreds of suspected al-Qa’ida operatives, repatriated as many of these detainees to their countries of origin as it could, and requested U.S. assistance in facilitating repatriations of detainees whose governments did not want to cooperate (a request the Bush Administration denied).

…Iranian officials acknowledged that a small group of al-Qa’ida figures had managed to avoid capture and enter Iranian territory, most likely through Sistan-Balochistan, in 2002. The Iranian government located and took some of these individuals into custody and said that others identified by the United States were either dead or not in Iran. At the beginning of May 2003, after Baghdad had fallen, Tehran offered to exchange the remaining al-Qa’ida figures in Iran for a small group of MEK commanders in Iraq, with the treatment of those repatriated to Iran monitored by the International Committee for the Red Cross and a commitment not to apply the death penalty to anyone prosecuted on their return. But the Bush Administration rejected any deal.

Of the six al-Qa’ida operatives sanctioned by the Treasury Department last week, only one is alleged to be physically present in Iran — and, by Treasury’s own account, he is there primarily to get al-Qa’ida prisoners out of Iranian jails. Moreover, the United States apparently has no hard evidence that the Iranian government is supportive of or even knowledgeable about the alleged al-Qa’ida network in the Islamic Republic.

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– Jonathan Chait (The New Republic)

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Click here to view the embedded video.

In 1960, I worked for Lloyd Burns at Screen Gems International. Lloyd was very smart, but in retrospect he was the victim of an inflated ego.

Helios Alvarez, a very smart Brazilian, ran the company’s “complex” operation in Sao Paulo.

Helios was in the process of renegotiating his contract for the third or fourth time in a year. He was on the phone with Lloyd, who was getting angrier and angrier by the minute. He pushed the phone’s “hold” button and said to me, “That little son of a bitch thinks he has me by the balls…and he does.”  

Lloyd and Helios both knew that, if Helios left the company, Lloyd would have a gigantic problem. Lloyd was smart enough to begrudgingly give Helios whatever he wanted because he understood that it was in his own self interest.

However: What went on in this confrontation in a small commercial situation didn’t really matter to anyone! The sun would come up the next morning, and whatever happened would matter little to Columbia Pictures, never mind the remainder of the planet.

My 50+ working years have left me with the sad conclusion that, whenever I faced a major career decision, the worst that could happen was that I would lose a deal or get fired. An advertising executive once threatened to cancel a half-million-dollar deal unless I did what he wanted me to do, and he about died when I told him to “go for it.”

The same can not be said of the political crazies being played out in Washington.

What Washington needs are real dealmakers who will not threaten to “dynamite” our nation unless they get their way. Remember that scene in Blazing Saddles where Bart the Sherriff holds a gun to his own head and threatens to pull the trigger?

Click here to view the embedded video.

Resurrecting the role of Bart, Eric Cantor has threatened to “blow up a deal” if such a deal included higher taxes. He has basically threatened to shoot us all, including himself, in the head! (Metaphorically speaking, of course.)

As the August “deadline” approaches, there is the possibility that we could do serious damage to America, were we not to solve the problem in a way acceptable to the extreme right wing of the Republican party. We need to remove or replace the petulant Republican children who threaten to destroy our economy if they don’t get their way.

63.7 million Americans voted for President Obama. How many elected the arrogant Cantor? Who is he to put a gun to our heads?

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