In Cartoons: War Bonds, Advertising & War Propaganda
War & Glory: Selling War Through The Ages... Illustrated IN Cartoons!
Ducktators: An Ancient Cartoon With Modern Lessons
The following cartoon has a great overview of infrastructure, how taxes are involved, how war affects freedom etc. Adopted for the Air Force in 1954 it has more value today than ever before to provide a much needed overview of how capitalism under a proper Law (or Constitution) is supposed to be. What follows after this first cartoon is a step by step cartoon illustration of how war breaks freedoms, develops a single industry and has led to the current state of affairs of "corporate socialism" or ;bailouts for the rich' and 'on the street' for the rest.
Cartoon: It's Everybody's Business (1954)...
The above cartoon outlines the basic structure of religious and economic freedom that the United States had in the 1950's. The structure is somewhat different now which this post will attempt to illustrate...
Freedom of choice
War cracks freedoms
Freedoms must be replenished
War makes taxes to high for a healthy economy
Important resources get misdistributed and have to be fixed after the war time is over
Taxes (& war bonds) were needed to build war machines for World War 2 against the "axis" powers...
Donald Duck: The Spirit of '43 (1943)
Fell in the public domain because it was made for the American government and all films made for or by the government of the U.S.A. are in the public domain.
All resources are used to develop war machines (in the case of this cartoon, planes)...
Note: The dogfight in the above cartoon was more of a World War 1 and World War 2 thing. Nowadays, planes don't do dog fights (at the speed of sound that's kinda ridiculous anyways).
This next cartoon was made in 1946. It's a Navy Department training video for pilots in Navy Aircraft Carriers...
Notice that the last thing the cartoon says is "Keep The Fleet To Keep The Peace". In Other words, by this time keeping the exceedingly expanded army due to world war 2 became necessary with the commencement of the cold war. Now the war machine could be toned down but the war factories, whose owners had by now been labeled/confirmed as patriots, had the ears of the government and the government and possibly the people probably felt a debt owed to them. This is how crony capitalism begins (seeking to keep certain industries going at war time levels during peacetime... eventually creating a war based economy).
News Reports confirming this image...
The man once regarded as the world's most powerful banker has bluntly declared that the Iraq war was 'largely' about oil.
Appointed by Ronald Reagan in 1987 and retired last year after serving four presidents, Alan Greenspan has been the leading Republican economist for a generation and his utterings instantly moved world markets.
In his long-awaited memoir - out tomorrow in the US - Greenspan, 81, who served as chairman of the US Federal Reserve for almost two decades, writes: 'I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil.'
In The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World, he is also crystal clear on his opinion of his last two bosses, harshly criticising George W Bush for 'abandoning fiscal constraint' and praising Bill Clinton's anti-deficit policies during the Nineties as 'an act of political courage'. He also speaks of Clinton's sharp and 'curious' mind, and 'old-fashioned' caution about the dangers of debt.
Greenspan's damning comments about the war come as a survey of Iraqis, which was released last week, claims that up to 1.2 million people may have died because of the conflict in Iraq - lending weight to a 2006 survey in the Lancet that reported similarly high levels.
More than one million deaths were already being suggested by anti-war campaigners, but such high counts have consistently been rejected by US and UK officials. The estimates, extrapolated from a sample of 1,461 adults around the country, were collected by a British polling agency, ORB, which asked a random selection of Iraqis how many people living in their household had died as a result of the violence rather than from natural causes.
Previous estimates gave a range between 390,000 and 940,000, the most prominent of which - collected by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and reported in the Lancet in October 2006 - suggested 654,965 deaths.
The economics of this situation is in this hip-hop video, towards the end...
Hayek VS Keynes Part 2 ...
Fight of the Century, Keynes vs. Hayek from Seo on Vimeo.
Note: $1.2 trillion for an outdated plan that doesn't work! = "In fact, the entire $1.2 trillion dollars that the sequester is supposed to save could be realized by cutting one unneeded, wasteful boondoggle: the $1.5 trillion F-35 fighter program. The F-35, billed as the next generation all-purpose military fighter and bomber, has been an unmitigated disaster. Its performances in recent tests have been so bad that the Pentagon has been forced to dumb-down the criteria. It is overweight, overpriced, and unwieldy. It is also an anachronism: we no longer face the real prospect of air-to-air combat in this era of 4th generation warfare. The World War II mid-air dogfight era is long over" http://the-free-foundation.org/tst3-3-2013.html
At the end of the above video, where you see cronies lighting cigars with money i.e. the people giving each other money while starving the rest of the country is explained now...
