By Julianne Escobedo Shepherd, AlterNet
Posted on April 19, 2011

Crossposted with http://www.alternet.org/story/150598/how_12_multinational_corporations_avoid_paying_taxes

In January, Barack Obama named Jeffrey R. Immelt, General Electric’s chief executive, to head the President’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness. “He understands what it takes for America to compete in the global economy,” Obama said. It figures.

OVER THE PAST MONTH, General Electric has been held up as the pinnacle of corporate vampirism –– the world’s largest corporation in the world’s lowest tax bracket. But it’s not just GE that’s bilking the system and paying zero dollars in taxes.

A new report out today illustrates that at least 11 other multinational, billion-dollar corporations managed to get a free pass from the IRS – and not only that, but while average Americans scraped their piggy banks to pay hefty taxes on paltry paychecks, many of these companies actually got a refund. Want to know how they pulled that off? By the fatcat’s swindle: lobbying, campaign contributions, and other legal gladhanding that helps them exploit corporate loopholes and keeps their pockets flush while the rest of us struggle to get by.

G.E.’s Strategies Let It Avoid Taxes Altogether
By DAVID KOCIENIEWSKI
The New York Times 

Ordinary Americans lack the kind of money needed to shop at this store.

The campaign reform group Public Campaign has released a report called “Artful Dodgers,” identifying 12 corporations – including GE – that used these tactics to avoid paying any taxes while reaping huge benefits. More disturbingly, the report notes they collectively spent over a billion dollars influencing politicians to make Washington more corporate-friendly. As the report points out, the money invested to sway groups such as the House Ways and Means Committee and the Senate Finance Committee has been wildly successful. Legislation from both parties has created these tax loopholes, while providing incentives that effectively destroy the American workforce. Public Campaign:

According to the non-partisan Government Accountability Office (GAO), eighty-three of the 100 largest publicly traded U.S. corporations utilize such tax havens to reduce their U.S. tax liability. Ironically, these accounting tricks aren’t available for companies that only do business in the United States, so Congress in effect is providing tax incentives to ship jobs overseas and dismantle the middle class.

Clearly, the moral of this story is that these corporations are not sneaking around the government, slithering through back alleys in order to avoid paying taxes. They are essentially lobbying our government – individuals we elected – into submission, tipping the tax brackets in their favor on the backs of average, everyday Americans. Congress wants to make huge budget cuts in social programs that help us in myriad ways, and yet many of the same politicians would rather punish the poor than make corporations pay their fair share. As PC points out:

Elected officials across the political spectrum are talking about the need for shared sacrifice to reduce our deficit. Both Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.) and President Obama have talked about getting rid of special interest tax loopholes. But, talk doesn’t equal action. And it’s not going to happen as long as well-heeled companies like G.E. or Chevron are able to use millions in lobbying and campaign contributions to advocate for the creation of loopholes and tax breaks, and against their closure. Reforming our tax code won’t happen when every line in it has a special interest that will push back against any increase.

The proposed budget looks a little different to you now, doesn’t it? Read the full report at Public Campaign.

Julianne Escobedo Shepherd is an associate editor at AlterNet and a Brooklyn-based freelance writer and editor. Formerly the executive editor of The FADER, her work has appeared in VIBE, SPIN, New York Times and various other magazines and Web sites.

© 2011 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.

To breathe the true air of freedom and democracy you need independent media lungs. Staffed with journalists and political observers not beholden to the status quo.
SUPPORT THE GREANVILLE POST AND CYRANOS JOURNAL TODAY.
DONATE WHAT YOU CAN!

____________________________________________

By Patrick Martin, WSWS>ORG
14 April 2011

President Barack Obama outlined plans Wednesday for slashing $4 trillion from the federal budget deficit over the next 12 years, the bulk of it by cutting domestic social spending, particularly in the area of health care.

His speech at George Washington University in the US capital demonstrates the consensus in the American ruling elite for a frontal assault on social programs upon which tens of millions of working people, children and retirees depend.

Obama largely accepted the deficit reduction framework set by the Republican right. But he proposed a different mix of spending cuts, as well as calling for tax increases on the wealthy, something that the leaders of the Republican-controlled House of Representatives have ruled out in advance.

