Tim DeChristopher: The Boomers "Failed" Us

By Sarah van Gelder, YES! Magazine

31 May 14

 

First the anger, then the love—overcoming generational anger to find the courage required for the difficult work ahead.

n the morning of December 19, 2008, Tim DeChristopher woke up knowing he would somehow protest an auction of oil and gas leases on federal lands in Utah’s red rock country. How he would make his views known, though, was a mystery. When an official at the auction asked him if he was there to bid on land parcels, he agreed. That seemed like a good place to start.

At first, he bid on parcels to increase their prices—it didn’t seem right to him that the leases were going for as little as $2 an acre. But after more than half the leases had been acquired by oil and gas companies, he began bidding to win. He acquired the rights to 14 parcels—a total of 22,500 acres for $1.8 million—before he was escorted out of the auction, and held and questioned by federal officials.

His civil disobedience galvanized activists concerned about the climate crisis and the fate of public wilderness lands. Some, including members of his Unitarian Universalist Church, formed the climate justice action group Peaceful Uprising.

On April 1, 2009, DeChristopher was indicted on two felony counts: interfering with a federal oil and gas leasing auction and making false statements. He pled not guilty on both counts and rejected the offer of a plea bargain, so he faced 10 years in prison and a fine of $750,000. His supporters raised cash to cover the first payment on the leases he’d won. The auction of those lands—initiated under the Bush Administration—was later ruled illegal and rescinded. But DeChristopher was found guilty. He served 21 months in prison and paid a fine of $10,000. He was released in April 2013 and is now attending Harvard Divinity School.

Tim DeChristopher was born in West Virginia, where his mother was an early opponent of mountaintop removal. He worked as a wilderness guide for at-risk youth and was studying economics at the University of Utah when he took part in the protest that made him famous.

Rolling Stone called DeChristopher “America’s most creative climate criminal.” He was nominated for the 2011 Utahn of the Year by The Salt Lake Tribune, named a 2011 Visionary of the Year by Utne Reader, and was one of the “YES! Breakthrough 15” in 2012. The documentary Bidder 70 features his story, and he’s been interviewed by, among many others, Bill Moyers, Amy Goodman, and David Letterman.

Sarah van Gelder: What was the moment like for you when you realized you were going to go to jail?

Tim DeChristopher: Once I decided to start winning parcels of land at the auction, I pretty much knew I was going to prison. That moment was extremely liberating. It was the first moment that I felt like my actions were finally in line with what I felt was the scale of the crisis.

van Gelder: I read that you decided to start bidding when you saw a friend burst into tears.

DeChristopher: That was one of the things that pushed me to the edge. I was feeling outraged that most of the parcels were going for $10 or $12 an acre. Some were going for as little as $2 an acre. And I saw toward the back of the room someone I knew from my church, and she started crying. I think what drove her to tears was watching the inhumanity of it and the coldness of it—that there was absolutely no respect for what was being lost. The depth of her emotion justified the depth of my emotion; it made me feel like I wasn’t crazy for feeling outraged.

van Gelder: Your description of a group of people calmly and bureaucratically proceeding to destroy something of immeasurable value reminds me of the phrase “the banality of evil.”

DeChristopher: That certainly would’ve fit the room.

That’s something that has always bothered me in the discourse around climate change; those who are choosing their own profits over people’s lives say, “Well, it’s just business.” They make it cold and calculating.

It’s only “just business” for the people making profits. For a young person looking at climate change, it is personal. It is an older generation trading our lives for their own short-term interests, whether that’s fossil fuel executives trading our lives for profit or whether that’s baby boomer liberals trading our lives for their own comfort and convenience because they don’t want to take the risk of fighting back.

van Gelder: That’s provocative! Do you want to expand on that?

DeChristopher: I’ve never seen a place in this movement or in the discourse around climate change where it’s considered appropriate for young people to express their anger at old people. But it’s just under the surface.

