"I'm Jealous of Cuba" An Interview with Gore Vidal

[donsu]

http://www.counterpunch.com/

By ROSA MARIAM ELIZALDE

Havana.

Gore Vidal was in Cuba for five days, following a frantic and packed program that took him from the University of Computer Sciences, the Latin American School of Medicine, the University of Havana's main campus, to the National Ballet School, from Old Havana to the park in honor of John Lennon where a bronze replica of the lead Beatle is found, seated as if he were a nearby neighbor.

For the brief span of an hour, Gore Vidal agreed to chat with us for this interview. He is the most erudite American writer of his generation and the most corrosive critic of the present Republican administration. But Vidal does not simply speak to us. He interprets what he says. Modulating his voice, he brings to life George W. Bush, Eisenhower, FDR, an obscure Pentagon bureaucrat, and even himself, mocking all of them with the irony contained in a visage that belies his 81 years of age.

He is more interested in being remembered as an historian than as a novelist. Although his works easily triple his age (we can find in his bibliography novels, tragedies, comedies, memoirs, essays, film and television screenplays), he has a singular obsession: the loss of the Republic. "The main bit of wisdom that I learned from Thomas Jefferson, and he from Montesquieu, is that we cannot maintain both a Republic and an Empire simultaneously. We have been rapacious imperialists since the Mexican War in 1846."

-snip-

(this is a very long interview so I'll only post one paragraph)

(GV):

There was a headline in one of the big American papers the other day that the army was begging the administration for money. They don't have the money to make fools of themselves in Baghdad. They've got to raise it somewhere; we have no tax revenues because all the rich people have been exempted from tax as well as corporations. It used to be that 50% of the revenues of the Federal government came from the taxes on corporate profits. Its about 8% now, they've just eliminated it. Corporations don't pay tax and rich people don't either. So they've not only helped all their rich friends who now have enough money to finance the Republican Party with billions of dollars so they can tell lies about anybody in the country and pretend that the patriots of the country are traitors. It's a very good trick both economically for them and it's a bad trick on us real Americans, we don't like it. We've lost the Bill of Rights; we lost the Magna Carta, on which all of our liberties are based for 700 years. No, it's not been an amusing time.

-snip-
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read the whole thing

[Ellis Wyatt]

1. I completely agree about the corporate taxes

No idea why corporate taxes have basically been eliminated for some reason. And I see no reason to pander to them, since they don't even vote. But I think he does himself a disservice in making that point, when he combines the corporations with the rich.

I can't understanding how on earth he could say that the "all of the rich people have been exempted from tax" and the "rich don't |pay tax|". It's just not true. Maybe he means in comparison to some other countries, or to our history, but he didn't make that clear, and so it just seems like he's making an absolute statement that the "rich don't pay any taxes", which obviously insn't true. I can understand him saying that the rich "don't pay enough" or "they should pay more", but saying that "all of the rich people have been exempted from taxes" just makes it easy to discount the rest of what he says.

Don't the richest 1% pay something like 30%+ of the taxes, but only make about 10%-15% of income? (I'm doing this from memory, don't have time to search the CBO, but I'm pretty sure it's something like that)

[Lydia Leftcoast]

2. No, it's more like they both earn and pay about 30%

The rich always whine about taxes. Billionaire rock stars move out of the UK complaining about taxes, even though they still have millions of pounds leftover to buy cocaine with every year.

The Republicans have convinced a lot of people that lowering income taxes on corporations "creates jobs." Nothing could be farther from the truth. Corporations are not taxed on every penny they take in but on what's left over after they've met their business expenses.

Say a corporation takes in a million dollars per year from sales and investments. Unless they're really stupid, they do not pay taxes on that million. They first subtract such things as wages, salaries, and benefits; the wholesale price of whatever they sell, costs of buildings and vehicles, utilities, advertising, travel, office and factory floor supplies, payments to outside contractors, and countless other things it takes to run a business. They then pay taxes on whatever is left over after all those subtractions. If they have a bad year, they may pay little or nothing.

Business are therefore different from individuals in that they can deduct a lot more things from their pre-tax income. Most people have never run a business, so they don't understand this, and they think that income taxes are preventing the poor, long-suffering corporations from hiring people or developing new products.

A company can reduce its taxes by hiring more people, opening a new plant, or developing and launching a new product. Is it any coincidence that American companies, relieved of heavy federal income tax (and state income tax, too, in many cases), are concentrating on making profits by cutting jobs, closing plants, and letting other countries surge ahead in R&D?

[Ellis Wyatt]

4. But that makes no mathematical sense

We have a progressive tax code in the states. As your income increases, your tax rate increases. Therefore, the rich are going to account for a higher % of tax revenues than they do as a % of income.

So, fine, I'll check and get the facts. According to the IRS (http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-soi/04in06tr.xls), as of 2004 (most recent data), the top 1% of income earners (over $328k) accounted for 19% of income in the US, but paid 37% of the taxes.

I agree with all your points about corporations, absolutely. I'm not debating that point or Vidal's point at all. Corporations should be subject to more tax. I see no reason why their tax burden has fallen so much in recent years. I was merely saying that Vidal's incorrect and/or misleading statement about the rich not paying any taxes only clouds his correct and valid point about corporations.

[Mikey929]

7. Hidden costs

The problem with higher corporate taxes is that the corporation just passes the cost along to the consumer in higher prices. It's as simple as that. If the governemnt tomorrow said corporations will pay an extra 10% in taxes, you can bet that prices will be about 10% higher very soon.

Higher corporate taxes are just a higher cost of doing business, no different than if you sell lemonade and suddenly the price of lemons shoots up 10%. You're going to start charging the public more for lemonade to recoup your costs.

So part of me thinks if we try to get corporations to pay more money in taxes, it's just going to make the cost of goods more expensive.

I haven't figured out the solution to all of this yet. Still working on it. :)

[Judi Lynn]

3. Very interesting interview. Hope he'll be around for many more years. Thanks, donsu. n/t

[oblivious]

5. His comments on the origin of the Patriot Act were a bit of an eye-opener.

RM: According to your own words, "the Oklahoma City bombings in 1995 are explained according to a law of Physics: there is a reaction to every action". You were speaking about the hatred spread by the United States around the world and in its own country. Was this a prophecy?

GV: Well I wouldn't directly connect it with what happened on 9/11. What happened after McVeigh did what he did, except that we now know that he really didn't do it by himself, somebody else was involved, quite a few people were involved. But essentially the Clinton administration ­and we now look back on it as being a very American one, in the best sense of the word-drew up his Draconian rules about terrorism in the United States just to get revenge on the ghost of Timothy McVeigh.

And that became the USA Patriot Act. After 9/11 happened the Bush Administration found these papers, from the Clinton administration in the Justice Department. They activated all of them and that is the USA Patriot Act. It has just about removed our Constitution. It just annulled everything about sacred liberties and that was the result of McVeigh.

[Laughing Mirror]

6. " ... We became overnight a banana republic without any bananas to sell.

And that is our problem at the moment."


Thanks for posting. Wonderful history lesson interview.