The proposed tax hikes are extremely modest, merely allowing the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy to expire at the end of 2012 and restoring the tax rates that prevailed under the Clinton administration. The promise, moreover, is an empty one. Obama caved in to Republican opposition to raising taxes on the rich last year, when the Democrats still controlled both houses of Congress. Why should anyone believe he will act differently now?

Throughout the speech, Obama sought to appeal to two diametrically opposed audiences. He sought to reassure global financial markets and the US ruling elite of his commitment to reaching bipartisan agreement on drastic and immediate spending cuts. And he sought to delude working people about both the causes of the fiscal crisis and the devastating consequences of the measures now being prepared in Washington.

For his ruling class audience, Obama spelled out proposals for spending cuts in Medicare and other social programs that would previously have been considered unthinkable from a Democrat in the White House.

According to a summary posted on the White House web site, these include:

• Massive cuts in domestic discretionary spending, from the baseline set by last Friday’s agreement with congressional Republicans that slashes $38.5 billion from spending for the current fiscal year. The total in spending cuts over 12 years would come to $770 billion in areas like education, the environment, transportation and other infrastructure, and in wages and benefits for federal government workers.

• An additional $360 billion over 12 years in cuts in mandatory domestic programs, so called because they provide benefit payments that are mandated under federal law, including farm subsidies, federal pension insurance, food stamps, home heating assistance and income-support programs for the poor and disabled.

• A further $480 billion over 12 years in cuts in federal health care spending, on top of the $1 trillion in cost-cutting already imposed to pay for the health care overhaul passed last year by a Democratic Congress. Obama outlined a series of policy changes in health care that he said would cut an additional $1 trillion in the decade after 2023.

• In the event that spending cuts fail to reduce the federal deficit to the desired proportion of the US gross domestic product by 2014, Obama would establish a debt failsafe mechanism that would trigger across-the-board spending cuts and tax increases, likely to include a national sales tax or European-style Value Added Tax.

• Cuts of $400 billion in military spending over 12 years, less than four percent of the gargantuan sum that the Pentagon, Department of Energy, Department of Homeland Security, CIA and other agencies will spend during that period on the armed forces, nuclear weapons and intelligence and security operations.

For his popular audience, Obama delivered a series of demagogic assaults on the Republican Party and the deficit reduction plan unveiled last week by House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan, which the House is expected to approve on Friday.

He explained that the Republican plan “is less about reducing the deficit than it is about changing the basic social compact in America.” He said that it “ends Medicare as we know it,” and would lead to the loss of health insurance for up to 50 million Americans now covered by Medicaid or scheduled to be enrolled in private insurance plans under Obama’s Affordable Care Act of 2010.

For Medicare recipients, he said, the Republican plan means “instead of guaranteed health care, you will get a voucher.” He continued: “And if that voucher isn’t worth enough to buy insurance, tough luck—you’re on your own.” Grandparents who cannot afford nursing home care, poor children, and children disabled by autism or Down’s syndrome would be told “to fend for themselves.”

Given the emphasis on health care cost controls both in last year’s “reform” legislation and in his speech Wednesday, Obama’s supposed outrage over Republican heartlessness is cynical and insincere. The two big business parties, the Democrats as much as the Republicans, seek to cut the cost of health care for American corporations and the government by placing more and more of the burden on working people, including the sick, the disabled and the destitute.

Even more deceptive was Obama’s explanation of the source of the fiscal crisis. He contrasted the 1990s—when “our leaders came together three times… to reduce our nation’s deficit” in bipartisan agreements under the first President Bush and the Clinton administration—to the decade after 2000, when “we lost our way.”

In this potted history, “America’s finances were in great shape by the year 2000. We went from deficit to surplus.” Then the administration of George W. Bush waged two wars, established a Medicare prescription drug benefit, and cut taxes for the wealthy, wrecking the “fiscal discipline” of the previous decade.

One small thing is left out of this account: the long-term crisis of American capitalism, culminating in the Wall Street crash of 2008 and the trillions expended by the Treasury and the Federal Reserve to bail out the banks. The financial catastrophe precipitated the worst economic slump since the Great Depression—which continues to this day, although Obama barely mentioned it in his 43-minute speech.

The conditions that produced the 2008 crash go back at least three decades, and include the increasing subordination of production to financial manipulation, the deregulation of financial markets, and colossal growth of economic inequality.