I don’t think we can have a healthy dialogue around climate change until young people are able to express that anger in an honest way, just like I don’t think we ever could have had really honest and productive dialogues around race without the expression of black rage. Certainly we need more than just rage, and on its own, it’s not productive. But if it’s not ever addressed, I think it’s hard to move forward in a trusting way.

van Gelder: What is it that enrages you?

DeChristopher: I’ve met very few baby boomer liberals who understand what it means to be a young person facing the reality of climate change. It means that we’re never going to have the opportunities that our parents’ and our grandparents’ generations had, and that we’ve got this massive burden weighing on our future.

We constantly hear baby boomers saying to young people: “Stopping climate change is going to be the challenge of your generation.”

Well, that’s not really true. We’ve known about climate change for 20 years, during the time when baby boomers were holding power in this country. Stopping climate change was the challenge of the baby boomer generation, and they failed because it would’ve meant making sacrifices and putting their children’s and grandchildren’s generations ahead of their own. They chose not to do that.

Certainly a lot of the blame falls on fossil fuel executives and politicians, but a lot of it falls on comfortable liberals who changed their light bulbs, bought organic, and sat back and patted themselves on the back. Young people don’t have the luxury of feeling like that’s enough—like they can go to their graves content that they drove a Prius and voted Democrat, so they don’t have to feel guilty about this catastrophe.

van Gelder: That may be objectively true, but if you look at most young people, they’re doing as little as the boomers did.

DeChristopher: If you look at the masses in the middle, that’s true. But the masses are never who change things. I think you have to look at the people who are engaged and paying attention to the world, which is a minority.

I don’t know that there are necessarily more young people who are more awake and engaged, but I think those who are awake and engaged are looking at things in a different way than generations before, realizing that changing our consumer habits is not enough. We are going to be making sacrifices, both now in fighting this injustice and throughout our lives in dealing with the impacts of it.

van Gelder: I’d like to go back to the moment when you stood in front of the judge and you said, “This is what love looks like.” Can you bring yourself back to that moment and recall what you were feeling then? Were you feeling love?

DeChristopher: To some extent, yeah. That was the first chance I had to speak freely in the court. And so I spoke for probably half an hour. That last line, “This is what love looks like,” is the line I stole from a speech Chris Hedges gave when he was getting arrested outside of the White House, in 2010, I think. He said, “This is what hope looks like.”

My speech was directed at the judge. I was saying, “I’m not looking for your mercy. I’m looking for you to join me.”

But in a way, the judge wasn’t really my audience. I was speaking to a much wider public about why I was there.

van Gelder: Were you trying to get through to the jurors?

DeChristopher: No, the jurors had been gone for months at that point. I was never allowed to speak freely to the jurors.

van Gelder: Do you think that if you’d had a chance to talk directly to the jurors you could have gotten through to them?

DeChristopher: Yeah, I think that’s a possibility.

van Gelder: What would you have told them if you’d had a chance?

DeChristopher: There are things about myself and my case I would’ve wanted them to know. The biggest one is that the auction was later overturned and ruled illegal. That was something we were absolutely not allowed to tell them.

Another was the fact that we offered to mail the Bureau of Land Management the money as a payment for the leases, and they wouldn’t take it.

And we weren’t allowed to talk about climate change.

Also, I would have liked to explain the reasons going through administrative channels for objecting to the auction felt futile. Two months before the auction, the House Resources Committee, chaired by Raul Grijalva, issued a report about how the BLM under the Bush administration was taking volunteers from the oil and gas industry to process the written objections to proposed leasing parcels.

van Gelder: And you felt that the jury had the right to choose what is called “jury nullification”—to actually go against the specifics of the law.

DeChristopher: And that would’ve been even more important: to remind the jury that their role is to protect our fellow citizens from the government.

Juries are not just there to take orders from the government and to do whatever the government wants. It’s the opposite. They were created because our founding fathers were leery of too much power in the hands of government officials. That’s why we have human beings, not computers, doing this job. We need jurors to use their conscience. That is the role of a citizen. A citizen should always use their conscience in all their civic duties.

