Category Archives: Economic Corruption

Rich People Hire Disabled Tour Guides So They Can Cut Lines at Disney

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Ah, Disney World — a collection of whimsically themed structures built on top of a swamp, in which fully-grown adults gambol about in rodent costumes cooing at the assembled youth of America. While this magical bog may seem to be a factory of simple, innocent fun, it hides a darker underbelly: Disney World is a veritable hellscape for Manhattan families who are just too rich to wait on line.

Thank the Disney Gods (which probably look like a hat with a glove attached to it and a white lady in a wig) that Manhattan’s elite are so plucky and inventive. They’ve figured out a way to cut the massive lines at the resort — by hiring a tour guides with a disabilities to pose as their family members so that their own children can bypass everyone else! Woohoo! Capitalism!

According to The New York Post, these “black market Disney guides” allegedly can be hired through a (not Disney affiliated) service called Dream Tours. The company, which states on its homepage that its specializes in wheelchair accesible travel, charges $130 an hour — or $1,040 for an eight-hour day. According to the “black market Disney” customers, it’s an awesome and great plan to hire a wheelchair-bound guide, because each guest with a wheelchair or motorized scooter is allowed to bring six other people with him/her to a “more convenient entrance.”

Disney Tours does officially offer a VIP guide service, complete with line-cutting fast passes, for $310 – $380 an hour, but, like, what’s the point in using your wealth to wield advantages over others if you’re not being as exploitative as humanly possible? Furthermore, according to social anthropologist Dr. Wednesday Martin, this service also functions as a status symbol amongst certain circles. You must be referred by someone in-the-know in order to use the wheelchair tour service as an able-bodied client, so Dream Tours has become a means of “affirming that you are one of the privileged insiders who has and shares this information.”

via Rich People Hire Disabled Tour Guides So They Can Cut Lines at Disney.

This makes me sick to my stomach. To think how degenerate our ruling elite have become. Absolute god-damned degenerates. I can’t wait for the revolution.

Austerity never works: Deficit hawks are amoral — and wrong – Salon.com

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In this, the fifth year of a prolonged downturn triggered by a financial crash, the prevailing view is that we all must pay for yesterday’s excess. This case is made in both economic and moral terms. Nations and households ran up unsustainable debts; these obligations must be honored — to satisfy creditors, restore market confidence, deter future recklessness and compel people and nations to live within their means.

A phrase often heard is “moral hazard,” a concept borrowed by economists from the insurance industry. In its original usage, the term referred to the risk that insuring against an adverse event would invite the event. For example, someone who insured a house for more than its worth would have an incentive to burn it down. Nowadays, economists use the term to mean any unintended reward for bad behavior. Presumably, if we give debt relief to struggling homeowners or beleaguered nations, we invite more profligacy in the future. Hence, belts need to be tightened not just to improve fiscal balance but as punishment for past misdeeds and inducement for better self-discipline in the future.

There are several problems with the application of the moral hazard doctrine to the present crisis. It’s certainly true that under normal circumstances debts need to be honored, with bankruptcy reserved for special cases. Public policy should neither encourage governments, households, enterprises or banks to borrow beyond prudent limits nor make it too easy for them to walk away from debts. But after a collapse, a debt overhang becomes a macroeconomic problem, not a personal or moral one. In a deflated economy, debt burdens undermine both debtors’ capacity to pay and their ability to pursue productive economic activity. Intensified belt-tightening deepens depression by further undercutting purchasing power generally. Despite facile analogies between governments and households, government is different from other actors. In a depression, even with high levels of public debt, additional government borrowing and spending may be the only way to jump-start the economy’s productive capacity at a time when the private sector is too traumatized to invest and spend.

via Austerity never works: Deficit hawks are amoral — and wrong – Salon.com.

Austerity Will Leave Us Crying ’96 Tears’

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Aging baby boomers may remember a 1960s rock band that sported an all-time great name. That band — Question Mark and the Mysterians — may now have a worthy rival on the name front. Make way for Reinhart-Rogoff and the Austerians.

