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America’s top 50 corporations are reckoned to have a total of $1.4 trillion in wealth tucked away in offshore tax havens, according to a report this week by the aid agency Oxfam.

That figure is more than the total debt owed by US students –$1.3 trillion. The comparable numbers not only speak of how warped American society has become. They point to the root of the problem and how it can be fixed. A democratic lesson indeed!

The top 50 companies are headed by household names: Apple, General Electric, Microsoft, Coca-Cola, Walmart, Disney, McDonald’s and so on. If a wider list of American mega firms –the Fortune 500 –was analyzed no doubt the figure for wealth in offshore accounts would be multiples of the $1.4 trillion figure cited above.

Student debt is one of the biggest public debt sectors in the US economy, incurred by millions of hard-pressed youth who struggle through college and university by taking on usurious financial “loans”to obtain a diploma, degree or some other qualification in order to better their employment opportunities and thereby better their life chances.

Tragically though, many of these indebted students can’t even find a decent job in today’s American economy when they eventually graduate and so they end up stacking shelves, flipping burgers or answering phones at a call centre. With trillions of dollars in unpaid debt, American youth become nothing more than wage-slaves for many of the same companies that at the same time have trillions of dollars stashed in offshore tax havens.

This vicious cycle could be broken in one fell swoop. If an American government just did the decent and democratic thing by closing down offshore tax havens and compelling the corporations to pay their fair share –just like the rest of society does.

Oxfam’s report, entitled Broken at the Top, estimates that out of the $1.4 trillion in corporate wealth hidden offshore, the amount of revenue lost to federal government in taxes is some $111 billion a year. That fiscal deficit manifests in social poverty and underinvestment, including student indebtedness.

Again, the $111 billion figure has a neat, if reprehensible, symmetry. For that figure in lost revenue from tax dodging is in the same ballpark as the entire federal education budget of $154 billion a year.

In other words, every elementary, high school and third-level student in the US could have a free education system paid for by American corporate taxation. Note we are not talking about charity or philanthropy here; we are merely talking about American companies paying their legal and statutory tax rate of 35 per cent –in full.

Bernie Sanders is the only presidential contender who comes even close to this reasonable way of seeing the world. The Vermont Senator has advocated “free education”as a signature policy. Yet he has been derided by opponents, including Democrat rival Hillary ‘Goldman Sachs’Clinton, and media pundits as being “unrealistic”.

What is actually unrealistic is the way things are and have been for several decades of make-the-rich-richer policy under corporate-controlled capitalism. American society, as with other Western societies, is collapsing and dying because politicians of all stripes have cravenly pandered to the super rich. The abject poverty in thinking by American politicians in the White House and Congress has led to crushing poverty among workers, students, families and communities.

Society is falling apart at the seams from chronic unemployment or in-work wage-poverty because the pampered elite have been allowed to hollow out the wealth from society –and bung into some onshore or offshore tax haven.

How crass can you get? The notion of making the rich richer with tax breaks, loopholes and offshore havens so as to make society progress through “trickle down”and “enterprise”is snake oil. Come off it. The rich have just pocketed the wealth, stashed it away and created a dysfunctional society where students have to incur trillions of dollars of debt only to end up working in crumby jobs –all because there is no productive investment in a real economy. In short, because there is no democracy.

Like the decadence in a F. Scott Fitzgerald story, the party is over. The effervescence of immoral and ultimately destructive wealth disparity has to be leavened with democratic control and distribution. That is the only way that American society and democracy can repair and find a sustainable, progressive path.

Pandering to the rich –as the political establishment incorrigibly is programed to do –is a dead-end. A socialist alternative to the corporate-bidding that has characterized both of the big parties is the only way forward.

When the corporate politician-puppets, pundits and media say “unrealistic”–the clarion call in response is to point to the obscene amount of wealth that is siphoned off into tax havens.

The corporate barons have inverted the rallying call of the American revolution. Instead of “no taxation without representation”, the new oligarchs want all the representation without paying any tax at all. They then funnel their unearned wealth into faceless, unelected lobbyists and political campaign funds to ensure that the rules of the game become even more fixed in their favor –so that they grow even more absurdly rich while the rest of society becomes turned into their chattel.

It’s high time to complete the American revolution and bring society under full democratic control. We can make a start –just a start mind you –by making corporations and their super-wealthy elite begin to pay their fair share towards society.

One immediate benefit would be a free education system for all American children and youth. It’s doable. All it takes is for the people to demand it.