One of the pivotal moments for me came during the jury selection when the judge called each juror, one at a time, into his chambers and asked them if they would do whatever he told them to do, even if it violated their conscience. And unless they said they were willing to do what they thought was morally wrong, they weren’t allowed on the jury.

That really clarified for me the power of conscience as one of those key factors that determines which road we’re going to go down—whether we respond to the climate crisis by turning against one another in fear or turning toward one another in love. I saw one juror after another say, “Yes, your honor, I’ll do whatever you tell me to do, even if I think it’s morally wrong.” And when I saw that, I saw how some of the great mass atrocities in history can happen.

But I also saw the prosecutor freak out. I saw him panicked and terrified at the notion of citizens using their conscience when they’re exercising their civic duties. And just as powerful as understanding how atrocities can happen was seeing a U.S. attorney, who has the full power of the United States government behind him, terrified at the power of conscience.

I saw that on the one hand if people let go of their moral authority, any atrocity is possible. But on the other hand, when people hold onto their conscience and the shared moral agency of their community, there’s no institution and no power that can’t be affected by that.

That’s part of why I’m going to divinity school. I see this question of whether or not we have faith in our own moral authority as a spiritual issue.

van Gelder: So how do you see your role? Once you’ve graduated, will you become a minister in the Unitarian Universalist Church? Do you see your role as helping people acquaint themselves with their own moral calling?

DeChristopher: I’m not sure. I think if I had those answers, I wouldn’t be in divinity school. I’d just go do it. I’m there because I have an understanding of what the challenge is, and I know that whatever my path is, it needs the kind of spiritual foundation that I’m getting in divinity school.

In terms of connecting people with their own moral authority, I think that’s deep, slow work that’s not done alone. I think that’s something that’s done in a community.

van Gelder: I grew up in the Quaker tradition, which asks that of each person. There’s no minister—no authority to turn to—so each person is expected to figure out for themselves what action to take within the context of a spiritual community. But it tends to be slow work. It took many Quakers years to decide that they were going to release the slaves they owned and oppose slavery overall. But once they figured that out, they became the backbone of the abolition movement. It’s a quandary. We don’t have a lot of time.

DeChristopher: We’re also not starting at the beginning—there is a strong critical mass of people who see the crisis that we’re in and are committed to resisting it and fighting for a healthy and just world. So that part of the choice has been made. It’s just building the discipline then of getting to the point where responding is automatic.

van Gelder: But do we want our responses to be simple and automatic? Our moral quandaries are quite complex. I’m reminded of Thoreau’s response when Emerson asked what he was doing in prison, and Thoreau answered: “The question is what are you doing out there?” Because we could all be in prison every single day of our lives for the atrocities we’re allowing to go by. Each one is a choice.

DeChristopher: True. And I think we need to spend more time understanding where that line is for us—what we’re going to tolerate and what we’re going to absolutely not accept. With a better idea of where that line is, we can respond more quickly, and our conscience can kick in faster.

van Gelder: You’re at Harvard. You’re at this center of power and the elite. And you’re at the divinity school there—a center of spiritual inquiry, which you mentioned is ecumenical. What is this like for you, coming right out of prison?

DeChristopher: The experience of the Harvard Divinity School is very different than the experience of Harvard. The experience of being at Harvard is just saturated with privilege in a really disgusting way.

van Gelder: What is that like for you?

DeChristopher: It’s disorienting.

I’m probably one of the few people at Harvard who has spent time being homeless and in prison, and to now be surrounded by that level of privilege at times makes me feel guilty and at times just feels like a heavy responsibility.

People refer to “Harvard Yard,” the old area of Harvard, and they’ll talk about a class in one of those buildings, and they’ll say, “It’s on the Yard.” And when I first started hearing that, I thought “Man, a year ago I was in prison, and when people would say ‘on the yard,’ that meant something very different.”

The divinity school has a very different feel than the rest of Harvard. It’s a far more humane place. In the rest of Harvard, knowledge is a commodity that can be used for our purposes, and used against others. Whereas in the divinity school, it feels like knowledge is a relationship; it is something that connects us to others.

van Gelder: I realize there’s a lot of uncertainty, but as you look ahead, what do you think you will be doing next?

