The Occupation Should Be On White House Grounds

The Occupation Should Be On White House Grounds

Posted 11/18/2011 06:05 PM ET
Crony Capitalism: As the president embraces Occupy Wall Street, his favorite corporation paid no taxes in 2010 on $14 billion in profits, much of it overseas. Meanwhile, 20,000 jobs for the 99% go unfilled.

At a recent town hall meeting, Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., chairman of the House Budget Committee, reminded constituents of a story that broke earlier in the year — that General Electric paid no taxes on profit of $14 billion, $9 billion of which was earned overseas.

Ryan related how he had asked a GE tax officer the length of GE's tax filing. The tax guy said it was filed electronically but if it had been printed out he reckoned about 57,000 pages. This speaks both to the complexity and unfairness of the tax code.

The Occupy Wall Street movement, with an incoherent agenda that rails against income inequality and the evils of capitalism, ignores the fact that what we are practicing is not true capitalism, the version where businesses and entrepreneurs are allowed to compete on a truly level playing field to reap the rewards or be allowed to fail.

Instead, businesses large and small are encumbered by regulations and a byzantine tax code designed not to raise money for the needed functions of government but to reward or punish the behavior of corporations and individuals as the government sees fit.

General Electric, a "good" and "green" company that makes wind turbines instead of drilling for oil, is rewarded for successfully jumping through government hoops and gaming the system.

TransCanada, which wants to build a pipeline to bring oil from Alberta's tar sands to American refineries, is deemed a "bad" company that wants to rape the earth and give us bad air and water. It, and the 20,000 jobs it would create for the 99% by building the Keystone XL pipeline, is told to cool its heels.

President Obama embraced the OWS movement when he told ABC News: "The most important thing we can do right now is those of us in leadership letting people know that we understand their struggles and we are on their side, and that we want to set up a system in which hard work, responsibility, doing what you're supposed to do, is rewarded."

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Yet his administration does exactly the opposite with policies designed to redistribute wealth rather than create it. Its industrial policy picks winners and losers based on ideology and backs firms with unworkable business plans, like failed solar panel maker Solyndra.