Fracking Above and Below

       The really interesting thing about the state of Washington’s primary last weekend was that the entire democratic congressional delegation—all eight of them--supported Hillary Clinton who proceeded to lose to Bernie Sander 72.7 to 27.1 percent.

The deeper vibrations from this suggest that “the establishment” most actively opposing the Sanders candidacy is not the big corporation, the billionaire class or the

Republicans. It’s the Democratic Party.

        At least sometimes we know the reason for earthquakes. In Oklahoma, Texas and Kansas, it’s fracking.   As an aside: according to Scientific American, “Until 2008 not a single earthquake had ever been recorded by the U.S. Geological Survey from the Dallas–Fort Worth area….Since then, close to 200 have shaken the cities and their immediate suburbs.  “Statewide, Texas is experiencing a six-fold increase in earthquakes over historic levels. Oklahoma has seen a 160-fold spike in quakes….In 2014 the state’s earthquake rate surpassed California’s. [Anna Kirchner, Scientific American, March 28, 2016]

         Political earthquakes are another matter. In last Saturday’s Washington State democratic results do we understand why Sanders’ won the youth vote by margins of 80 percent?  Economist Robert Kuttner describes the ground-shattering inequality that mainstream democrats have difficulty seeing. “Yes there is an uptick in entrepreneurship, but for every young person who creates a company like Amazon, there are tens of thousands working in its warehouses.”

”most of the unreliable jobs are not on-demand gigs [like Uber and Task Rabbit]. Rather, they are other forms of lousy “contingent” work. That category includes temping, contract work, on-call workers, workers hired by staffing agencies, workers with no job security, and inferior forms of conventional employment like adjunct college professors who can make less than minimum wage, Ph.D.’s and all. (So much for the education cure.)

        Not exactly a science magazine, ”The Economist,” admits that today

...opportunity is seen as the preserve of the elite: two-thirds of Americans believe the economy is rigged in favor of vested interests. And optimism has turned to anger. Voters’ fury fuels the insurgencies of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders and weakens insiders like Hillary Clinton. [March 26, 2016]

         Some details one wishes Bernie Sanders and his supporters would talk more about have been described by Financial Times reporter, Virginia Houlder, who reported on  Google and Amazon strategies to defray citizens of the tax payments they should have been receiving to help run their governments. “They” are merely the latest big international companies to come under fire for adroit tax planning. “The tech group chose to pay money back to shareholders by raising $17bn of debt rather than repatriate some of the huge reserves of cash it holds overseas, which would have resulted in it writing a big cheque to the US Internal Revenue Service.”

         The move had stoked the growing concern over corporate tax planning. As a financial crisis became a fiscal crisis and then a political crisis, public anger has risen over a flawed international system that allows billions of dollars, pounds and euros of profits to go untaxed.[Vanessa Houlder, Financial times May 3, 2013]

No wonder there’s no money for education or universal health care. While more up-to-date reports in the press this week contain the good news that “a global crackdown on tax avoidance includes the big U. S Tech firms, like Linkedin and Yahoo, pharmaceuticals, insurance and asset management firms like Blackstone and Carlyle.”   

         This came, of course, not as a progressive celebration but an estimated loss warning for large corporations.  The headline about this in the San Francisco Chronicle (3/28/16) reported that the “Global tax crackdown will damage earnings.”  The underlying “frack” making the earth tremble is the OECD report that it is costing governments $240 billion in tax lost to avoidance ploys such as the booking of profits in tax havens. 

        We may not know if the democratic Congressional delegation in Washington State is leading the charge against companies using tax avoidance ploys or just warning them so they can take defensive action.  But somewhere between the energy companies’ love of fracking for oil, and corporate love of control of the American political process, more earthquakes are coming.

        The churches could begin to recite their own parts in this drama. Studying and praying about the fract-like quakes that are slaughtering the innocents around the world, and in their own neighborhoods too. Moving into a public liturgical mode.