Obama made only one fleeting reference to this most important aspect of the economic crisis. He condemned the Ryan plan for proposing another $1 trillion in tax breaks for the wealthy, then added:

“In the last decade, the average income of the bottom 90 percent of all working Americans actually declined. The top 1 percent saw their income rise by an average of more than a quarter of a million dollars each.”

He then asked rhetorically, “And that’s who needs to pay less taxes? They want to give people like me a $200,000 tax cut that’s paid for by asking 33 seniors to each pay $6,000 more in health costs. That’s not right, and it’s not going to happen as long as I’m president.”

This was the high point of Obama’s populist demagogy, a typical dog-and-pony show in which the Democrats pretend to be the tribunes of the common man and the Republicans are assigned the role of Wall Street stooges.

A little over an hour after Obama’s address, three top House Republicans did their part in the play-acting, going before press microphones and practically snarling their hostility to the president’s whipping up of “class war.”

“Class war” is an accurate term for the program of both the Democrats and Republicans. However vituperative the mutual mudslinging, both parties represent corporate America and do the bidding of the super-rich. The leading personnel of both parties consist of individuals, like Obama, who are themselves multi-millionaires.

The US ruling elite is taking advantage of the fact that the working class is politically disenfranchised and the old union organizations have been transformed into instruments of corporate management for imposing wage and benefit cuts. It is moving aggressively to return working people to conditions of exploitation unseen in America in nearly a century.

For the past few months, state and local governments, both Republican and Democratic, have taken the leading role in these attacks, sparking the confrontation with public employees in Wisconsin and increasingly bitter conflicts throughout the country.

It was noticeable that in Obama’s lengthy speech there was no reference whatsoever to the financial crisis wracking state and local government and the devastating cuts being imposed on social services, jobs, wages, benefits and pensions.

For two years, the stimulus legislation passed in 2009 provided limited support to state and local government finances. This period has come to an end, and there will be no further federal support. On the contrary, as the positions of both the congressional Republicans and the Obama White House demonstrate, the federal government is now set to play the leading role in the assault on the social rights of working people.

The working class should reject the entire framework of the official deficit-reduction debate. The Democratic and Republican politicians who claim there is “no money” for necessities like pensions, health care and education represent a corporate elite sitting on countless trillions in wealth.

The working class alternative to capitalist austerity must be the expropriation of this hoarded wealth, accumulated from the labor of workers, and the reorganization of economic life to serve human needs, not corporate profits.

This means the building of an independent mass political party of the working class based on a socialist and anti-imperialist program.

PATRICK MARTIN is a senior political analyst with the World Socialist Web Site.

To breathe the true air of freedom and democracy you need independent media lungs. Staffed with journalists and political observers not beholden to the status quo.
SUPPORT THE GREANVILLE POST AND CYRANOS JOURNAL TODAY.
DONATE WHAT YOU CAN!

____________________________________________

<!--

Monday 11 April 2011

By Dean Baker, Truthout

House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan's (R-Wisconsin) budget plan would cut $5.8 trillion over the next decade by cutting programs like Medicare.

House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan put out a budget proposal last week that will leave the vast majority of future retirees without decent health care by ending Medicare as we know it. According to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) analysis, most middle-income retirees would have to pay almost half of their income to purchase a Medicare equivalent insurance package by 2030 [3]. They would be paying much more than half of their income in later years.

This comes to more than $60,000 for every man, woman and child in the country. That would be money out of the pocket of ordinary workers and retirees that will go to the insurance and pharmaceutical industries, highly paid medical specialists, and other health care providers.

last week [4].

[5]

 

Make creeps like Kissinger and Palin miserable. Read The Greanville Post every day and stay clear of the tsunami of caca their kind is constantly creating.
SUBSCRIBE ME TO THE GREANVILLE POST BY EMAIL

 

By Jerry White  | 1 April 2011

In a crowded field of repulsive politicians from both parties bent on betraying the public interest, John Kasich (R) is a standsout.

AFTER MORE THAN A MONTH OF PROTESTS, the Republican governor of Ohio signed Senate Bill 5 in a brief statehouse ceremony Thursday evening, putting into a law an unprecedented attack on the 360,000 workers who provide public services in the Midwestern US state.

The law bans the right of public workers to strike; imposes large wage cuts by mandating workers to pay at least 15 percent of their health insurance costs; bases pay raises for teachers and other workers on performance instead of seniority; and facilitates the decertification of local unions. It also allows school districts, municipalities and other government bodies to impose their final offer if a labor agreement cannot be reached in negotiations.

