"Brace yourself for one of the most aggressive corporate lobbying campaigns of all time. And one of the most hypocritical," Sarah Anderson, Global Economy Project.
Listen up White House and Democratic Congresscritters, we commoners--the ones who just worked their asses off electing you-- see through the Wall Street bullshit masquerading as a fair and balanced, shared sacrifice solution to the purported fiscal crisis.
And, we will have none of it!
Have you so easily forgotten the $16 trillion bailout (our tax money) of our financial industry?
We haven't, we are still sacrificing and have more than payed our fair share for the Robber Baron's gambling.
Jogging your memories:millions lost their homes, millions more lost their retirements, millions more, their jobs; school teachers, fire fighters, policemen were fired, classrooms are crowded. A generation of college graduates have no prospects and are burdened with debt they can't pay; millions added to food stamps, millions unemployed, millions living without healthcare and on and on because the Wall Street fuckers gambled away our country's resources.
Now, these same asshats that robbed the Treasury have a seat at the big table with a
plan of tax reform and spending cuts.
The Bowles-Simpson “Fix the Debt" campaign is a coalition of more than 80 CEOs who claim they know best how to deal with our nation’s fiscal challenges. The group boasts a $60 million budget just for the initial phase of a massive media and lobbying campaign.
The irony is that CEOs in the coalition’s leadership have been major contributors to the national debt they now claim to know how to fix. These are guys who’ve mastered every tax-dodging trick in the book. And now that they’ve boosted their corporate profits by draining the public treasury, how do they propose we put our fiscal house back in order? By squeezing programs for the poor and elderly, including Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.
Fix the Debt claims their agenda is not just about spending cuts. But when it comes to their tax proposals, they use the slippery term “pro-growth reform” to push for cuts in deductions that are likely to include credits for working families and — you guessed it — more corporate tax breaks. Chief among these is a proposal to switch to a territorial system under which corporate foreign earnings would be permanently exempted (instead of being taxed when they are returned to America).
This idea, also supported by the Bowles-Simpson deficit commission, would make it even more profitable for big corporations to use accounting tricks to disguise U.S. profits as income earned in tax havens. Citizens for Tax Justice estimates that such tax haven abuse will cost the Treasury more than $1 trillion over the next decade. https://www.commondreams.org/...
~more~
And from an interview on Democracy Now: http://www.democracynow.org/...
They’re doing a massive media and lobbying blitz, portraying themselves as the reasonable ones, because they’re calling for both raising revenues and cutting spending. But if you look at the details of their tax plan, you see that they are really just a Trojan horse. They’re pushing for the same old tax breaks for corporations that they’ve been pushing for for about a decade.
And we looked at one of them, which is they want a permanent exemption from U.S. taxes for all of their foreign earnings. And we calculated that the companies in this campaign stand to gain a windfall of as much as $134 billion, if they get this corporate tax break through. And so, people should be very wary of this big ad campaign that they’re about to see in their newspapers across the country. This is just one more corporate attack on our fair taxation system.
It’s just crazy to be talking about, as he said, "shoring up the entitlement programs." That’s just Washington speak for reducing the cost of these programs and limiting access. To think that we need to shift the burden onto the backs of the poor and elderly is crazy, when we’re in one of the richest countries—the richest country in the world. Our problem is that our resources have been misallocated. And the approach to the debt should be to look at the ways that we could raise revenues through fair taxation, including taxing financial transactions, which could rein in Wall Street; number two, environmental reforms like cutting fossil fuel subsidies and using carbon taxes; and three, cutting military spending, especially all these military bases we have around the world that are obsolete. That kind of combination could raise trillions of dollars over the next decade. And that’s how we should be addressing the debt, not through these, you know, tax shenanigans that are just about giving more breaks to corporations and the wealthy, and cuts to Social Security and Medicare.
There are numerous budget plans by Senator Sanders, the Congressional Progressive Caucus, and others that would get us on the right track.
The Fix the Debt coalition is using the so-called “fiscal cliff” as an opportunity to push the same old corporate agenda of more tax breaks while shifting the burden on to the middle class and the poor. If America’s CEOs really want to Fix the Debt, they should first commit to eliminating the loopholes that have allowed them to avoid paying their fair share of the cost of government, including investments necessary to keep our families and our communities strong and secure.
Please click to the links above, read and share.
We bailed them out, it's time for their "shared sacrifice." Damn it to hell! Make Wall Street pay. The effective corporate tax rate is only 17 percent, they have no case!
And if they refuse to cooperate and accept a transaction tax and higher taxes on unearned income during their White House roundtable, have the handcuffs ready.
PS: Eric Holder should be at the meeting.