Wednesday 24th of April 2024
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the dark side of the moon .....

the dark side of the moon .....

As politicians are asking ordinary Americans to sacrifice their education, their health, their labor rights, and their wellbeing to tackle budget deficits, some of the world's richest multinational corporations are getting away with shirking their responsibility and paying nothing. ThinkProgress has assembled a short but far from comprehensive list of these tax dodgers - corporations which have rigged the tax system to their advantage so they can reap huge profits and avoid paying taxes:

- BANK OF AMERICA: In 2009, Bank of America didn't pay a single penny in federal income taxes, exploiting the tax code so as to avoid paying its fair share. "Oh, yeah, this happens all the time," said Robert Willens, a tax accounting expert interviewed by McClatchy. "If you go out and try to make money and you don't do it, why should the government pay you for your losses?" asked Bob McIntyre of Citizens for Tax Justice. The same year, the mega-bank's top executives received pay "ranging from $6 million to nearly $30 million."

- BOEING: Despite receiving billions of dollars from the federal government every single year in taxpayer subsidies from the U.S. government, Boeing didn't "pay a dime of U.S. federal corporate income taxes" between 2008 and 2010.

- CITIGROUP: Citigroup's deferred income taxes for the third quarter of 2010 amounted to a grand total of $0.00. At the same time, Citigroup has continued to pay its staff lavishly. "John Havens, the head of Citigroup's investment bank, is expected to be the bank's highest paid executive for the second year in a row, with a compensation package worth $9.5 million."

- EXXON-MOBIL: The oil giant uses offshore subsidiaries in the Caribbean to avoid paying taxes in the United States. Although Exxon-Mobil paid $15 billion in taxes in 2009, not a penny of those taxes went to the American Treasury. This was the same year that the company overtook Wal-Mart in the Fortune 500. Meanwhile the total compensation of Exxon-Mobil's CEO the same year was over $29,000,000.

- GENERAL ELECTRIC: In 2009, General Electric - the world's largest corporation - filed more than 7,000 tax returns and still paid nothing to U.S. government. They managed to do this by a tax code that essentially subsidizes companies for losing profits and allows them to set up tax havens overseas. That same year GE CEO Jeffery Immelt - who recently scored a spot on a White House economic advisory board - "earned total compensation of $9.89 million." In 2002, Immelt displayed his lack of economic patriotism, saying, "When I am talking to GE managers, I talk China, China, China, China, China....I am a nut on China. Outsourcing from China is going to grow to 5 billion."

- WELLS FARGO: Despite being the fourth largest bank in the country, Wells Fargo was able to escape paying federal taxes by writing all of its losses off after its acquisition of Wachovia. Yet in 2009 the chief executive of Wells Fargo also saw his compensation "more than double" as he earned "a salary of $5.6 million paid in cash and stock and stock awards of more than $13 million."

In the coming months, politicians across the country are going to tell Americans that the only way to stave off huge deficit and balance the budgets is by gutting programs for the poor, eviscerating support for the middle class, eliminating labor rights, and decimating the government's ability to serve the public interest. This is a lie. The United States is the richest country in the history of the world, and income inequality is higher now than it has been at any time since the 1920′s, with the top "top 1 percentile of households [taking] home 23.5 percent of income in 2007."

You Have More Money in Your Wallet Than Bank of America Pays in Federal Taxes

as for those picking-up the tab .....

The large demonstrations at the state Capitol in Madison, Wisconsin are driven by a middle class awakening to the spectre of its destruction by the corporate reactionaries and their toady Governor Scott Walker.

For years the middle class has watched the plutocrats stomp on the poor while listening to the two parties regale the great middle class, but never mentioning the tens of millions of poor Americans. And for years, the middle class was shrinking due significantly to corporate globalization shipping good-paying jobs overseas to repressive dictatorships like China. It took Governor Walker's legislative proposal to do away with most collective bargaining rights for most public employee unions to jolt people to hit the streets.

Republicans take rigged elections awash in corporatist campaign cash seriously. When they win, they aggressively move their corporate agenda, unlike the wishy-washy Democrats who flutter weakly after a victory. Republicans mean business. A ram rod wins against a straw all the time.

