From Susie Madrak at CrooksandLiars.com
Think Progress features this piece on USUncut, the U.S. version of the United Kingdom grassroots movement that dares to ask the impertinent question, "Why should our public services be slashed when we have huge corporations who don't even pay any taxes?" I think this movement has real potential -- its success in Great Britain is grounded in its broadbased appeal. After all, not many people agree corporations should pay less in taxes than they do.
Anyway, I hope you'll check them out. The website has some good tips for organizing an action:
In an interview with In These Times, Carl Gibson, the founder of US Uncut, which is organizing some of today’s UK-inspired massive demonstrations against tax dodgers, explains that while ordinary Americans are being asked to sacrifice, major corporations continue to use the rigged tax code to avoid paying any federal taxes at all. As he says, if you have “one dollar” in your wallet, you’re paying more than the “combined income tax liability of GE, ExxonMobil, Citibank, and the Bank of America“:
[Gibson] explains, “I have one dollar in my wallet. That’s more than the combined income tax liability of GE, ExxonMobil, Citibank, and the Bank of America. That means somebody is gaming the system.”
More below the fold . . .
I hear nothing but CUTS, CUTS, CUTS. What about JOBS! JOBS! JOBS??????
But there is an alternative: Make corporate tax avoiders pay.
Enjoying record profits and taxpayer-funded bailouts as the economy slowly recovers from a financial crisis, nearly two-thirds of US corporations don't pay any income taxes, instead opting to abuse tax loopholes and offshore tax havens. According to this study from the non-partisan Government Accountability Office, 83 of the top 100 publicly traded corporations that operate in the US exploit corporate tax havens. Since 2009, America’s most profitable companies such as ExxonMobil, General Electric, Bank of America and Citigroup all paid a grand total of $0 in federal income taxes to Uncle Sam. Tax havens alone account for up to $1 trillion in tax revenue lost every decade, money that could be invested in K-12 education, colleges, public health, job creation and hundreds of other worthy public programs.
If we pay our taxes, why don’t they? If corporations profit here, shouldn't they pay here?
It’s time for ordinary Americans to fight back and demand an end to the corporate tax avoidance. Join US Uncut and together let's make corporate tax avoiders pay.
USUncut.org
Bold text added by the diarist
Our deficits are CAUSED by our refusal to tax the rich and their huge corporations. This is CLASS WAR, and corporate welfare. This is also the stupidest sort of socialism in human history, where we socialize the losses of the gambling risks of the richest among us on the backs of the working class but privatize any profits that might be made to the wealthiest 5% among us. The bailouts and wars and tax cuts for the rich will apparently be paid for by the added suffering of teachers, emergency service workers, the elderly and the young, and anybody else who depends on the social contract by which our society is held and can not Galt their way out of any golden parachute required financial disaster. The easily available information linked above should stand as a testimony to the fact that there will BE NO RECOVERY for the working class until these greedy bastards and corrupt corporate personhoods start paying their fucking taxes like everyone else.
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Peace and love to all who can't afford it!
Solidarity NOW!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
The Banksters remind me of the fascists. Didn't Mussolini say "Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power."
It is class war. Tell the people