Today's Stories

May 21, 2008

Jeffrey St. Clair
Hillary Reclaims Her Innner Child

May 20, 2008

Ralph Nader
A Trip Inside Google

Uri Avnery
With Friends Like These

Patrick Irelan
The Empire and the Fleet

Ray McGovern
Come Out, Admiral Fallon, Wherever You Are

David Macaray
The UAW Strike Against American Axle

Chris Genovali
Big Oil on the Water: Skating Around the Tanker Issue

Ibrahim Fawal
Birmingham, Israel and the Nakba

Christopher Ketcham
Let Us Now Praise Famous Suicides

Andy Worthington
Guantánamo Trial Delayed

Martha Rosenberg
Merck is a Repeat Offender

Website of the Day
Defend the Students Who Pied Tom Friedman

May 19, 2008

Saul Landau
Cuba Will Live

Paul Craig Roberts
The Metamorphosis of the Conservative Movement

Brian McKenna
Brotherly Love in Philly's Badlands

Patrick Cockburn
City of the Dead: Mosul on Lockdown

B. R. Gowani
The Central Problem Pakistan Needs to Tackle

Dr. Trudy Bond
Psychologists and Torture: If Not Now, When?

Cindy Sheehan
Whose War is It?

John Mohawk
The Warriors Who Turned to Peace

Remi Kanazi
When Free Speech Doesn't Come for Free

Robert Day
I Get a Horse

Website of the Day
Evolve or Die

May 17 / 18, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
The View from the Crusaders' Castle

Tim Wise
Testosterone is Not to Blame: Why Sexism isn't the Reason for Hillary's Loss

Andy Worthington
Gitmo Trials: Betrayal, Backsliding and Boycotts

Robert Fantina
The Double-Talk Express Derails

Karim Makdisi
In the Wake of the Doha Truce

Harry Browne
Only Ireland Can Vote on EU's Future

John Ross
Suicide by Taco? The Demise of Mexico's PRD

Dave Lindorff
Fear at the Pump

Robert Weissman
Pharmaceutical Payola

Laray Polk
Bush Family Appeasement

David Yearsley
Puritans in Seattle

Ron Jacobs
Riot Squads, Privatization and the National Front

Paul Quinnett
My Last Flight

Sam Bahour
Refugees are the Key

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor
Poverty Wages

Dr. Susan Block
The Groom May Kiss the Groom

Kim Nicolini
Paranoid Park: Inside the Fractured Landscape of Male Adolescence

Jeremy Scahill
John Cusack's War

Jeffrey St. Clair
Booked Up

Poets' Basement
Dominguez, Gerard and Davies

May 16, 2008

Stephen Soldz
Involuntary Drugging of Detainees

Jonathan Cook
Police Attack Al-Nakba March

Paul Craig Roberts
Lies of Aggression

Christopher Brauchli
A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Pharmacy

James L. Secor
Olympic Torch China: the View from Shaoxing

Franklin Lamb
Did Hezbollah Thwart a Bush/Olmert Attack on Beirut?

Linn Washington, Jr.
The Price of Protecting Racist Cops

Dave Lindorff
What West Virginia Means

May 15, 2008

Stan Cox
Big Brother Close Up

Jeff Halper
Rethinking Israel After 60 Years

Greg Moses
Living for the Children of Palestine

John Ross
Why Mexican Justice is a Euphemism

Ron Jacobs
Go to Work, Go to Jail

Binoy Kampmark
Indian Jailbirds: the Case of Binayak Sen

Eve Spangler
We Should Not Celebrate Dispossession

Martha Rosenberg
Meat Wars with South Korea

Website of the Day
Idaho Wolf Killers

May 14, 2008

Ismael Hossein-Zadeh
Oil Wars

Reza Fiyouzat
Torture, a Bully's Creed

Felice Pace
California Water Politics: Of Dams and Water Buffaloes

Hamdan A. Yousuf / Dania S. Ahmed
A Generation Defined by War

Robert Weitzel
Hillary's "Final Solution" to the Persian Problem

Ralph Nader
You're Either with the American People or the Big Auto Bosses

Dave Lindorff
Hillary, McCain and the Stupid Vote

Missy Comley Beattie
White Heaven: Hillary's W. Virginia Idyll

Neve Gordon
Israel as a Site of Struggle

Dr. Susan Block
A Washington Witch Hanging

Website of the Day
Hillary's Downfall

May 13, 2008

David Rosen
Sexual Terrorism: the Sadistic Side of Bush's War on Terror

Alan Farago
Nuclear Florida: Beachfront Reactors in an Age of Rising Sea Levels?