DeChristopher: I’ve gotten involved with some folks from the Lakota Nation in Pine Ridge, South Dakota, to plan a unity concert in September in the Black Hills. This concert is an effort to try to create some trust across cultural divides in areas where trust has been repeatedly violated, so that we can unite to be more effective in the struggle for a healthy and just future.

Also, there’s a case coming up in May of Jay O’Hara and Ken Ward, who anchored a lobster boat in front of the Brayton Point coal plant south of Boston, blockading a coal shipment. They’re going to trial in May. They might actually have the opportunity to argue in court that they acted to prevent the greater harm of climate change.

I’ve also been in some conversation with Jonathan Moylan in Australia who did a Yes Men-style action there around a coal mine and issued a fake press release that caused a lot of bad PR for the coal company and the bank that was funding it. He is now facing 10 years in prison, and he’s going to trial in June. I don’t know the Australian legal system, but I do know a bit about using the trial as an organizing opportunity.

van Gelder: Looking ahead further, how do you think the climate crisis will affect our future?

DeChristopher: I think it’ll cause massive food shortages and disruptions of our agricultural system.

At the same time, we’re looking at an ever-increasing number of migrants whose homes are under water and who are moving into areas that are already stressed—because of droughts, because of food shortages, because of a generally unworkable economic model. These communities are already insecure, and they’ll have waves of other people coming in who are completely insecure themselves, and we can see the conflicts that can come out of that.

I think there’ll be plenty of opportunities for those in power to pit people at the bottom against one another, to say: All those hardships you’re facing, those are the people who are causing them—that group, whether it’s migrants, unions, religious groups, whatever it may be. And if we’re not ready for that as a society—if we’re not committed to a path of cooperation—then there’s a potential for us to create a really ugly society that could bring out the worst in us. People feeling insecure can be driven to do really ugly things to their fellow human beings.

I think there’s also the potential for the opposite to happen. People in times of hardship can turn toward one another, and hardship can bring out the best in people. And those hardships, those shortages, could be an opportunity to reflect on what’s really important to us and to create new bonds.

Look at the difference between the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and of Hurricane Sandy. After Katrina, what filled the void was militarism, police power, and violence. And immediately following that was corporate power and the privatization of public resources.

After Sandy, the first thing that filled the void was the people power of Occupy, and they were in every neighborhood. So people power created new bonds and even healed old wounds.

One of the stories that came out of Occupy Sandy was of a young guy in Occupy who shoveled out the basement of a guy who turned out to be the cop who had beaten him up in Zuccotti Park.

The cop was like, “Why would these horrible kids—these people we were told to beat up—why would they be shoveling out my basement?” It became an opportunity for a real connection: The kid could express his values and his worldview and the reasons why what they were doing in the park was the same thing as what they were doing shoveling out his basement.

I think a lot of people looked at Occupy and said, “Why are they spending so much time sitting around talking?” Completely unproductive, right? But they built networks. They built relationships. They spent a lot of time articulating their vision and values and being reminded that this is their community—this is their society. When Sandy happened, we realized, that’s what they were doing. They were getting ready for whatever lay ahead.

That’s why I think activism right now is so critical. The only thing inevitable about our future is that the status quo cannot continue. We know things are going to change. But we can go down very different roads from this point.

There’s an opportunity now to build a society in the ashes of this one that is much more in line with our values. There’s the opportunity for this disruption to be sort of a mass reflection where we realize that basing society on greed and competition was not the best way to go about things.

Maybe we can do better. But that’s not inevitable any more than the ugly path is inevitable, which to me is why our engagement now is really, really critical.

Joseph E. Stiglitz: Let's Stop Subsidizing Tax Dodgers

By Bill Moyers, Moyers & Company

31 May 14

 

 

 

new report by Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph E. Stiglitz for the Roosevelt Institute suggests that paying our fair share of taxes and cracking down on corporate tax dodgers could be a cure for inequality and a faltering economy.

