Page 1 of 2 Washington's killer touch
By Julian Delasantellis
For their groundbreaking 1976 rock musical Evita, Andrew Lloyd Webber
and Tim Rice meant for a character called "Che" to be the piece's narrator;
when the work arrived at London's West End and New York's Broadway, it was
self-evident who "Che" was supposed to be.
With his shaggy dark hair and beard, and his de rigueur urban revolutionary
uniform of multi-pocketed vest and dark beret, this was an obvious
representation of Che Guevara, the ferociously handsome Argentinean
revolutionary whose dreamy eyed poster was almost a required furnishing in the
1970s coed dormitory rooms of the most expensive colleges originally financed
by the
most avaricious of capitalist robber barons in the West.
But more than just a simple narrator, Che, who in actuality had been executed
by Central Intelligence Agency-directed Bolivian army units in 1967, was meant
to be the musical's Greek chorus and conscience, looking at the Eva Peron story
with a mixture of dread, contempt and morbid, obsessive fixation. Here he was,
like a good part of the Latin American left, eventually giving their lives in
vain attempts to obtain power, while all Evita had to do to rule was to fix her
hair and wear designer clothes.
By the time of the 1996 movie adaptation of the play, starring Madonna as Evita
and Antonio Banderas as Che, the movie's American producers gave Che a shave
and a haircut - none of that silly socialist nonsense for an American audience
looking more for a matinee idol than a Maoist. Still, among the many passages
from Che's lines that made it into the movie was this, a lament of the world
left still befuddled by the fact that it needs to learn more Oscar de la Renta
and less dialectical materialism.
Sung at the curtain's rise, at Evita's 1952 death, Che looks back on her life.
She
had her moments, she had some style.
The best show in town was the crowd
outside the Casa Rosada crying, "Eva Peron."
But that's all gone now.
As soon as the smoke from the funeral clears,
We're all gonna see and how, she did nothing for years.
... just like the governments of the West, especially free market capitalism's
head cheerleaders, the United States and Great Britain. As the first 10 years
of the 21st century are now concluded, a rough consensus seems to have been
reached on a name for that first decade - the "oughts" - although some prefer
the "naughties"; whatever your choice, both capture what was actually
accomplished in these societies during this period - naught, or nothing.
You've probably heard the statistics by now. No advance of any kind in any
major US or British stock index over the period; the best performer being the
US Dow Jones, down about 9% over the decade, while the US NASDAQ continues to
flail about in the crater created by the dot-com crash, down 44%. Add in the
effects of inflation, which rising stock prices are supposed to hedge, and
things look much, much worse.
Net new jobs created in the USA? Zip. Net advance in real workers' wages? You
gotta be kidding. Almost 15 million more people in the country without health
insurance than when the decade commenced. If you, as many did think, the oughts
would be the decade to make money in real estate rather than in stocks, one
would hope you managed to get scuba training before your dives into the now
hopeless underwater wreckage of American housing finance.
But the funny thing is that it hardly looked as if this was so at the time. As
the decade was passing the Anglo-Saxon world by, the overwhelming impression
was of being on a madly broken carousel, accelerating beyond all design or
reason, watching the world pass by in a blinding blitz of shiny bling, fast
Bentley's, and all that in-the-know idolatry of Frank Gehry's absolutely
gorgeous Guggenheim in Bilboa. Three American movies, The Dark Knight, The
Lord of the Rings - The Return of the King and Pirates of the Caribbean
- Dead Man's Chest, all topped the US$1 billion worldwide box-office
marks - as did Avatar as 2009 gave way to 2010.
It seemed like the deal-makers who had created the great media conglomerates -
the Viacoms, the News Corps, the Time Warners and the GEs - were all succeeding
in their apparent desire to cross-promote their products on so many retail
platforms that takeover specialists would be required at all heterosexual
romantic moments to sign off that the possible progeny's DNA would be fully
marketable and brandable into cereal varieties, new fast-food menu items, and
mobile-phone rate plans ...
A key measure as to whether any organization or organism will be able to
sustain itself into the future is the balance of what it consumes versus what
it produces; any entity that becomes addicted to consuming more than it
produces must inevitably starve to death. Here, the statistics for the US and
Britain are not promising. At no point during the past decade did either sell
more than what it bought from the world.
In terms of fiscal policy, what the government takes in as revenue as opposed
to what it sends out in spending, and with the exception of a couple of years
at the commencement of the oughts, when government coffers were flush with
capital gains taxes paid from sales of dot-com bubbled stocks, both governments
have been in deep fiscal deficit since, especially as the full brunt of the
current global recession took force.