How war and oil combined together....
Propaganda Cartoon: Destination Earth (1956)
In this
corporate-sponsored cartoon, Martian dissidents learn that oil and
competition are the two things that make America great.
The above was made in 1956. There were 1000's of oil companies. An INCREASING Standard of Living. Oil was constantly being found. Competition was important. That was before the subsidies for oil companies while making billions in profits. That was before the CIA moved to Iran for oil and set up a puppet Shah that tortured it's citizens. Then the Iranian Revolution happened. People in the States heard about the second but not the first. The war economy continues under the consciousness of the American public as uncovered by PBS in 1987. Now there are only a few oil companies...
Eventually, from 1000's of companies that were supposed to exist according to the promise of America from World War 2 onwards, this is the structure that emerged that is clearly not democratic or fair...
This lack of fairness leads to gross inequalities which many have taken to calling "Corporatism" or "Socialism for the Rich". i.e. stuff like this...
More detail into the US Corporate Oil industry here:
Background:
Oklahoma: Oil, Coal, Fracking, Earthquakes, Tsunami's, & More
Environmental Solutions Collage: The Climate Change Debate Is Over... Now Lets Prepare 4 Floods
Documentary: Fuel
3. Energy/Oil (Documentary "Fuel") - Director Josh Tickell takes us along for his 11 year journey around the world to find solutions to America's addiction to oil. A shrinking economy, a failing auto industry, rampant unemployment, an out-of-control national debt, and an insatiable demand for energy weigh heavily on all of us. Fuel shows us the way out of the mess we're in by explaining how to replace every drop of oil we now use, while creating green jobs and keeping our money here at home. The film never dwells on the negative, but instead shows us the easy solutions already within our reach.
Quick Reference:
A. Evidence On Fracking...
Fracking DID cause ELEVEN earthquakes in Ohio last year
How fracking might have led to an Ohio earthquake
Ohio Earthquake Likely Caused by Fracking Wastewater
News Report: "In what the Pennsylvania governor says will 'level the playing field for gas exploration', a controversial bill has been passed, rendering previous zoning laws void"
Mother Jones On Fracking:
There are plenty of reasons to worry about fracking—groundwater contamination, methane leaks, that flaming tap water thing. But can it really cause earthquakes? That's the question the US Geological Survey set out to answer after a spate of tremors in the Midwest—an area not usually known for earthquakes—alerted scientists to the possibility that some of them might be man-made.
Seismic activity in the Midwest started increasing around 12 years ago but picked up significantly in the past few years, says seismologist Bill Ellsworth, the lead author of a new USGS study examining potential links between fracking and earthquakes in the region. Since 1970, the baseline for earthquakes in the Midwest measuring above a 3.0 hovered at around 21 per year, but beginning in 2001, that number began to rise. There's been a "remarkable increase" in the past few years: The number of 3.0-plus earthquakes rose from 29 in 2008 to 50 in 2009, then to 87 in 2010, and in 2011 to a staggering 134. Something unusual was going on, but what? As Ellsworth and his colleagues at USGS ask in the study, "Is this increase natural or manmade?" And if it's man-made, is fracking—which has ramped up in the region in the past several years—to blame?
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B. On Keystone Pipeline
Citizen voices (rights vs oil company profits - as there are no long-term civilizan benefits)
1. Citizens don't want their property destroyed: "See the land owners and citizens of Nebraska as they voice thier concerns about the Trans Canada XL Pipeline which could affect the protected Sandhills and drinking water supply"
2. The Keystone Pipeline creates ONLY a few temporary jobs (i.e. it's a pipeline... how many people do you need to manage the pipes in your house? None): "The State Department said in a report to Congress yesterday that the pipeline would create 5,000 to 6,000 construction jobs during the two years needed to build the project, based on labor expenses TransCanada included in its application."
