Archive: Opinions

To the Editor,

"Tompkins Ranks 36 of 1822 for Taxes,” your August 13 article, should have been designated an editorial.  Two issues render it unfit to be called news.

First, you state your source as "the Tax Foundation, a nonpartisan tax research group based in Washington, D.C."  A rigorous discussion of economic study methodology will no doubt bore most people, but it should be noted that data can be manipulated through careful selection and exclusion procedures, to produce a desired result.  Such manipulation has already been successful in the South and a significant piece of the West, and is now being aimed at the East, in a continuing effort to minimize or eliminate government resistance to a multi-national corporate agenda. 

I believe that a history of The Tax Foundation will convince people that it is anything but "nonpartisan.” In fact, it represents the interests of corporations and wealthy individuals, with the purpose of destroying the middle class, the champion of democracy, and ultimately government, the only entity capable of standing up for the average American in the face of a methodical assault by the super rich.

The Tax Foundation was founded in 1937 in response to the Roosevelt's administration New Deal, by Alfred P. Sloan, chairman of General Motors, Donaldson Brown, VP Finance of General Motors, William S. Farish, president of Standard Oil and Lewis H. Brown, president of Johns Manville Corporation.

General Motors, during the 1930's lead up to war, had what was later described (generously, in the opinion of many) as having a questionable relationship with the Nazi government in Germany.  William S. Farish, who replaced John D. Rockefeller as Standard Oil president, was a close friend of Hermann Schmitz, chairman of I.G. Farben, the notorious arms manufacturer of the Third Reich, that brutally utilized concentration camp slave labor to produce some of its products.  Farish hired a PR executive to write pro-Farben and pro-Nazi propaganda for U.S. consumption.  Karl Lindemann, a Farish hired Standard Oil executive, was authorized to write checks to Heinrich Himmler, chief of the Nazi SS, on a special Standard Oil account.

Lewis Brown, as president of Johns Manville, oversaw the asbestos scandal at the firm, which was alleged to have prioritized profits over the health of employees.  He was quoted in federal court testimony as having stated, "... that Unarco (another defendant in the asbestos law suits) managers were a bunch of fools for notifying employees who had asbestosis..." and he further added in the same third party testimony that he ".would let them work until they dropped dead..." because "we'd save a lot of money that way..."  Brown also later founded the American Enterprise Institute, a well known conservative think tank, that strives to place its people in influential government positions to further its conservative causes.

The modern funding sources for The Tax Foundation are the Koch Foundation and the Earhart Foundation.  The Koch brothers (pronounced coke) head the largest privately owned company in the U.S., with 70,000 employees and annual sales of $100 billion, dealing primarily in gas, oil and especially coal mining.  They are personally worth at least $3 billion.  Their father, Fred Koch, was a founding member of the ultra conservative John Birch Society that leading conservative William Buckley ex-communicated from the Republican Party due to the society's extreme views.  The Koch brothers founded the ultra conservative Cato Institute, another "think tank" for far right philosophies and the distribution of "information" that will support public acceptance of that philosophy.  Koch Industries and the Koch Foundation are heavy political contributors to any politician willing to further their causes, and the firm and foundation have been involved in numerous PR campaigns ranging from tobacco support to global climate change denial.

The Earhart Foundation is best known for its support of neoconservative economists, most notably Friedrich von Hayek, a well known and celebrated (by the right) economist.  Earhart was also a key supporter of the American Enterprise Institute, whose philosophy is addressed above.  AEI, by the way, was a major supplier of personnel to the George Bush administration and the organization provided PR and legal consulting support for the "war on terror" and the war with Iraq.

Given this history, do you or does anyone else, seriously propose that The Tax Foundation is non-partisan?  Present their findings if your philosophy so dictates, it's your publication, after all, but do not insult the community of Lansing by calling The Tax Foundation "non-partisan."

The second issue is your ending quote from Scott Pinney, "Country, county, whatever it is, I think it's easy," he says.  "Smaller government."  Mr. Pinney would likely support noted neoconservative Grover Norquist whose philosophy can be summed up in two sentences: "I don't want to abolish government.  I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub."  Acceptance of this philosophy in Lansing would no doubt significantly add to Mr. Pinney's personal wealth.

You failed to mention in the article that Scott Pinney derives his primary income from development in Lansing (he owns a paving business and through his wife, a gravel business), and that a significant portion of the community and a significant portion of Town officials have opposed the unregulated growth that Mr. Pinney craves.

When government is reduced to an onlooker, we get the aftermath of Katrina, the gulf disaster, mining disasters, pollution and global climate change, middle class shrinkage, reduced Social Security and Medicare coverage, and high-volume hydraulic fracturing in the Marcellus shale.  Then people scream in unison, “Where is the government to protect us?”  My response: look in the bathtub that some voters endorsed in exchange for lower short-term taxes.

Alternatively, we might ask Mr. Pinney and The Tax Foundation, "Why aren't average people earning enough wages for their many hours of hard work, to pay the taxes that provide us all with the government services we need and want?"  Perhaps this bottom up (as opposed to trickle down) philosophy might even end up generating more advertising revenue for the Lansing Star, since small businesses are primary beneficiaries of a bottom up economic philosophy and a strong middle class.  Big business has always favored monopolistic environments and feudal based societies for their profits—feudal societies being far riper for exploitation.  A middle class invariably upsets that picture.

Given the bias of the The Tax Foundation and Mr. Pinney, any claim to responsible journalism would have mandated several opposing views.  Barring those views, one would hope in future that you would, at the very least, fully disclose source information or simply label such a piece as pure opinion.  We are your neighbors and expect some measure of fair play.

David M. Dubin
Lansing, NY

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