This week on Moyers & Company, Stiglitz tells Bill that Apple, Google, GE and a host of other Fortune 500 companies are creating what amounts to “an unlimited IRA for corporations.” The result? Vast amounts of lost revenue for our treasury and the exporting of much-needed jobs to other countries.

“I think we can use our tax system to create a better society, to be an expression of our true values.” Stiglitz says. “But if people don’t think that their tax system is fair, they’re not going to want to contribute. It’s going to be difficult to get them to pay. And, unfortunately, right now, our tax system is neither fair nor efficient.”

BILL MOYERS: This week on Moyers & Company, Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz.

JOSEPH E. STIGLITZ: Our democracy is now probably better described as one dollar, one vote than one person, one vote. We have a tax system that reflects not the interest of the middle. We have a tax system that reflects the interest of the one percent.

TRANSCRIPT

BILL MOYERS: Welcome. Avoiding taxes has become a hallmark of America’s business icons; Apple, Google, GE, and many more of the Fortune 500. The nation’s largest corporations are sitting on more than $2 trillion in cash while revenue from corporate income taxes have plummeted from just below 40 percent in 1943 to just below 10 percent in 2012. Government and big business have colluded to create what’s tantamount to an “unlimited IRA” for corporations.

That’s not my term, although I wish I had thought of it, because it explains so much about what’s gone wrong in a country where some 20 million workers who would like a full-time job still can’t get one. Yet the upper one percent of the population takes home a staggering 22.5 percent of America’s income while their effective federal income tax rate has dropped.

No, the phrase was coined by Joseph Stiglitz, a man eminently worth quoting, a Nobel Prize winner and one of the world’s most influential economists.

Currently he’s president of the International Economic Association. Former chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors under President Bill Clinton, and the author of best-selling books that have shaped worldwide debates on globalization, income inequality, and the role of government in the financial marketplace. Now he’s written one of his shortest but most important works: this white paper, published by the Roosevelt Institute where Joseph Stiglitz is a senior fellow. It’s a mere 27 pages, but in clear and cogent prose, backed up by facts and figures, it lays out a plan that not only would reform our taxes but create jobs and strengthen the economy. I’ve asked him here to tell us about it. Welcome.

JOSEPH E. STIGLITZ: Nice to be here.

BILL MOYERS: You argue that elimination of corporate welfare, or at least its reduction, should be at the center of tax reform. Why?

JOSEPH E. STIGLITZ: Well, let me put it in a broader context. Our country needs, faces a lot of challenges. We, as you mentioned, 20 million Americans would like a full-time job and can't get one. We have growing inequality. We have environmental problems that threaten the future of our planet. I think we can use our tax system to create a better society, to be an expression of our true values. But if people don't think that their tax system is fair, they're not going to want to contribute. It's going to be difficult to get them to pay. And, unfortunately, right now, our tax system is neither fair nor efficient. Look at the tax rate paid by that one percent. It's much lower than the tax rate paid by somebody whose income is lower who works hard for a living, as a percentage of their income.

You know, Warren Buffet put it very, you know, why should he pay a lower tax rate on his reported income than his secretary? And the interesting thing that he didn't emphasize was most of his income is in the form of unrealized capital gains.

BILL MOYERS: Unrealized capital gains are not taxed as long as the owner keeps them, right, doesn't get rid of them?

JOSEPH E. STIGLITZ: That’s right. And what's even worse, if you're a corporation and you even realize the capital gains but you're abroad, you don't bring the money back home, there's still no taxes.

As long as they don't bring the money back here, it accumulates, it grows and grows and grows, and they get wealthier. But it's even worse than that. Because it means that they have an incentive to keep their money abroad.

And what does that mean? They have an incentive to create jobs abroad. And with our trade agreements, they can take the goods that are produced abroad with this tax-free money, bring it back in the United States, basically making it unfair competition with the goods produced by Americans.

