At 22:56 26/09/2012,Natalia wrote:
<http://dirtdiggersdigest.org/archives/3297>http://dirtdiggersdigest.org/archives/3297
Natalia
Corporations are the Real Moochers
September 20th, 2012 by Phil Mattera
The firestorm over Mitt Romneys closed-door
comments depicting nearly half the U.S.
population as parasites is coming mainly from
those defending seniors, the poor and the disabled.
Not over the pond it isn't (and I doubt in
America also). Romney's nasty remarks have been
condemned by Tory columnists (even by those who
are somewhere near as right-wing as Thatcher) as
by Labour and LibDem journalists. (There's also a
very curious relative silence over here by the
right-wing press about the prospects for a Romney
victory. They don't like him.)
But whats really wrong with the Ayn Rand
worldview Romney was parroting is that it
ignores those who are the biggest moochers of all: giant corporations.
Phil Mattera shouldn't condemn the majority of
corporations for the sins of the relative few
which have actually been able to influence the
crucial law-framers and makers. The latter must
carry the primary responsibility for faulty law.
Even fewer corporations actually try to break
whatever law exists, whether tax law or any
other, because they need a basic framework of law
in order to operate, just like ordinary citizens.
On the other hand, no tax paying body -- whether
state government, corporation or individual --
seeks to pay more tax than they need to by law.
Keith
If, as Romney suggested, moocherism begins with
the failure to pay federal income taxes, then
that label can easily be applied to many of the
countrys major companies. A November 2011
<http://ctj.org/ctjreports/2011/11/corporate_taxpayers_corporate_tax_dodgers_2008-2010.php>report
by Citizens for Tax Justice and the Institute on
Taxation and Economic Policy found that more
than one-quarter of large companies paid zero
taxes in at least one of the three years examined.
Quite a few of those companies arranged their
affairs so that they had negative tax rates,
meaning that the IRS sends them checks. And many
of those that paid taxes did so at what CTJ and
ITEP called ultra low rates of 10 percent or less.
Corporate tax avoidance is just the beginning of
the story. The dependence on government that has
Romney so upset is at the heart of the business
plan for much of Corporate America. What
libertarian types tend to overlook is that much
of the public spending they disdain comes in the
form of purchases from businesses. Its
<http://money.cnn.com/2012/07/23/news/economy/federal-spending/index.htm>estimated
that more than $500 billion a year in federal
outlays occurs via private-sector contracts.
Some companies rely so heavily on that spending
that they are as government-dependent as any
Medicaid or food stamp recipient. Aerospace
giant Lockheed Martin, for example, derives
<http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/936468/000119312512074929/d221578d10k.htm>more
than 80 percent of its revenue from the federal
government, especially the Pentagon; for its
competitor Raytheon the figure is about
<http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1047122/000104712212000044/rtn-12312011x10k.htm>75
percent.
A large portion of what is called entitlement
spending, especially in healthcare, ends up in
the pockets of corporations, including drug
makers, medical device manufacturers and
for-profit hospital chains. The largest of the
latter, HCA, gets more than
<http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/860730/000119312512075882/d264514d10k.htm#tx264514_8>40
percent of its revenue from Medicare and Medicaid.
Corporations can get federal grants as well as
contracts. The Commerce and Agriculture
Departments have a slew of programs that assist
businesses in marketing their products or that
underwrite some of their costs. And, of course,
a large portion of the billions paid each year
in farm subsidies goes to agribusiness giants rather than family farmers.
Despite the recent Republican demagoguery on
Solyndra, targeted federal spending to develop
new energy technologies is nothing new. The
Recovery Acts billions for solar and wind
companies was completely in line with federal
programs that have subsidized everything from
coal gasification to nuclear power plants.
Before the Fukushima Daiichi disaster in Japan,
the U.S. government was promoting a loan
guarantee program to encourage the construction
of a new generation of nukes by major utility companies.
Giant corporations also depend on the federal
government to help them sell their goods abroad.
The Export-Import Bank of the United States
spends more than
<http://www.exim.gov/about/reports/ar/2011/fy2011_at_a_glance.pdf>$30
billion each year providing various forms of
insurance, loan guarantees and direct loans for
the likes of Boeing, General Electric and
Caterpillar. The federal governments Overseas
Private Investment Corporation helps U.S.
companies do more business offshore by providing
political risk insurance and other types of financial assistance.
Another form of corporate dependency on
government is the ability of natural resources
companies to operate on public lands and pay
either no royalties or artificially low ones .
Mining corporations, for example,
<http://www.earthworksaction.org/issues/detail/general_mining_law_of_1872>take
advantage of an 1872 law that allows them to
extract gold, silver and other hardrock minerals
from public lands royalty-free.
Assistance from the federal government can be a
matter of life and death for some companies, as
in clear in the cases of General Motors and
Chrysler as well as the banks that were brought
back from the brink by the TARP bailout and then
thrived on the influx of billions in essentially
free money from the Federal Reserve.
Hearing all the ways in which the federal
government makes life easier and more profitable
for big business, a newly arrived Martian might
expect giant corporations to be grateful
boosters of the public sphere. Instead, as we
know all too well, most large companies are
disdainful of government and are constantly
whining about regulation and taxes they cant avoid paying.
To make things worse, many government-dependent
companies are less than honest when it comes to
their dealings with the public sector. The
Project On Government Oversights
<http://www.contractormisconduct.org/>Federal
Contractor Misconduct Database identifies
hundreds of examples of contract fraud and other
offenses. Healthcare providers such as HCA, not
satisfied with the vast amount of honest
business they get from Medicare and Medicaid,
have
<http://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/2003/June/03_civ_386.htm>defrauded
taxpayers out of billions more.
If Romney wants to find the real moochersand
often crooked ones at thathe can find them in
the corporate world that is his natural habitat.
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This entry was posted on Thursday, September
20th, 2012 at 5:14 pm and is filed under
<http://dirtdiggersdigest.org/archives/category/contractor-misconduct>Contractor
Misconduct,
<http://dirtdiggersdigest.org/archives/category/corporate-crime>Corporate
Crime,
<http://dirtdiggersdigest.org/archives/category/corporate-subsidies>Corporate
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<http://dirtdiggersdigest.org/archives/category/government-contracting>Government
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Keith Hudson, Saltford, England http://allisstatus.wordpress.com
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