Many giant profitable U.S. corporations are increasingly abandoning America while draining it at the same time.
General Electric, for example, has paid no federal income taxes for a
decade while becoming a net job exporter and fighting its hard-pressed
workers who want collective bargaining through unions like the United
Electrical Workers Union (UE). GE’s boss, Jeffrey Immelt, makes about
$12,400 an hour on an 8-hour day, plus benefits and perks, presiding
over this global corporate empire.
Telling by their behavior, these big companies think patriotism
toward the country where they were created and prospered is for chumps.
Their antennae point to places where taxes are very low, labor is wage
slavery, independent unions are non-existent, governments have their
hands out, and equal justice under the rule of law does not exist.
China, for example, has fit that description for over 25 years.
Other than profiteering from selling Washington very expensive
weapons of mass destruction, many multinational firms have little sense
of true national security.
Did you know that about 80 percent of the ingredients in medicines
Americans take now come from China and India where visits by FDA
inspectors are infrequent and inadequate?
The lucrative U.S. drug industry – coddled with tax credits, free
transfer of almost-ready-to-market drugs developed with U.S. taxpayer
dollars via the National Institutes of Health – charges Americans the
highest prices for drugs in the world and still wants more profits. Drug
companies no longer produce many necessary medicines like penicillin in
the U.S., preferring to pay slave wages abroad to import drugs back
into the U.S.
Absence of patriotism has exposed our country to dependency on
foreign suppliers for crucial medicines, and these foreign suppliers may
not be so friendly in the future.
Giant U.S. companies are strip-mining America in numerous ways,
starting with the corporate tax base. By shifting more of their profits
abroad to “tax-haven” countries (like the Cayman Islands) through
transfer pricing and other gimmicks, and by lobbying many other tax
escapes through Congress, they can report record profits in the U.S.
with diminishing tax payments. Yet they are benefitting from the public
services, special privileges, and protection by our armed forces because
they are U.S. corporations.
On March 27, 2013, the
Washington Post reported that
compared to forty years ago, big companies that “routinely cited U.S.
federal tax expenses that were 25 to 50 percent of their worldwide
profits,” are now reporting less than half that share. For instance,
Proctor and Gamble was paying 40 percent of its total profits in taxes
in 1969; today it pays 15 percent in federal taxes. Other corporations
pay less or no federal income taxes.
Welcome to globalization. It induces dependency on instabilities in
tiny Greece and Cyprus that shock stock investments by large domestic
pension and mutual funds here in the U.S. Plus huge annual U.S. trade
deficits, which signals the exporting of millions of jobs.
The corporate law firms for these big corporations were the
architects of global trade agreements that make it easy and profitable
to ship jobs and industries to fascist and communist regimes abroad
while hollowing out U.S. communities and throwing their loyal American
workers overboard. It’s not enough that large corporations are paying
millions of American workers less than workers were paid in 1968,
adjusted for inflation.
Corporate bosses can’t say they’re just keeping up with the
competition; they muscled through the trade system that pulls down on
our country’s relatively higher labor, consumer and environmental
standards.
Corporate executives, when confronted with charges that show little
respect for the country, its workers and its taxpayers who made possible
their profits and subsidized their mismanagement, claim they must
maximize their profits for their shareholders and their worker pension
obligations.
Their shareholders? Is that why they’re stashing $1.7 trillion
overseas in tax havens instead of paying dividends to their rightful
shareholder-owners, which would stimulate our economy? Shareholders? Are
those the people who have been stripped of their rights as owners and
prohibited from even keeping a lid on staggeringly sky-high executive
salaries ranging from $5,000 to $20,000 an hour or more, plus perks?
Why these corporate bosses can’t even abide one democratically-run
shareholders’ meeting a year without gaveling down their owners and
cutting time short. To get away from as many of their shareholder-owners
as possible, AT&T is holding its annual meeting on April 26 in
remote Cheyenne, Wyoming!
Pension obligations for their workers? The award-winning reporter for the
Wall Street Journal Ellen E. Shultz demonstrates otherwise. In her gripping book
Retirement Heist: How Companies Plunder and Profit from the Nest Eggs of American Workers,
she shows how by “exploiting loopholes, ambiguous regulations and new
accounting rules,” companies deceptively tricked employees and turned
their pension plans into piggy banks, tax shelters and profit centers.
Recently, I wrote to the CEOs of the 20 largest U.S. corporations,
asking if they would stand up at their annual shareholders’ meetings and
on behalf of their U.S. chartered corporation (not on behalf of their
boards of directors), and pledge allegiance to the flag ending with
those glorious words “with liberty and justice for all.” Nineteen of the
CEOs have not yet replied. One, Chevron, declined the pledge request
but said their patriotism was demonstrated creating jobs and sparking
economic activity in the U.S.
But when corporate lobbyists try to destroy our right of trial by
jury for wrongful injuries – misnamed tort reform – when they destroy
our freedom of contract – through all that brazenly one-sided fine print
– when they corrupt our constitutional elections with money and
unaccountable power, when they commercialize our education and patent
our genes, and outsource jobs to other countries, the question of
arrogantly rejected patriotism better be front-and-center for discussion
by the American people.
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