BILL MOYERS: Yeah. There are several startling statements in your report. This is one of them: “our current tax system encourages multinationals to invest abroad.” And create jobs abroad, as you just said. And yet, these are people who defend their practices by saying, we are the job creators, we're the job producers. And yet, you say they have an incentive to send jobs abroad.

JOSEPH E. STIGLITZ: The whole discussion of who are the job creators, I think, has been misplaced. You know, what really creates jobs is demand--

BILL MOYERS: I spend my money to buy things.

JOSEPH E. STIGLITZ: Exactly. Americans of all income groups are entrepreneurial. You got people across our income distribution who, when there's a demand, respond to that demand. But if there's no demand, there won't be jobs. Now, the problem is that the people in the one percent have so much money that they can't spend it all. The people at the bottom are spending all of their income and hardly getting by. In fact, a very large fraction of those in the bottom 80 percent are spending more than their income. And it's part of the instability of our economy. So, the point is this inequality contribute, to which our tax system contributes actually weakens our demand.

And that's one of the main messages of my report, which is if we had a more progressive tax system, we could get a more efficient economy. Because there would be more jobs being created.

BILL MOYERS: So, these 20 million people I referred to, and you referred to in your report, who are looking for full-time work but can't find it, if they had that work, they'd be spending their money. They're not going to send it to the Cayman Islands, right. JOSEPH E. STIGLITZ: Exactly. And they're going to be paying taxes. Because they don't have the opportunities for tax avoidance that the people who have the Cayman Islands and can use these unlimited IRAs and other ways of tax avoidance. You know, they don't keep the money in the Cayman Islands because the sunshine makes the money grow better. They put their money there because the lack of sunshine, the way of tax avoidance--

BILL MOYERS: Dark money, money in the shadows, money now going into our political process, as you know so well, to reinforce this tax code.

JOSEPH E. STIGLITZ: That's right. Reinforce the tax code, which has led America to be the country with the highest level of inequality of any of the advanced countries.

BILL MOYERS: Give us a working definition for the laity of corporate welfare.

JOSEPH E. STIGLITZ: Well, this was an idea that I began talking about when I was serving as chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers--

BILL MOYERS: Twenty years ago.

JOSEPH E. STIGLITZ: --twenty years ago. And everybody was talking about how much money you were giving to the poor people. It wasn't, if you actually looked at the amount of money, it wasn't that much. But we said, well, you're also giving away a lot of money to rich corporations, directly and indirectly. Most of the indirect way is through the tax system. So, for instance, if you give special tax provisions for oil companies, so they don't pay the full share of taxes that they ought to be paying, that's a welfare benefit.

Lots of other provisions in our, hidden in our tax code basically help one industry or another, that can't be justified in any economic terms. And, so, that's where we coined the term "corporate welfare." It's caught on. And because it says it's a subsidy, but not a subsidy, help going to a poor person, which is where welfare ought to be going, but going to the richest Americans, going to our rich corporations.

BILL MOYERS: So, we have a tax code that encourages people to-- encourages companies to send their profits abroad, to send jobs abroad, and to reward owners of their company whose money may not come back to the United States?

JOSEPH E. STIGLITZ: It doesn't make any sense, you might say. And the fact it doesn't, you know, one of the reasons I wrote the paper was, you know, there's a lot discussion going on about we have a budget of deficit. And we have to slash this, and slash that, and cut back education, and cut back research, things that will make our economy stronger, cut back infrastructure.

And I think that's counterproductive. It's weakening our economy. But the point I make in this paper is it would be easy for us to raise the requisite revenue. This is not a problem. This is not as if it's going to oppress our economy. We could actually raise the money and make our economy stronger. For instance, we're talking about the taxation of capital. If we just tax capital in the same way we tax ordinary Americans, people who work for a job, who pay taxes we pay on wages.

If we eliminate the special provisions of capital gains, if we eliminated the special provisions for dividends we could get, over the next ten years, over, you know, approximately $2 trillion. And those are numbers according to the CBO. And so, we're talking about lots of money.

BILL MOYERS: The figures make sense to me. But the politics doesn't. Because these are the people, once again, who dominate our system with their contributions to the politicians who then have no interest in changing a system that rewards their donors.