A. Sex For Oil Scandal At Interior Department (CBS/ AP) Government officials handling billions of dollars in oil royalties engaged in illicit sex with employees of energy companies they were dealing with and received numerous gifts from them, federal investigators said Wednesday. The allegations of bad behavior involve 13 government employees in Denver and Washington, reports CBS News investigative correspondent Sharyl Attkisson. Those accused are workers who sell U.S. mineral rights to oil companies. Such sales are one of the government's biggest sources of revenue besides taxes. But the Inspector General for the Interior Department says they rigged contracts, and engaged in illegal moonlighting, drugs, sex and gift-taking from oil company representatives, according to three reports released Wednesday. The reports revealed startling allegations including that an employee attended a so-called "treasure hunt" in the desert with all expenses paid by an oil producer, and that a former supervisor - who bought cocaine from a colleague then boosted her performance award - had sex with subordinates, and steered government contracts to an outside business where he also worked, Attkisson reports.
B. Billions Missing From U.S. Indian Trust Fund
In his testimony before Congress, John Echohawk, director of Native American Rights Fund, called it "yet another serious and continuing breach in a long history of dishonorable treatment of Indian tribes and individual Indians by the United States government." Arizona Senator John McCain, the chairman of the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs, bluntly called it "theft from Indian people." These men were describing the single largest and longest-lasting financial scandal in history involving the federal government of the United States. With no other recourse left at their disposal, NARF, along with other attorneys, filed a class action lawsuit in federal district court on June 10 on behalf of more than 300,000 American Indians. The suit charges Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt, Assistant Interior Secretary of the Interior for Indian Affairs Ada Deer and Secretary of the Treasury Robert Rubin with illegal conduct in regard to the management of Indian money held in trust accounts and managed by the Bureau of Indian Affairs. If the lawsuit's claims are correct, and there's an overwhelming body of evidence that suggests they are, then the federal government has lost, misappropriated or, in some cases, stolen billions of dollars from some of its poorest citizens.
XL Pipeline, Fracking and Oil Scandal: Koch company declared 'substantial interest' in Keystone XL pipeline: Document filed with Canada's Energy Board appears to cast doubt on claims by Koch Industries that it has no interest in the controversial pipeline.
Some news reports of extreme corruption in the Department of the Interior;
Sex For Oil Scandal At Interior Department (CBS/ AP) Government officials handling billions of dollars in oil royalties engaged in illicit sex with employees of energy companies they were dealing with and received numerous gifts from them, federal investigators said Wednesday. The allegations of bad behavior involve 13 government employees in Denver and Washington, reports CBS News investigative correspondent Sharyl Attkisson. Those accused are workers who sell U.S. mineral rights to oil companies. Such sales are one of the government's biggest sources of revenue besides taxes. But the Inspector General for the Interior Department says they rigged contracts, and engaged in illegal moonlighting, drugs, sex and gift-taking from oil company representatives, according to three reports released Wednesday. The reports revealed startling allegations including that an employee attended a so-called "treasure hunt" in the desert with all expenses paid by an oil producer, and that a former supervisor - who bought cocaine from a colleague then boosted her performance award - had sex with subordinates, and steered government contracts to an outside business where he also worked, Attkisson reports.
Days Before Scandal, Interior Got Ethics Award Oh, the irony. Just before the Department of Interior's inspector general released reports that laid bare the oil-and-sex scandal in the department's oil royalties office this week, Interior won an annual award from the federal Office of Government Ethics, The Post's Mary Pat Flaherty and Derek Kravitz report. The inspector general said Wednesday that federal officials in the Mineral Management Service's royalty-in-kind program allegedly were plied with alcohol and expensive gifts from industry representatives, and in some cases had sex and did drugs with them. The Denver-area office takes in roughly $4 billion each year in oil and natural gas reserves from companies drilling on federal and Indian land and offshore.
Oil Industry and Government connections
(Image is edited from here - Found this image through Bill Moyers.com)
Solyndra Scandal: 5 More U.S. Energy Scandals
2005: Halliburton and Iraq: The Texas oil giant reportedly overcharged $108 million for work in Iraq, but reports didn't leak until after the 2004 election. Former Vice President Dick Cheney, who was once chief executive, came under fire for his connection to the company. Nonetheless, Halliburton continued to be awarded government contracts, such as in 2006 when subsidiary Kellogg Brown & Root received a $385 job to build immigration detention centers in the U.S. for the Department of Homeland Security.