Do anything long enough, and often enough, and it's natural that you get good
at it. That's what is happening this year - one of the cleverest tricks
discovered by the American government to live beyond its means is coming full
due this year. Wait until you hear about it, it'll just kill you.
In actuality, that's exactly what it'll do.
The novel and two film adaptations of Richard Condon's The Manchurian Candidate
speculate on the existence of secretive, malicious powers able to bend men's
souls against their wills to suit their destiny - these were a communist
psychiatrist called Yen Lo in the book and first movie, the multinational
conglomerate Manchurian Global in the second.
But secretive organizations able to bend wills is not science fiction. The
polling divisions of the US Republican Party, and to a much lesser extent the
Democratic Party, do it every single day.
Around the time of the early 1990s, Republican pollsters found they could get
far more political traction campaigning against something they called a "death
tax", the now common government charge against the value of large estates
before being passed on to beneficiaries, instead of its more standard
categorizations as the "estate tax" or "inheritance tax". Those two
appellations caused middle-class Americans to make great flying lunges for the
TV remote control on hearing them, while "death tax" seemed to hit home on an
almost visceral level, as if it meant that black-jacketed, machine-gun-carrying
government thugs were going to be scouring the cupboards to seize recently
deceased Grandma's rhubarb pie recipe
The truth was far different. Over time, legislative income exemptions from the
estate tax, along with reductions in the actual rate, meant only those
beneficiaries of US taxpayers standing to inherit estates in the upper fifth
percentile in value of all estates were paying the tax. With the new George W
Bush administration taking over amid a recession in 2001, and with even the Fed
chief, Alan Greenspan, famously and fatuously asserting that he was now worried
about excess government surpluses, it was open season on taxes, all taxes, and,
in this, the estate/death tax was hardly one to be spared.
In the bill formally known as "The Economic Growth and Tax Relief
Reconciliation Act of 2001", already planned reductions to the estate tax for
2006 would be accelerated and broadened. From 2001 to 2009, the maximum
applicable estate tax rate would be lowered to 45%; the amount exempted from
any tax would rise from the first $675,000 of inheritance to the first $2
million.
But here's the kicker. For this year, 2010, the estate tax is gone. If you die
this year, no matter how big your estate is, your inheritors will get every
single last penny of it.
But woe be to those, or the beneficiaries of the will of those, whose breath
hangs out until January 1, 2011. For them, the tax will return, at a 55%
maximum rate with the first one million of inheritance exempted. Talk about
family values.
What this means is extraordinary.
Let's say that it's 11 months from now, the year 2010 grows old and grey;
likewise in some retirement center or hospital in some gated community in
Hilton Head, South Carolina, or Coral Gables, Florida, does the focus of the
exercise. As the year is wheezing its way out of existence, so is Grandpa
Moneybags Carnegie Sourpuss Sr, sitting on top of a $20 million fortune earned
through a lifetime of stinginess, pennypinching and saving on dentures by
wearing his only very infrequently, meaning that any memory of him includes the
hollowed out cheeks instantly recognizable as belonging to the guy always
yelling at the kids riding by on their bikes.
But the dilemma is not really that of Moneybags; he will learn his fate soon
enough. Who really has to make the fateful decision are the heirs to that $20
million estate.
To make the example easier, let's say that there is only one heir. Moneybags
II. Should his dad pass on prior to 11:59:59 pm on December 31, MII gets the
entire estate free and clear of any federal estate tax. However, if the breath
hangs in there after the ball drops in Times Square to open 2011, when the
estate tax returns, MII will get the estate minus what the US Internal Revenue
Service will take out of it back at the 55% rate, possibly almost $10.5
million.
This could certainly lead to some interesting family vignettes.
It's late in December of this year. Moneybags II is talking to his wife:
"Dear, I think it's time we took little Newt [their five-year-old son] to see
his grandpa before its too late."
"Oh, Boopsie. Is that such a good idea? Your father is so sick, and with the
doctors still not getting a handle on little Newt's ADHD; after all, we still
haven't gotten the bill for all the damage he caused to the nuclear power
station on the school trip "
"Nonsense. We'll just sit little Newt down, right besides the spot where the
plug on my father's life support machine goes into the wall. He'll be fine."
But it doesn't even have to be this hard. The number of Americans who now die
not from their "natural causes" but from an agreement between doctors and
family members to discontinue some kind of life support, even if it's only
hydration or nutrition, is American miracle medicine's dirty little secret. How
much more so under these circumstances - where family members whose loved one
dies next year will be rolling lemons, but this year, straight sevens.
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