JOSEPH E. STIGLITZ: We have this vicious cycle where economic inequality gets translated into political inequality. It gets translated into rules of the game that lead to more economic inequality, and which allow that economic inequality to get translated into evermore political inequality. So, my view, you know, the only way we're going to break into this viscous cycle is if people come to understand that there is an alternative system out here.

That there is an alternative way of raising taxes, that we are not really faced with a budget crisis. It's a manmade crisis. You know, when we had the government shutdown, we realized that that was a political crisis. That wasn't an economic crisis. And the same thing about our budget crisis, you know. It's not that we couldn't raise the revenues in a way which actually could make our economy stronger. We can.

If we just had a fair tax system, to tax capital at the same rate that we tax ordinary individuals, if we just made those people in that upper 1 percent pay their fair share of the taxes they got 22.5 percent of the income, well, let's make sure that they pay a commensurate part of our income tax, if we had taxes that would be designed to improve our environment.

BILL MOYERS: You mean by taxing pollution?

JOSEPH E. STIGLITZ: Taxing pollution.

BILL MOYERS: Carbon emissions.

JOSEPH E. STIGLITZ: A general principle that we've known for a long time, a lot better to tax bad things than good things. Rather than tax people who work, let's shift some of that burden into things that are bad, like pollution.

BILL MOYERS: You make it sound so easy. And I'm still hung up on your saying, you know, it would be easy to do these things. And yet, if they were easy, why haven't we done them?

JOSEPH E. STIGLITZ: Well, that’s the politics. The fact is that we have a political process that I won't say is broken, but is certainly not functioning the way we think a democracy is supposed to function, you know. In democracy, supposed to be one person, one vote. And there's a well-developed theory about what does that imply for the outcome of a political process?

We talk about it, called the median voter. It should reflect the middle, you know. Some people want more spending. Some people want less spending. Some people, you know, so the nature of democracy is compromise. And it's supposed to be compromise sort of in the middle. But that's not we have today in the United States. We have a tax system that reflects not the interest of the middle. We have a tax system that reflects the interest of the one percent.

BILL MOYERS: Let me cite some examples of the biggest tax dodgers. These come from the organization, Americans for Tax Fairness. Citigroup had $42.6 billion in profits offshore in 2012 on which it paid no U.S. taxes. Exxon Mobil had $43 billion in profits offshore in 2012 on which it paid no U.S. taxes. General Electric made $88 billion from 2002 to 2012 and paid just 2.4 percent in taxes for a tax subsidy of $29 billion, I could go on. Pfizer, Honeywell, Verizon, FedEx, Apple. What goes through your mind when you hear these figures?

JOSEPH E. STIGLITZ: Well, so, many things go through my mind. But, you know, one of the things is how unfair this is, and how angry Americans ought to be about this. I also think of the ethics of the question. If I were a CEO, take of a company like Apple, use the ingenuity of America, based on the internet. Internet was created, in large measure, by government--

BILL MOYERS: Right.

JOSEPH E. STIGLITZ: --by government spending. They're willing to take but not to give back. So, there's really a whole set of problems that concern it, ethics, equity, fairness, resource allocations. What they don't seem to understand is our society can't function if these large corporations don't make their fair share of contributions.

BILL MOYERS: Aren't they likely to say, though, in response, well we do this because the law permits it. This is what the system incentivizes.

JOSEPH E. STIGLITZ: Well the law does permit it. They use their lobbyists to make sure that the law gives them the scope to avoid taxes. So, this argument, oh, we're only doing what the law allows, is disingenuous. The fact is they created, their lobbyists, their lobbying helped create this law that allows them to escape taxes, pushing the burden of taxation on ordinary Americans.

BILL MOYERS: So, that's the big impact on people, right. They-- somebody has to make up the difference between--

JOSEPH E. STIGLITZ: Somebody has to make up the difference. I mean, we can't survive as a society without roads, infrastructure, education, police, firemen. Somebody's going to have to pay these costs.