Over the last eight years, President Bush, Vice President Cheney and their Republican allies in Congress have fallen over themselves to give oil companies huge tax breaks. They have repeatedly blocked meaningful progress toward energy independence and they have shown no interest in taking on the unchecked speculation that has created extreme volatility in energy markets and pushed oil and gas prices upward. Yesterday, addressing the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Vice President Cheney said, "We have to recognize that there isn't anything out there that is going to get us away from a hydrocarbon economy anytime in the near future. There really isn't anything on the horizon that today is economic, relative, for example, to basic, good old oil and gas." Not surprising coming from an oil man, and the man who sat down with oil company lobbyists behind closed doors to write the current failed policy. But those remarks show the bankruptcy of the Republican vision on energy. It's a vision of the status quo, invested in the problem, not in finding a solution. And it just doesn't cut it.
Note: A closed door meeting on a ‘failed’ policy that put Halliburton at number one and helped Exxon have the largest profits EVER. I wonder how many other failed policies have helped the oil companies?
The following is from an old book called Unequal Democracy
“The recession of 1974-1975 was triggered by a massive oil price shock engineered by the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC). The real price of oil increased by 140% in 1974, throwing the industrial sector of the United States and other advanced economies into a tailspin. Accidental president Gerald Ford entered the White House in the midst of a major economic crisis not of his own making.
With all the evidence of corruption above, the following connections between General Electric and it's (initial) lack of taxes makes complete sense, as it's part of the government so obviously it will create policy that will benefit them...
With so many corporations so firmly embedded in the government, it's funny the kind of tax breaks for multi-billion dollar profit companies you hear about. Jon Stewart explains...
Conclusion:
Crony Capitalism has existed for a long time. So energy companies have been able to get government officials to pass legislation that helps them make more money. So they get tax breaks, loopholes, subsidies while the rest of the economy suffers and they make huge profits (and in some cases, record breaking profits).
Top Ten Tax Avoiders
[Senator Bernie Sanders] BURLINGTON, Vt., March 27 - While hard working Americans fill out their income tax returns this tax season, General Electric and other giant profitable corporations are avoiding U.S. taxes altogether.
With Congress returning to Capitol Hill on Monday to debate steep spending cuts, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) said the wealthiest Americans and most profitable corporations must do their share to help bring down our record-breaking deficit.
Sanders renewed his call for shared sacrifice after it was reported that General Electric and other major corporations paid no U.S. taxes after posting huge profits. Sanders said it is grossly unfair for congressional Republicans to propose major cuts to Head Start, Pell Grants, the Social Security Administration, nutrition grants for pregnant low-income women and the Environmental Protection Agency while ignoring the reality that some of the most profitable corporations pay nothing or almost nothing in federal income taxes.
Sanders compiled a list of some of the 10 worst corporate income tax avoiders.
1) Exxon Mobil made $19 billion in profits in 2009. Exxon not only paid no federal income taxes, it actually received a $156 million rebate from the IRS, according to its SEC filings. (Source: Exxon Mobil's 2009 shareholder report filed with the SEC here.)
2) Bank of America received a $1.9 billion tax refund from the IRS last year, although it made $4.4 billion in profits and received a bailout from the Federal Reserve and the Treasury Department of nearly $1 trillion. (Source: Forbes.com here, ProPublica here and Treasuryhere.)
3) Over the past five years, while General Electric made $26 billion in profits in the United States, it received a $4.1 billion refund from the IRS. (Source: Citizens for Tax Justice hereand The New York Times here. Note: despite rumors to the contrary, the Times has stood by its story.)
4) Chevron received a $19 million refund from the IRS last year after it made $10 billion in profits in 2009. (Source: See 2009 Chevron annual report here. Note 15 on page FS-46 of this report shows a U.S. federal income tax liability of $128 million, but that it was able to defer $147 million for a U.S. federal income tax liability of $-19 million)
5) Boeing, which received a $30 billion contract from the Pentagon to build 179 airborne tankers, got a $124 million refund from the IRS last year. . (Source: Paul Buchheit, professor, DePaul University, here and Citizens for Tax Justice here.)
