Daily Music SelectionBefore pushing grandma down the stairs by ‘reforming’ her Medicare and Social Security benefits out of existence, why not go after these god-awful drains on our treasury? Here are five examples of profitable corporations that pay no or low federal income taxes, yet extract much of their profit margin from the American economy. It’s past time for them to pay, as a percentage of their income, at least as much as the average public school teacher or firefighter in Wisconsin. Want to balance the budget? Start here: 1. General Electric has made over $26 billion in profits in the past five years, with $5 billion from the US market just last year, on which it paid zero federal income taxes. It’s also received a hefty $4.1 billion refund from the IRS. Despite this generosity on the part of the American taxpayer, over the last nine years GE has shipped one-fifth of its jobs overseas and used every trick available to avoid paying US taxes. This is bringing good things to life? (BTW, Jack Welch, former CEO of GE, is sometimes called the father of modern outsourcing.) 2. ExxonMobil. This oil giant paid no federal income taxes in 2009 on $19…
Now there seems to be some question about Donald Trump’s birthplace. (That those questions were apparently invented out of thin air, possibly for humorous reasons, is of no consequence.) As we know from the example of the right-wring media, any question involving your place of birth must be answered by a slew of legal documents which they will then reject as forgeries and demand more, just as Trump, to goose up his pathetic TV show’s ratings with a presidential bid, is demanding that Obama release his ‘long form’ birth certificate since the short form, adequate for obtaining a US passport or entering the military, just isn’t enough for the blubbery mass of ham and ego some call “The Donald.” Consider this: Not one person at the Jamaica, New York, hospital where Trump claims to have been born remembers his birth, as far as I care to find out. Aside from that, Trump’s alleged ‘real’ birth certificate doesn’t specify it is a hospital in Jamaica ‘New York’ — it simply says “The Jamaica Hospital.” What is Trump trying to pull here, MON? Was he born in the islands and smuggled into dis country? And where are the contemporaneous 1946 newspaper birth…
“All business sagacity reduces itself in the last analysis to judicious use of sabotage.” – Thorstein Veblen, author of “The Theory of the Leisure Class.”