Saul Landau
The Crisis at Home

Saree Makdisi
Forget the Two-State Solution

Paul Craig Roberts
How Empires Fall

Andy Worthington
Gitmo's Suicide Bomber

Brother Bede Vincent
The Problem with Rev. Wright--There are Too Few Like Him

Linda Mamoun
Marketing Ethnic Cleansing

David Macaray
The Myth That Won't Die

Website of the Day
Burning the Future: Coal in America

May 12, 2008

St. Clair / Frank
The Pentagon's Toxic Legacy

Ziga Vodovnik
Rebels Against Tyranny: an Interview with Howard Zinn on Anarchism

Gary Leupp
Why All of Our Efforts Won't Stop an Attack on Iran

Frankln Lamb
Choufeit's Bloody Pentacost

Suzanne Baroud
The Ambition of Hillary Clinton

Martha Rosenberg
Farmer Ernie's Chamber of Horrors

Dave Zirin
The Boss's Boycott

Carl Finamore
I Ain't Gonna Work No More

Peter Morici
Recession Watch

Richard Rhames
The Third Way to Nowhere

Website of the Day
The Untold Story of Black New Orleans

May 10 / 11, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
Real Clear Numbers: 101,000 Casualties a Year

Franklin Lamb
Hezbollah Eases Up and Beirut Opens Its Shutters

Ciara Gilmartin
A Surge in Iraqi Detainees

Diane Farsetta
Inside a Nuclear Industry Soirée

Kent Paterson
Mother's Day in Ciudad Juarez

Alan Farago
The Social Engineers

Rannie Amiri
Beirut on the Brink

Patrick Irelan
Bolivia, Morales and the Red Ponchos

Robert Fantina
The Lexicon Legacy of George W. Bush

Nikolas Kozloff
El Salvador 2009: Another Feather in the Cap of Chavez?

George Ciccariello-Maher
The Yumare Massacre, 22 Years On

David Yearsley
Bacharach at 80

Ron Jacobs
Rosa Luxemburg's Shock Doctrine

John Holt
Can Yellowstone Survive?

David Michael Green
It's So Over

Ben Terrall
Dealing Sleep

Kim Nicolini
The Best Film of the Bush Era?

Jeffrey St. Clair
Booked Up

Poets' Basement
Gibbons, Orloski, Frisella, Gladstone-Gelman

May 9, 2008

Franklin Lamb
A Wild Day in Beirut

Andy Worthington
The Afghans of Gitmo

Benjamin Dangl
Polarizing Bolivia

Mark A. Huddle
Remembering Mildred Loving, an Unsung Hero of the Civil Rights Movement

David Macaray
Hollywood Gives SAG the Brush Off

Dave Lindorff
Team Clinton: Going Down Ugly

C.G. Estabrook
The Way We Live Now

Matt Kosko
McCain, Clinton, Obama and the Wages of Lesser-Evilism

Robert Weissman
Big Business is not the Solution to Global Poverty

Michael Dickinson
Jailing the Joint

Website of the Day
The Role of Third Parties in the U.S.A.

May 8, 2008

Sharon Smith
Rockefeller Family Fables

Saul Landau
The NATO Axiom

Laura Carlsen
A Primer on Plan Mexico

Binoy Kampmark
Food Riots are Coming to the U.S.

Kenneth Couesbouc
China's Paper Feet

Liaquat Ali Khan
Pakistan's Constitutional Shenanigans

Franklin Lamb
Blindsided, Hezbollah Mulls Its Response

Sen. Russ Feingold
Government in Secret

George Wuerthner
The Problems with Conservation Easements

Richard W. Behan
A Brief Exposé of a Fraudulent War

Adam Federman
Marching for Sean Bell

Website of the Day
State of the Air

Subscribe Online

Shifting the War Burden

Tax Against Tyranny

By KENNETH COUESBOUC

The governments of the world can be seen as belonging to either of two categories. There are those that depend on taxes for their spending and there are those that do not. And the extent of its dependence on taxes will largely determine the form of a particular government.