Governor Walker won his election, along with other Republicans in Wisconsin, on mass-media driven Tea Party rhetoric. His platform was deceitful enough to get the endorsement of the police, and firefighters unions, which the latter have now indignantly withdrawn.

'Mad As Hell' In Madison

 

robbing the environment blind...

The Federal Government and its faithful Opposition are falling over each other to say their own climate policy is market friendly.

On Lateline last week, Penny Wong and Greg Hunt each argued theirs was the most faithful “market mechanism” which could be devised.

Perhaps this should be taken as a positive - recognition by both sides of politics that voluntary trade in a free market is the most efficient way to allocate resources. A few decades ago this would have been a very different debate.

But a crucial distinction has to be made. A market mechanism does not make a free market.

Indeed, while market mechanisms like an emissions trading scheme are superficially appealing - it has all the buying and selling that we see in the most dynamic sides of capitalism - they can only ever be a crude approximation of the real thing.

Sure, it looks like a duck. It quacks like a duck. But it swims like a robot which has been engineered to swim like a duck.

Ducks and robo-ducks are different. So are genuine and artificial markets.

Genuine markets emerge, spontaneously and dynamically, to meet demands or to create them. The market order which develops seems harmonious - balanced, as if, by an “invisible hand”.

But of course there is no invisible hand guiding the marketplace. Ideally, the market is only limited by general rules: private property, protection against fraud, and enforcement of contracts.

There are just billions of people working to produce things for other people to buy, and buying things which other people have produced for them.

It works. The efficiency, wealth, and increase in living standards that results from this capitalist dynamic have been recognised, implicitly, by every side of politics.

An artificial market like the proposed emissions trading scheme is a completely different beast. It has a very visible hand indeed.

http://www.abc.net.au/unleashed/44556.html
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Gus: Let's be real here. There has never been a fully operational "free market"... Nor has there ever been a true "level playing field" in world trade. This is due to various factors like wages, subsidies, tariffs, taxes, cost of living including health and life style levels in different countries — even within one country. At present the capitalist system of world-trade does not include the environment in its equation — apart from how much it's going to cost to remove the dirt above this coal or iron ore seam. Pitiful...

Thus all of what Berg is speculating about relates fancifully to a non-finite, non-influenceable environment. We know this is not the case. If we produce something or whatever, we modify the environment by taking from it, make rubbish and leave holes in the ground. Eventually we run out of space to get rid of the rubbish. One of the place we've rubbished for years is the ATMOSPHERE without paying a minute attention to it, except for the soot that could kill the slaves. Global warming from our CO2 is REAL — induced BY HUMAN CARBON related ACTIVITIES. The Capitalist system is very flawed at this level and ultimately dangerous. It needs to be contained and forced to include the cost of the environment into it. But this cost cannot be just a cheap insurance job, it has to be a genuine action to minimise the impact of human business.

It is imperative that for a country like Australia about to impose a carbon tax on the locals, another tax should be imposed on imports — those that do not comply to a carbon trading scheme or a carbon tax. Difficult to implement but it will become necessary as we advance towards 2100... We should then start to manufacture locally, smartly and efficiently. At present we're loosing the small producers because of unfair discounting wars from within and from overseas. Furthermore, most of the free marketeers have defrauded the world in creating booms and busts to line their pockets with the loot.
But back to the environment: banksters simply don't care about it. They have to be made to pay for it.

http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/opinion/2011/02/2011226131635826806.html#

opportunity costs .....

opportunity costs .....

When the Cadillac Eldorado made its debut in the 1950s, wealthy Americans were paying a top rate of tax of 90%; today, the top rate of tax is 35%.

Over the last half century, the richest Americans have shifted the burden of the federal individual income tax off themselves and onto everybody else. The three convenient and accurate Wikipedia graphs below show the details. The first graph compares the official tax rates paid by the top and bottom income earners. Note especially that from the end of the second world war into the early 1960s, the highest income earners paid a tax rate over 90% for many years. Today, the top earners pay a rate of only 35%. Note also how the gap between the rates paid by the richest and the poorest has narrowed. If we take into account the many loopholes the rich can and do use far more than the poor, the gap narrows even more.

One conclusion is clear and obvious: the richest Americans have dramatically lowered their income tax burden since 1945, both absolutely and relative to the tax burdens of the middle income groups and the poor.

How the rich soaked the rest of us