OUR CORPORATE OVERLORDS

No, Seriously. From the New York Times:

G.E.’s Strategies Let It Avoid Taxes Altogether

Its American tax bill? None. In fact, G.E. claimed a tax benefit of $3.2 billion.

That may be hard to fathom for the millions of American business owners and households now preparing their own returns, but low taxes are nothing new for G.E. The company has been cutting the percentage of its American profits paid to the Internal Revenue Service for years, resulting in a far lower rate than at most multinational companies.

Its extraordinary success is based on an aggressive strategy that mixes fierce lobbying for tax breaks and innovative accounting that enables it to concentrate its profits offshore. G.E.’s giant tax department, led by a bow-tied former Treasury official named John Samuels, is often referred to as the world’s best tax law firm. Indeed, the company’s slogan “Imagination at Work” fits this department well. The team includes former officials not just from the Treasury, but also from the I.R.S. and virtually all the tax-writing committees in Congress.

While General Electric is one of the most skilled at reducing its tax burden, many other companies have become better at this as well. Although the top corporate tax rate in the United States is 35 percent, one of the highest in the world, companies have been increasingly using a maze of shelters, tax credits and subsidies to pay far less.

And

Transforming the most creative strategies of the tax team into law is another extensive operation. G.E. spends heavily on lobbying: more than $200 million over the last decade, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. Records filed with election officials show a significant portion of that money was devoted to tax legislation. G.E. has even turned setbacks into successes with Congressional help. After the World Trade Organization forced the United States to halt $5 billion a year in export subsidies to G.E. and other manufacturers, the company’s lawyers and lobbyists became deeply involved in rewriting a portion of the corporate tax code, according to news reports after the 2002 decision and a Congressional staff member.

By the time the measure — the American Jobs Creation Act — was signed into law by President George W. Bush in 2004, it contained more than $13 billion a year in tax breaks for corporations, many very beneficial to G.E. One provision allowed companies to defer taxes on overseas profits from leasing planes to airlines. It was so generous — and so tailored to G.E. and a handful of other companies — that staff members on the House Ways and Means Committee publicly complained that G.E. would reap “an overwhelming percentage” of the estimated $100 million in annual tax savings.

According to its 2007 regulatory filing, the company saved more than $1 billion in American taxes because of that law in the three years after it was enacted.

More here.

While everybody emphasizes how utterly lame this is, including an obligatory dose of extreme hypocrisy from the weirdos at Fox News, I'd like to make one small but obvious point that might be overpowered by the weekend news media and blogosphere frenzy on the subject: that a large corporation, whose CEO is also a highly placed economic advisor to the White House, is able to essentially write the tax code such that it not only doesn't have to pay taxes, but that the federal government also pays them a few billion dollars, is extraordinarily strong evidence that large corporations own the government.

I mean, can you do this? No, of course not. You're just a voter. All you have is the ability to vote for some guy who may or may not, probably not, adequately reflect your political views. Massive corporations, however, can hire armies of lobbyists and legions of lawyers, can make large campaign donations to, well, everybody running for office, regardless of party affiliation, which, in turn, makes our leaders beholden to them, can wage enormous propaganda wars effectively drowning out any and all dissenting views, and can place their own employees in key governmental regulatory agencies and advisory bodies. Compared to that, your vote, your one and only ability in our "democracy" to affect public policy, is a sick joke.

Like I and many others keep saying, our democratic republic is dead. I'm not sure when, exactly, it ended, maybe at some point back in the 90s, but dead it is, and it has been replaced by a wealth-driven and corporate oriented oligarchy. A plutocracy, rule by the wealthy. I don't even know how this can be controversial anymore.

We're no longer citizens; we're subjects. And it sucks.

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