BILL MOYERS: Summarizing what you say in here about your proposal, raise the corporate tax rate, but provide generous tax credits for corporations that invest in the U.S. and create jobs here. Eliminate the loopholes that distort the economy, increase taxes on corporations, the profits of which are associated with externalities such as pollution, reduce the bias toward leverage by making dividend payments tax deductible, but imposing a withholding tax. I mean, these seem so common-sensical that a journalist can understand them. But they don't get into the debate.

JOSEPH E. STIGLITZ: Yeah, well, I hope this paper will help move that along. You notice when you were listing them that these are very much based on incentives. As I said--

BILL MOYERS: Your plan is based on incentives?

JOSEPH E. STIGLITZ: On incentives that we've created a tax system that has an incentive to move jobs abroad. And what I want to do is create a tax system that has incentives to create jobs. And if you tell a corporation, look it, if you don't create jobs, you're taking out of our system, you're not putting anything back, you're going to pay a high tax.

But if you put back into our system by investing, then you can get your tax rate down. That seems to me, common sense, particularly in a time like today, when 20 million Americans need a job. When we have so much inequality and this unemployment is contributing to that inequality.

You know, in this, the first three years of the so-called recovery, between 2009 and 2012, 95 percent of all the gains went to the upper 1 percent. So, the American workers are not participating. And the reason they're not participating is there's just not enough job creation here at home. And, so, this is a way of trying to incentivize all these corporations who are sitting on all this money abroad to start using some of their huge resources, some of all those benefits that we've given them, for the benefit of the American people.

BILL MOYERS: You move in circles where you come into contact with the CEOs of these companies, many of whom are deficit hawks, you know. They keep, they’re on committees. They keep testifying in Washington. They call for deficit reduction. What do they say when you make this argument to them face to face, as you're making it to me?

JOSEPH E. STIGLITZ: Most of them are not economists. And most of them are concerned with their corporation's own bottom line and with their own salary. So, we've created a corporate system in the United States where the CEOs' pay is related to the shareholder value. The shareholder value is related to how little taxes they pay. Because if they get the taxes down, profits look high and people will pay more for their shares.

So, when they're making an argument for, let's lower the corporate income tax, let's lower taxes that I have to pay, let's expand corporate loopholes, they don't use those words. But what they're really saying is, pay me more, because if I succeed in getting Congress to do that, my pay goes up, not because I've worked harder.

I haven't invented something new. I haven't made my customers happier. I made my company more valuable by succeeding in getting provisions that allow my company to avoid taxes. And then, my shareholder value goes up, and my salary goes up.

BILL MOYERS: My conversation with Joseph Stiglitz will continue next week.

As if to prove a point, the U.S. House of Representatives, functioning these days as a legislative bordello for corporate America, is moving to extend and make permanent six separate tax cuts for big business. The whole package would come at a cost of $310 billion, virtually wiping out all the deficit reduction from last year. One of those tax credits, for research and development, already has been approved, at a cost over the next ten years of $156 billion. That’s 15 times as much as it would cost to extend unemployment benefits.

Did House Republicans offer to renew help for people out of work? Nope. They’re deficit hawks, and they said there’s no money to pay for it. Of course they could just ask their corporate friends to give the tax breaks back. But that would be asking too much, especially on the eve of the fall Congressional elections when secret or dark money from you-know-who will flow into you-know-whose campaigns like….well, like champagne on the company jet.

Yet another reminder that you need not impose fraud on people by stealth if you can succeed by law.

Next week, more on politics, taxes, and inequality with Joseph Stiglitz.

JOSEPH E. STIGLITZ: We already have a tax system that has contributed to making America the most unequal society of the advanced countries. That doesn’t have to be. We can have a tax system that can help create a fairer society— only ask the people at the top to pay their fair share.

BILL MOYERS: At our website, BillMoyers.com, we’ll link you to Joe Stiglitz’s white paper for the Roosevelt Institute. You’ll also find a list there of ten corporate tax dodgers whose names and brands we bet you’ll recognize.