Governor John Kasich is the latest Republican state executive to gut public employee collective bargaining rights. On March 11, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker signed into law a similar attack after a month of job actions, student walkouts and mass protests. Republicans in Indiana, Michigan, Arizona and other states are pursuing similar policies.

In a fundraising email sent out by Kasich after the bill’s passage, the governor declared, “The nation is watching us in Ohio and we will provide the leadership necessary to become a job creating state and serve as a model for the rest of America.”

In fact, the anti-worker laws are aimed at outlawing collective resistance to sweeping cuts in social spending and the virtual destruction of public education and other essential services. The aim is to further reduce taxes on the corporations and big investors who created the economic disaster, which has bankrupted virtually every state in the nation.

Kasich’s “Jobs Budget” proposal slashes education, health care and other programs critical to the state’s 11.5 million residents. This includes a $1 billion cut in state aid to local governments over the next two years; a 10-11 percent cut in K-12 and higher education; and savage cuts to childcare and medical services that would, among other things, limit the number of hours of mental health care patients can receive.

The massive cuts in state aid to local governments and school districts will be used to wrench even greater concessions from public workers. “We’ve got 10 percent of people without jobs. Be glad you have a job,” the Columbus Dispatch quoted Representative Louis Blessing, a Republican from Cincinnati, telling public workers. “Would you rather have no job or a pay cut of 4 percent? That’s basically what we’re telling public employees. Congratulations, you’ve done a great job since (collective bargaining) was enacted 27 years ago, but the party’s over. We can’t afford it anymore.”

In his budget proposal, Kasich continues the 21 percent cut in state income-tax rates that was part of the 2005 tax overhaul by Republicans that replaced the state corporate income tax and phased out a business property tax. These measures cost the state more than $2 billion a year in lost tax revenue, half of the state’s $8 billion budget gap over the next two fiscal years.

“At least half of our current budget problem is a direct result of the tax changes we made in 2005,” Zach Schiller, research director at Policy Matters Ohio, told the Columbus Dispatch. “A lot of people don’t want to hear that, but that’s the reality. Much of our pain is self-inflicted.”

There is enormous working class opposition to Kasich’s attack on public workers and social spending, and thousands of public employees have taken part in protests over the last month. The state capitol in Columbus was packed with workers booing and shouting as legislators voted for the bill Tuesday night.

As in Wisconsin, however, the officials who lead the teachers and other public employee unions accept without question that workers must pay for the budget deficit and have offered their services to do so. They only oppose the Republican Party’s attempt to push the unions out of their traditional role of imposing the cuts, and, above all, collecting union dues.

Union officials were particularly angered over a new provision added to the bill this week that would ban “fair share” fees—union dues paid by public workers who decide not to join their union. Under current rules, public workers who do not want to join a union must still pay dues.

State Democrats, whose counterparts in New York, California, Illinois and other states are imposing spending cuts just as vicious as the Republicans’—made it clear they want to utilize the services of the unions to slash public employees’ pay and benefits. As the Columbus Dispatch noted, “Rep. Matt Szollosi, D-Oregon, said if governments need to contain costs, they can ask for the kind of concessions a number of state and local unions have given in recent years.”

With the passage of the bill, the Democrats are now working with union officials to divert anger into a petition campaign for a referendum vote to overturn the new law. The Democrats and unions are reportedly spending $10 million to $20 million to collect more than 230,000 signatures needed to place the issue on the ballot in November.

This follows the same pattern as in Wisconsin, where the unions opposed any serious struggle—including rejecting demands for a general strike—and worked with the Democrats to divert working class opposition behind a toothless campaign to recall Republican legislators. Meanwhile, the unions have taken advantage of legal rulings that have delayed the implementation of the law to sign scores of contracts that gut wages, benefits and working conditions, while preserving the automatic dues check-off system, which will be prohibited once the law goes into effect.

Well aware that tens of millions of workers are disgusted with the refusal of the Obama administration to address their economic and social concerns—including his refusal to bail out the states—the campaigns launched by the unions and the state Democrats in Ohio, Wisconsin and other states are aimed at boosting the electoral fortunes of the Democratic Party in 2012. The goal of this is to secure the interests of the union apparatus, while the attacks on the working class would continue unabated.

JERRY WHITE writes often on political matters for the World Socialist Web Site.