The collection of taxes has never been popular. And introducing new taxes has more than once brought down a government, or led to revolt and even revolution. Taxing the nation means taking a part of the wealth produced. But the part appropriated should not be excessive, as overtaxing inhibits investments and growth. So that a short term gain from an increase in the tax rate contradicts the long term gain due to increased wealth being taxed at the same rate.

The necessary “fine tuning” of the tax rate and the consensual disapproval of taxes in general often result in governments having to pay their budget deficits with borrowed money. This inveterate borrowing in turn allows governments, in a bid to restore lost popularity, to cut taxes for certain strategic sectors of society. However, borrowing relies on the lender’s confidence in the borrower’s future capacity to pay. This also applies to government borrowing but, as the limits of debt are poorly defined (1), the lender’s reaction often comes too late, after the limits are passed.

Deciding who bears the burden of financing the state is a fundamental function of parliamentary representation. The question of who is taxed, how and how much is (or should be) a subject of great importance in electoral debates. On a par with law and order, education and welfare, war and peace, that is with all the different ways of spending what is reaped. Fair taxation is essential to the notion of res publica, the idea of a commonwealth shared by all citizens. And so, refusing taxation has proved to be the most effective, perhaps the only way of opposing tyranny. Unless, of course, the tyrant ensures that refusal is impossible.

Communist regimes managed to eliminate taxation by a total control of production, exchange and finance, with government expenditures as an integral part of the process. The highly centralised planning put in place by the communists was inherent to the mechanical age. Coal and steel are best produced in a planed and centralised manner.

For this reason, the totalitarian economies were fairly successful for a while, but they were totally unable to adapt to the electronic age. The decentralised nature of electronic software production, the garage start-ups and the high school entrepreneurs quietly pushed state control of production into the landfills of history. Initiative and inventiveness can neither be planned nor extorted.

The top down control of bureaucratic tyranny could not survive in a changed environment. But military tyranny is as thriving as ever, because warlords only need guns and ammunition to maintain their dominion. The rest can be procured by force. And, in the same way, tyrants are able to rule by might, when they do not depend on civil society for their incomes. An army can buy the arms it needs to impose its will thanks to “blood” diamonds, coltan, copper, oil, etc.

If the Burmese generals stopped receiving royalties for gas, oil and timber, they would fade away almost over night. But, as no one wants to give up their consumption of gas, oil and tropical timber, it just won’t happen (2). And, to make tyranny even easier, Burma is ethnically divided. So the army just looks after its own and can oppress or neglect the other inhabitants. In the same way, dozens of corrupt cliques are in power all around the world, funded by the royalties they receive.

Beginning with the Magna Carta, English history is a tale of rulers submitting to the will of the people in exchange for badly needed cash. And, to a large extent, it was George III’s need of money and Lord North’s intransigence that led to the Declaration of Independence and the birth of the United States of America. While, in France, Louis XVI’s empty coffers obliged him to assemble the Three Estates that deposed and then beheaded him.

These nations are justly proud of their rebellious past and of their forefathers’ brave stands against tyranny. But what of to-day? What pressure can be brought to bear by the taxpayers on a government that grants rebates and borrows all it needs on the world’s currency markets? Powerless at home and hooked to minerals and fossil fuels abroad, what remains of our heritage?

Kenneth Couesbouc can be reached at: kencouesbouc@yahoo.fr

Notes

1. The capacity to repay depends on excess income, the part that is over and above the cost of the necessities of life. When incomes are stable, increased borrowing means reduced spending on necessities. But it is always difficult to assess how far the reduction can go.

2. During the Cold War, dictators were funded to put down the reds or the imperialist puppets, depending on which side was paying. Nowadays, funding is essentially commercial, with a few exceptions due to the War on Terror. And events in Iraq have demonstrated once again that it is easier and cheaper to payroll a tyrant than to subdue a nation.

 

 

 

Now Available from CounterPunch Books!

Born Under a Bad Sky:
Notes from the Dark Side
of the Earth
By Jeffrey St. Clair

Buy End Times Now!

Click Here to Buy!

Click Here to Buy!

Click Here to Order!

The Occupation
by Patrick Cockburn

Humanitarian Imperialism
By Jean Bricmont