Harvard economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff don’t make smash records. They write learned economic papers that make champions of austerity happy — and help smash the life prospects of average working families.

Austerians preach the absolute necessity of whacking away at government spending. We must, they solemnly intone, discipline ourselves to reduce government deficit and debt, no matter the pain austerity may bring us.

And austerity does bring pain. People lose access to basic services. People lose jobs. People even go hungry. But some people — extremely rich people — don’t mind austerity at all.

These affluent Americans don’t send their kids to public schools. They don’t visit public parks. They never ride public transit. These wealthy folks don’t need public services and resent having to pay taxes to support them.

via Austerity Will Leave Us Crying '96 Tears'.

The Rich Have Gained $5.6 Trillion in the ‘Recovery,’ While the Rest of Us Have Lost $669 Billion | Alternet

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May 3, 2013 |

Oh, are we getting ripped off. And now we’ve got the data to prove it. From 2009 to 2011, the richest 8 million families (the top 7%) on average saw their wealth rise from $1.7 million to $2.5 million each. Meanwhile the rest of us — the bottom 93% (that’s 111 million families) — suffered on average a decline of $6,000 each.

via The Rich Have Gained $5.6 Trillion in the 'Recovery,' While the Rest of Us Have Lost $669 Billion | Alternet.

Within the Profit Margin, the Stench of Death

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“Everywhere near the building, the stench of death was overpowering. Men in surgical masks sprayed disinfectant in the air.”

We move from tragedy to tragedy with hellish regularity.

“The scope of injuries,” Jim Yardley writes in the New York Times, “was horrifying: fractured skulls, crushed rib cages, severed livers, ruptured spleens. One survivor lost both legs. . . . A teenage girl named Sania lost her right leg. Another teenager, Anna, lost her right hand.”

This wasn’t from a bomb in Boston. It was from a collapsed building outside Dhaka, Bangladesh — another shocking sweatshop disaster, this one claiming the lives, according to the most recent count, of 385 people, with many more missing and at least 1,000 injured. Eight people, including the owner of the building, which housed five separate garment operations employing more than 3,000 people, were arrested. Workers, the Times reported, saw cracks in the walls of the building the day before it collapsed. They were told to go to work anyway.

Last November, when a fire swept through another Bangladesh garment factory, killing 112, I wrote: “It is a ruthless profit squeeze that has created workers’ hell in Bangladesh and elsewhere, and that guarantees more fires and grotesque death tolls in coming months and years.”

It is terrifyingly easy to be prescient about such matters, just as it’s easy to predict more mass shootings in the United States. The system is broken. It’s eating us alive. We do not value human life — or, for that matter, life itself — at the core of our social structure. But even the immensely powerful among us affect to value it after the fact, as rescuers pull bodies from the rubble and the survivors wail.

Thus two Western retailers, Britain’s Primark and Canada’s Loblaw, which contracted with local manufacturers in the collapsed building, have promised to compensate the families of workers killed in the disaster, according to Reuters. The heart weeps. How much is a dead Fourth Worlder worth? I can hardly wait to find out.

And while the name-brand retailers will do everything they can, PR-wise, to distance themselves from “the stench of death” in what is the worst industrial accident in Bangladesh history . . . nothing will change.

As labor scholar Beth English wrote recently on Huffington Post: “With demand high, accountability low, and profit margins thin, garment producers and retailers who source from them have little incentive to change. Citing costs and potential legal issues, major retailers rejected a plan in 2011 proposed by Bangladeshi and international unions that would have established an independent inspectorate to oversee all of Bangladesh’s factories with the power to shutter facilities deemed unsafe.”

Indeed, both Loblaw and Primark were among the retailers that did not sign the agreement, according to Nina Strochlic of The Daily Beast.

