As you begin to count down till tax day in a couple of weeks, I thought I'd cheer you up with
this little piece from
Common Dreams. I don't know if you're paying or not. But if you are, you'll be delighted to learn that:
- General Electric made $10.3 billion in 2009, but received a $1.1 billion tax rebate.
- Forbes said about Bank of America in 2010: "How did they not pay any taxes on $4.4 billion in income?"
- Oil giant Exxon made a $45 billion profit in 2009, but paid no taxes in the United States.
- Citigroup had 4 quarters of billion-dollar profits in 2010, but paid no taxes.
- Wells Fargo made $12 billion but purchased Wachovia Bank to claim a $19 billion tax credit.
- Hewlett Packard's U.S. income tax rate was 4.3% in 2008 and 2.3% in 2009.
- Verizon's 10.5% tax rate, according to Forbes, is due to its partnership with Vodafone, the primary target in UK Uncut's protests against tax evaders.
- Chevron's tax rate was 1% in 2008.
- Boeing, which just won a $30 billion contract to build 179 airborne tankers, got $124 million back from the taxpayers in 2010.
- Over the past 5 years Amazon made $3.5 billion and paid taxes at the rate of 4.3%.
- Carnival Cruise Lines paid 1% in taxes on its $11.5 billion profit over the past 5 years.
- Koch Industries is not publicly traded, so their antics are kept private. But they benefit from taxpayer subsidies in ranching and logging.
- In 2008 CorporateWatch said Rupert Murdoch's Newscorp paid "astoundingly low taxes" because of tax havens.
- Google "cut its taxes by $3.1 billion in the last three years by shifting its money around foreign countries.
- Merck, the second-largest drugmaker in the U.S., last year brought more than $9 billion from abroad without paying any U.S. tax.
- Pfizer, the largest drugmaker in the U.S., erased $10 billion in taxes with an "accounting treatment."
"60 Minutes" tonight had a piece about this subject of corporate malfeasance on taxes. I tell you we are an insane people to allow stuff like this. But you already knew that.
6 comments:
It has been going on for a long time, and all we can do is offer them more and pray for jobs.
What a crock!
Start with GE. Insist that their domestic branch pay a reasonable tax. This is to be done regardless of the Tax "laws", because those are nothing except enabling acts for theft.
If they pull out of here, deny them access to the market.
Unfortunately, since our national legislature is owned by these very same corporate tax cheats, your excellent suggestion has about as much chance of success as my getting down to the weight I was when I got married, 44 years ago.
They have demonstrated how vulnerable they are: their own greed and short-sightedness will cause them to destroy the stability of the country soon again.
That is the time to act.
Things are no longer the same as before, and the future is going to be very bumpy.
But how does one break the great lassitude that seems to envelop the entire country? How bad does it have to get. We've ignored hundreds of warning signs already.
You are following a narrative that assumes that there is going to be a fix possible ahead of the final break-down. Maybe so.
The good news is that the WTO has ruled that Boeing, which is on your list, has wrongfully received $ 5.4 Billion from our government - more of our money to go along with their tax refund.
The story I see has a silly country believing so urgently in their "exceptionalism" that it goes down the drain faster than piss out of a boot and into a black hole... all the while wondering where the Lord wuz.
I'm sorry. I misunderstood your "it's time to act" as denoting a belief that our affairs are reparable. We are on the same sheet of music. I.e., there's not much to be done except get out of the way of the sliding deck chairs.
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