There's a newsletter from a website called Global Guerrillas which engages in
Peace: Resilient communities and networked economies. Conflict: Open source insurgency and systems disruption.
The site is the brain child of
John Robb who wrote
Brave New War: The Next Stage of Terrorism and the End of Globalization. The most recent news update I received, has a link to
a new report of the most profitable companies and the taxes they dodged. The report came from
Citizens for Tax Justice, a non-profit organization with a long standing (since 1979) commitment to provide a voice for the millions of middle class taxpapers in our country. The report says the the greatest tax subsidies went to the financial industries in 2008 through 2010. Not unexpected for anyone who has been following the corporate welfare that has been granted the 1%, through the influence of lobbiest in Washington DC. Beyond the squiggle are some highlights from the report:
NEW REPORT: 280 Most Profitable U.S. Corporations Shelter Half Their Profits from Taxes.
“These 280 corporations received a total of nearly $224 billion in tax subsidies,” said Robert McIntyre, Director at Citizens for Tax Justice and the report’s lead author. “This is wasted money that could have gone to protect Medicare, create jobs and cut the deficit.”
30 Companies average less than zero tax bill in the last three Years, 78 had at least one no-tax year.
Financial services received the largest share of all federal tax subsidies over the last three years. More than half the tax subsidies for companies in the study went to four industries: financial services, utilities, telecommunications, and oil, gas & pipelines.
U.S. corporations with significant foreign profits paid tax rates to foreign countries that were almost a third higher than they paid to the IRS on their domestic profits.
The report details how the top 208 corporations have managed to house half their profits in tax shelters while millions of US citizen's shelters have been foreclosed upon. Many of these tax shelters are in off-shore accounts with mail box headquarters. Never mind the tax reductions to the rich instituted since Reagon's reign. The taxes that these dodgers have avoided, under current tax percentages, could have provided funding needed for Medicare and many of the Social Safety net that is gradually being unraveled.
From the Report here are the tax figures for:
30 Corporations Paying No Total Income Tax in 2008-2010
Company 08-10Profit 08-10Tax 08-10 Rate
($ in millions)* ($ in millions)* *(my explanatory addition)
Pepco Holdings 88 – 508 –57.6%
General Electric 10,460 –4,737 –45.3%
Paccar 365 –112 –30.5%
PG&E Corp. 4,855 –1,027 –21.2%
Computer Sciences 1,666 -305 –18.3%
NiSource 1,385 –227 –16.4%
CenterPoint Energy 1,931 –284 –14.7%
Tenet Healthcare 415 –48 –11.6%
Atmos Energy 897 –104 –11.6%
Integrys Energy Group 818 –92 –11.3%
American Electric Power 5,899 –545 –9.2%
Con-way 286 –26 –9.1%
Ryder System 627 –46 –7.3%
Baxter International 926 –66 –7.1%
Wisconsin Energy 1,725 –85 –4.9%
Duke Energy 5,475 –216 –3.9%
DuPont 2,124 –72 –3.4%
Consolidated Edison 4,263 –127 –3.0%
Verizon Communications 32,518 –951 –2.9%
Interpublic Group 571 –15 –2.6%
CMS Energy 1,292 –29 –2.2%
NextEra Energy 6,403 –139 –2.2%
Navistar International 896 –18 –2.0%
Boeing 9,735 –178 –1.8%
Wells Fargo 49,370 –681 –1.4%
El Paso 4,105 –41 –1.0%
Mattel 1,020 –9 –0.9%
Honeywell International 4,903 –34 –0.7%
DTE Energy 2,551 –17 –0.7%
Corning 1,977 –4 –0.2%
TOTAL $ 160,341$ –10,742 –6.7%
Of these 30 clever companies the following are confirmed to have sent our US jobs out of the country:
General Electric
Computer Sciences
Dupont
Verizon
Boeing
Honeywell
Corning
And just because the rest aren't on the list, doesn't mean that they didn't send jobs out of the country. They just are not confirmed. There is no law that requires companies to report to the general public how many jobs that ship overseas.
For example PEPCO has been building it's business in China:
“We’ve been in China for years, but now we’re getting enough of our own company infrastructure, and enough people working in China, and enough experience working in China, that it makes sense to bring in vehicles at this time,” Pigott said. “It takes several years to understand exactly what products are required, how our products would do, do our testing, do evaluation. Now it makes sense.”
An interesting factoid about Pepco's tax dodging:
"The trophy for turning the burden of taxes into a benefit goes not to General Electric, whose skillful use of tax law and lobbying for tax breaks is famous, but to Pepco Holdings, which owns the monopoly electric utility in and around the U.S. capital. Pepco’s three-year tax rate? Minus 57.6 percent. GE’s was only minus 45.3 percent. Pepco says it pays all of its taxes as required by law. For sure that’s true.
Here’s the irony. Pepco’s biggest customer, by far, is the federal government. So, federal taxpayers and other customers paid electric rates to Pepco that assumed about $309 million in corporate tax payments would flow to the Treasury, only to see $508 million of their taxes flow to Pepco as refunds. Ouch."
As more of this kind of information emerges, the more big coporate tax dodgers are taxing our collective tolerance. One more peice of the puzzle defining what the Occupy movement is becoming.