6) Valero Energy, the 25th largest company in America with $68 billion in sales last year received a $157 million tax refund check from the IRS and, over the past three years, it received a $134 million tax break from the oil and gas manufacturing tax deduction. (Source: the company's 2009 annual report, pg. 112, here.)
7) Goldman Sachs in 2008 only paid 1.1 percent of its income in taxes even though it earned a profit of $2.3 billion and received an almost $800 billion from the Federal Reserve and U.S. Treasury Department. (Source: Bloomberg News here, ProPublica here, Treasury Department here.)
8) Citigroup last year made more than $4 billion in profits but paid no federal income taxes. It received a $2.5 trillion bailout from the Federal Reserve and U.S. Treasury. (Source: Paul Buchheit, professor, DePaul University, here, ProPublica here, Treasury Department here.)
9) ConocoPhillips, the fifth largest oil company in the United States, made $16 billion in profits from 2006 through 2009, but received $451 million in tax breaks through the oil and gas manufacturing deduction. (Sources: Profits can be found here. The deduction can be found on the company's 2010 SEC 10-K report to shareholders on 2009 finances, pg. 127,here)
10) Over the past five years, Carnival Cruise Lines made more than $11 billion in profits, but its federal income tax rate during those years was just 1.1 percent. (Source: The New York Times here)
Sanders has called for closing corporate tax loopholes and eliminating tax breaks for oil and gas companies. He also introduced legislation to impose a 5.4 percent surtax on millionaires that would yield up to $50 billion a year. The senator has said that spending cuts must be paired with new revenue so the federal budget is not balanced solely on the backs of working families.
"We have a deficit problem. It has to be addressed," Sanders said, "but it cannot be addressed on the backs of the sick, the elderly, the poor, young people, the most vulnerable in this country. The wealthiest people and the largest corporations in this country have got to contribute. We've got to talk about shared sacrifice."
Related Blog Posts:
Arundhati Roy on Iraq War’s 10th: Bush May Be Gone, But "Psychosis" of U.S. Foreign Policy Prevails http://www.culturesocietyblog.com/2013/03/arundhati-roy-on-iraq-wars-10th-bush.html
Breaking: Iraq Spies Lies Exposed! & Tony Blair Ignores His Own Spy Agencies! http://www.culturesocietyblog.com/2013/03/breaking-iraq-spies-lies-exposed-tony.html
Bush's Legacy: Dahr Jamail Returns to Iraq to Find Rampant Torture and a Failed State Living in "Utter Devastation" http://www.culturesocietyblog.com/2013/03/bushs-legacy-dahr-jamail-returns-to.html
Bush's Legacy: Ten Years Later, U.S. Has Left Iraq With Mass Displacement & Epidemic of Birth Defects, Cancers http://www.culturesocietyblog.com/2013/03/bushs-legacy-en-years-later-us-has-left.html
Bush's Legacy: New Iraq Oil Law To Open Iraq’s Oil Reserves to Western Companies http://www.culturesocietyblog.com/2013/03/bushs-legacy-new-iraq-oil-law-to-open.html
Bush's Legacy: Massacres, War Crimes, Neo-Nazi's, Murder & Terrorism http://www.culturesocietyblog.com/2013/03/bushs-legacy-massacres-war-crimes-neo.html
BBC-Guardian Exposé Uses WikiLeaks to Link Iraq Torture Centers to U.S. Col. Steele & Gen. Petraeus http://www.culturesocietyblog.com/2013/03/bbc-guardian-expose-uses-wikileaks-to.html
Democracy Now! Iraq War Timeline Recaps a Decade of Independent Reporting on Occupation and Protest http://www.culturesocietyblog.com/2013/03/democracy-now-iraq-war-timeline-recaps.html
CNN: Drones killing innocent Pakistanis, U.N. official says http://www.culturesocietyblog.com/2013/03/cnn-drones-killing-innocent-pakistanis.html
The Halliburton Agenda: The Politics of Oil and Money http://www.culturesocietyblog.com/2013/03/the-halliburton-agenda-politics-of-oil.html
The Iraq Effect (2007): New Study Finds 600% Rise in Terrorism Since US Invasion of Iraq http://www.culturesocietyblog.com/2013/03/the-iraq-effect-2007-new-study-finds.html
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