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AMERICA ADOPTS RUSSIAN SOCIALISM

T.J. Rodgers, the flamboyant chief executive of Cypress Semiconductor writes: "Let's be frank: The choice to take money from citizens to pursue the government's 'good ideas' is socialism pure and simple, which has been consistently destructive to the economies of those countries that have pursued it. America has moved 35% of the way from its no-tax origins toward the 100% wealth control of the Soviet Union."

"Taxing the rich to fund poorly conceived government programs is self-destructive: It does nothing more than take money and investment decisions away from proven moneymakers and job producers and give them to Washington amateurs," he says.

Americans who resent paying income taxes so that our socialist government can then use them against the peoples' interests, or hand them out to rich multinational companies as corporate welfare, have just got some unlikely allies. T.J. Rodgers, the flamboyant chief executive of Cypress Semiconductor, and 61 other top Silicon Valley executives, signed their names to an ad entitled, "Declaration of Independence: End Corporate Welfare." The ad ran in the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) earlier this month. And today (June 23), the Journal also published Rodgers' OpEd piece, "America's Corporations Should Swear Off Port."

As the title suggests, Rodgers argues against government handouts to companies which make hundreds of millions of dollars in profits. Not just because it is a waste of taxpayers' money. But also because such subsidies make the recipient companies WEAKER competitors. And he backs it up with examples, both from the U.S. and the Japanese computer industry.

But what the article's headline obscures is the second major issue which Rodgers raises - taxing of personal incomes of Americans, which the Cypress' CEO seems to think is unconstitutional. "The first Americans hated taxes; the Constitution limited government and, originally, banned levies on personal income," he writes.

Indeed, the U.S. Constitution ceased being what it was envisaged to be by the Founding Fathers, when in 1913 Congress approved the taxation of personal incomes. And in December of the same year, the international bankers completed the all-important round two of their hijacking of America, when Congress approved the privately-controlled central bank - the Federal Reserve Board.

For 137 years (1776-1913), American presidents had resisted the pressure from international bankers to do onto the U.S. what they had already done in Europe - cease control of governments by financial means. For 137 years, American presidents had acted in the interests of the people. Until the international bankers dug up and dusted off an obscure Ivy League school president (Woodrow Wilson, a Democrat), put him in the pin-striped suit, and split the Republican vote by backing Teddy Roosevelt's Progressive Party against the incumbent Republican President William Howard Taft (who said he would veto the bill creating the central bank).

Meanwhile, "it is immoral and un-American for the government to tax working people, who struggle to make ends meet, to subsidize corporations (or anything else)," Rodgers also said in his Wall Street Journal piece.

"Eliminating corporate welfare is a moral imperative," he adds. "We should not be asking senior citizens and the poor to tighten their belts while our government actually subsidizes the sale of American chardonnay to the French."

Indeed. If the above lines weren't written by a corporate CEO, one might have thought they were ideas of a social worker. But Rodgers' motive is not entirely altruistic.

No wonder, therefore, that the American Dream is being eroded. Since 1976 annual GDP growth per capita (expressed as a 20-year rolling average) has steadily declined, to 1.5% from 2.5%, Rodgers points out. Why? In part because federal, state and local taxes now consume a whopping 35% of our national output, Rodgers argues. Current peacetime spending is higher than the 29% peak during World War I!

A typical argument FOR corporate welfare is that Japan and Europe subsidize their corporations, so the U.S. should do the same in order to remain competitive. But the facts prove this rationalization false, Rodgers says. Japan's chip market share peaked at 53% in 1986, but has fallen to below 30% this year. Meanwhile, the U.S. is now back in first place with more than 50% market share.

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