The building owner, Mohammed Sohel Rana, who was arrested while apparently trying to flee to India, said the disaster wasn’t his fault. He didn’t force the factory owners to stay open. “It was them who forced me,” he insisted, according to the Bangladesh online news site bdnews24.com, “saying they would face huge losses, and shipments would be canceled if the factories were closed for even one day.”

“In an assembly line with so many middlemen, who’s to blame?” Strochlic writes. Bangladesh’s $20 billion garment industry employs 3.2 million people, she notes. “But in the finger pointing after every disaster, little progress is made to fix the issue, as companies often blame corrupt government inspectors or factory owners, who blame companies for the pressures of a rigorous supply schedule.”

via Within the Profit Margin, the Stench of Death.

“Fix the Debt” CEOs Enjoy Taxpayer-Subsidized Pay – IPS

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Thanks to a “performance pay” tax loophole, large corporations in the United States today are routinely deducting enormous executive payouts from their income taxes. In effect, these companies are exploiting the U.S. tax code to send taxpayers the bill for the huge rewards they’re doling out to their top executives.

During the three-year period 2009-2011, the 90 publicly held corporate members of the austerity-focused “Fix the Debt” lobby group shoveled out $6.3 billion in pay to their CEOs and next three highest-paid executives.[i]

These 90 Fix the Debt member firms raked in at least $953 million — and as much as $1.6 billion — from the “performance pay” loophole between 2009-2011. The exact full value of corporate windfalls from this loophole will remain impossible to compute until we have more complete mandated disclosure for executive compensation.

Top executives at these same Fix the Debt companies are aggressively advocating cuts to government programs that benefit the ordinary American taxpayers subsidizing their compensation. Many of these executives have also added to America’s debt and deficit by using tax havens and other accounting tricks to have their corporations avoid paying their fair tax share.

via "Fix the Debt" CEOs Enjoy Taxpayer-Subsidized Pay – IPS.

Too-Big-to-Fail Takes Another Body Blow | Matt Taibbi | Rolling Stone

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Minds are changing on Too Big to Fail. A month ago, it was just something in the air. Now, it looks like we’re headed for a real legislative confrontation. And man, is the finance sector freaking.

Last week, on April 24th, Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio and Louisiana Republican David Vitter introduced legislation called the “Terminating Bailouts for Taxpayer Fairness Act of 2013 Act,” or the “Brown-Vitter TBTF Act” for short. The bill is a gun aimed directly at the head of the Too-Big-To-Fail beast.

via Too-Big-to-Fail Takes Another Body Blow | Matt Taibbi | Rolling Stone.

Only Little People Pay Taxes | Mother Jones

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“We don’t pay taxes. Only the little people pay taxes,” billionaire hotelier Leona Helmsley famously (and allegedly) sniffed. She wasn’t entirely correct: The superrich do still pay taxes. The wealthiest 1 percent of taxpayers pay 32 percent of all income tax collected by the federal government.

But the superrich don’t pay as much as they used to—and thanks to a combination of tax cuts and preferential tax policies, their tax obligations can be less demanding than the so-called little people’s. In fact, the very wealthiest Americans’ tax burden has been steadily dropping for years, even as they’ve enjoyed astounding income growth not seen by the vast majority of Americans.

via Only Little People Pay Taxes | Mother Jones.

Daily Kos: Leak of Identities & Emails of Rich Hiding *$32 Trillion* Offshore

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Maybe I missed it, but I haven’t seen this posted on Daily Kos, and I figure it’s pretty relevant. This’ll be short because 1) I’m not a diary writer and 2) I really don’t know what to say. My jaw is still hanging down around my balls.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/…

Looks like the rich are sheltering up to $32 TRILLION DOLLARS in cash in the British Virgin Islands… but now we’ll be finding out who they are since a leak has given us their names and emails.

via Daily Kos: Leak of Identities & Emails of Rich Hiding *$32 Trillion* Offshore.