R i g h t a r d i a: Think Progress: Main Street movement

Monday, February 28, 2011

Think Progress: Main Street movement

The Main Street Movement , a coalition of students, the retired, union workers, public employees, and other middle class Americans, are demonstrating against brutal cuts to public services and crackdowns on organized labor.

Conservative lawmakers that are attacking collective bargaining and cutting necessary services like college tuition aid and health benefits for public workers claim that they have no choice. . .

But it wasn’t teachers, fire fighters, policemen, and college students that caused the economic recession that has devastated government budgets , it was Wall Street.

Carl Gibson, the founder of US Uncut, who has organized some of today’s UK-inspired massive demonstrations against tax dodgers, explains that while ordinary Americans are being asked to sacrifice, major corporations continue to use the rigged tax code to avoid paying federal taxes.

As Gibson notes if you have “one dollar” in your wallet, you’re paying more than the “combined income tax liability of many of the largest corporations in the US:

I have one dollar in my wallet. That’s more than the
combined income tax liability of GE, ExxonMobil, Citibank, and the Bank of America. That means somebody is gaming the system.”

GE's ecoimagination is a GOP tribute

Rightardia is irritated by the GE ecoimagination commercials. GE has been using a frolicking elephant in its commercials for more than a year which is obvious homage to the GOP.

Apparently their accountants use a lot of ecoimagination when they filed 7,000 tax returns. America's largest corporation has paid no corporate income tax to the US government.

General Electric is so good at avoiding taxes that some people consider its tax department to be the best in the world, even better than any law firm's.

Conservatives like to note the US corporate income tax is 35 per cent, one of the highest of the OECD countries. The US also has one of the worst tax codes in the OECD because there are so many exemptions.

According the NY Times, two out of every three United States corporations paid no federal income taxes from 1998 through 2005. This is according to a report released Tuesday by the Government Accountability Office.

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