The Top 7 Corporate Tax Evaders | Wall St. Cheat Sheet

Here's some interesting info from U.S. Uncut, and the Wall Street Cheat Sheet:
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We lose out on $100 billion in corporate tax revenue every year.

Big business has to learn to be responsible to the American taxpayers who make it possible for them to run an American business. If you earn income here, you should pay income taxes here.

Bank of America and numerous other corporations should pay their fair share in taxes so more people can keep working. I'd say lost jobs and less local spending are both anti-business, wouldn't you?"

The Top 7 Corporate Tax Evaders | Wall St. Cheat Sheet

7) Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) earned pretax income of $9.4 billion, but managed to keep their tax rate the same as someone earning less than $33,950 a year. Their trickery? Book profits at lower-tax foreign subsidiaries.

6) Verizon (VZ) has a lovely 10.5% tax rate. That’s better than a long term capital gain. Although Verizon earned $11.6 billion in pretax income, they have diverted much of their income through foreign wireless partner Vodafone.

5) Chevron (CVX) paid $8 billion in taxes on $18.5 billion in pretax income. So why did they make the list? Chevron only sent Uncle Sam a check for $200 million. The rest was paid abroad in lower-tax countries. I think they should change their logo colors from red, white and blue to something more representative of the Caymans.

4) We all know Ford (F) and other car makers have been skidding since the recession began. The struggling car maker still managed to earn $3 billion in pretax income. The beauty? Ford only plunked down $69 million in taxes — a 2.3% tax rate. Not bad considering all the other subsidies, bailouts, and cash for clunkers we’ve already given as gifts to one of the oldest car manufacturers in the world.

3) ExxonMobile (XOM) did pay $17.6 billion in taxes on $37.3 billion in pretax income. However, unlike Chevron, none of Exxon’s taxes were paid in the US. That’s funny … I think they sell a fair amount of profitable gasoline here.

2) Bank of American (BAC) earned pretax income of $4.4 billion in 2009, yet the financial services super market tallied up a $1.9 billion tax benefit. How could such a travesty occur? Bank of America scoured the tax code for deductions like $860 million in tax-exempt income, $670 million in low-income housing credits, and a $600 million loss on shares of foreign subsidiaries. Making matters worse for the US Treasury, Bank of America has a provision for credit losses of $49 billion which will carry over for a long, long time.

1) Like those who received an Earned Income Credit (EIC), GE (GE) actually made money on their tax filing this year! Although the industrial behemoth generated $10.3 billion in pretax income, they recorded a tax benefit of $1.1 billion. Don’t we all wish we could be in that bracket. But big tax breaks are nothing new for the 12th largest company in the world. In 2008, GE’s effective tax rate was 5.3% versus the marginal US corporate rate of 35%. In 2007, it was 15%. You’d think GE would at least pay a little more for paper and administration costs considering their tax filing to the IRS is an astounding 24,000 pages when printed out.


Bank of America Tax Avoidance
• BofA is the largest bank and 5th largest corporation in America
• BofA holds over $2.2 Trillion in assets
• BofA in 2009 earned a pretax income of $4.4 Billion.
• BofA received $45 Billion in taxpayer bailout funds in 2008 and 2009
• BofA paid ZERO federal income tax in 2009
• BofA actually received a $1.9 Billion tax benefit from the government in 2009
• BofA took deductions of $2.1 Billion in 2009
• BofA funneled its income through 115 foreign tax-haven subsidiaries
General Corporate Tax Avoidance
• Two-thirds of all US corporations do not pay federal income tax
• 25% of the biggest US corporations do not pay federal income tax
• US corporations avoid between $37 Billion and $100 Billion a year in US taxes
• President Obama has called for ending corporate tax loopholes in his campaign, the 2010 State of the Union and the 2011 State of the Union
• The “Stop Tax Haven Abuse Act” was not acted upon by the previous Congress.

Behind the Arab Revolt Is a Word We Dare Not Speak

I love my country, I just think it's been perverted into a corporatist monster
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by: John Pilger, t r u t h o u t | News Analysis

Fascism is a difficult word, because it comes with an iconography that touches the Nazi nerve and is abused as propaganda against America's official enemies and to promote the West's foreign adventures with a moral vocabulary written in the struggle against Hitler. And yet, fascism and imperialism are twins. In the aftermath of World War II, those in the imperial states who had made respectable the racial and cultural superiority of "western civilization" found that Hitler and fascism had claimed the same, employing strikingly similar methods. Thereafter, the very notion of American imperialism was swept from the textbooks and popular culture of an imperial nation forged on the genocidal conquest of its native people, and a war on social justice and democracy became "US foreign policy."

As the Washington historian William Blum has documented, since 1945, the US has destroyed or subverted more than 50 governments, many of them democracies, and used mass murderers like Suharto, Mobutu and Pinochet to dominate by proxy. In the Middle East, every dictatorship and pseudo-monarchy has been sustained by America. In "Operation Cyclone," the CIA and MI6 secretly fostered and bankrolled Islamic extremism. The object was to smash or deter nationalism and democracy. The victims of this western state terrorism have been mostly Muslims. The courageous people gunned down last week in Bahrain and Libya, the latter a "priority UK market," according to Britain's official arms "procurers," join those children blown to bits in Gaza by the latest American F-16 aircraft.

The revolt in the Arab world is not merely against a resident dictator, but against a worldwide economic tyranny designed by the US Treasury and imposed by the US Agency for International Development (USAID), the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, which have ensured that rich countries like Egypt are reduced to vast sweatshops, with half the population earning less than $2 a day. The people's triumph in Cairo was the first blow against what Benito Mussolini called corporatism, a word that appears in his definition of fascism.

How did such extremism take hold in the liberal West? "It is necessary to destroy hope, idealism, solidarity, and concern for the poor and oppressed," observed Noam Chomsky a generation ago, and "to replace these dangerous feelings with self-centered egoism, a pervasive cynicism that holds that ... the state capitalist order with its inherent inequities and oppression is the best that can be achieved. In fact, a great international propaganda campaign is underway to convince people - particularly young people - that this not only is what they should feel but that it's what they do feel."

Like the European revolutions of 1848 and the uprising against Stalinism in 1989, the Arab revolt has rejected fear. An insurrection of suppressed ideas, hope and solidarity has begun. In the United States, where 45 percent of young African-Americans have no jobs and the top hedge fund managers are paid, on average, $1 billion a year, mass protests against cuts in services and jobs have spread to heartland states like Wisconsin. In Britain, the fastest-growing modern protest movement, UK Uncut, is about to take direct action against tax avoiders and rapacious banks. Something has changed that cannot be unchanged. The enemy has a name now.

Behind the Arab Revolt Is a Word We Dare Not Speak: