2/3rds of US Corporations Pay Zero Federal Taxes: US Uncut Movement Builds to Make Them Pay Up - The Nation - Alison Kilkenny - March 31, 2011 - “I’m tired of people calling for shared sacrifice and it’s all coming from the workers and nothing’s coming from the top,” says protester Dave Sonenberg. “I’m sick of companies like Bank of America not paying their taxes.”....
Real estate crash catches up to cities as property taxes slide - Bloomberg - By William Selway and Henry Goldman - March 29, 2011 - Local officials are now facing the consequences. Property- tax revenue dropped in the last three months of 2010 at the fastest pace since home prices slipped from their peak more than four years ago, the Census Bureau said yesterday. The decline may continue as values fall further, adding strains to cash- strapped localities that already fired workers, halted projects and cut spending because of the recession that began in 2007.
Foreign Banks Tapped Fed’s Secret Lifeline Most at Crisis Peak - Bloomberg - April 1, 2011 - “What in the world are we doing thinking we can pass out tens of billions of dollars to banks that are overseas?” said Paul, who has advocated abolishing the Fed. “We have problems here at home with people not being able to pay their mortgages, and they’re losing their homes.” ...
Fed's Rules Let Brokers Turn Junk Into Cash at Height of Financial Crisis - Bloomberg - By Matthew Leising - Mar 31, 2011 - At the height of the financial crisis, the Federal Reserve allowed the world’s largest banks to turn more than $118 billion in junk bonds, defaulted debt, securities of unknown ratings and stocks into cash.... Collateral of those asset types made up 72 percent of the total $164.3 billion in market-rate securities pledged to the Fed on Sept. 29, 2008, two weeks after the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc., according to documents released yesterday. The collateral backed $155.7 billion in loans on the largest day of borrowing from the Primary Dealer Credit Facility, which was created in March 2008 to provide loans to brokers as Bear Stearns Cos. collapsed....
Gross Echoes Buffett Saying Treasuries Have ‘Little Value’ on Debt, Dollar - Bloomberg - By Wes Goodman - Mar 30, 2011 - By Wes Goodman - Mar 30, 2011 - The U.S. has unrecorded debt of $75 trillion, or close to 500 percent of gross domestic product, counting what it owes on its bonds plus obligations for Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, Gross wrote in his monthly investment outlook. The U.S. will experience inflation, currency devaluation and low-to- negative interest rates after accounting for consumer-price gains if it doesn’t reform its entitlement programs, he said... Pimco “has been selling Treasuries because they have little value within the context of a $75 trillion total debt burden,” ... President Barack Obama’s government has increased the U.S. publicly traded debt to a record $9.05 trillion, leading Gross to compare the nation to Greece, which had its credit ratings cut two steps by Standard & Poor’s on March 29... “We are out-Greeking the Greeks,” he wrote.
Underemployment Rises to 20.3% in March - Gallup - April 1, 2011 - Jenny Marlar - Despite the Obama administration's March 16 announcement that unemployment would remain high or increase in coming months, the underemployed in March became neither more nor less hopeful about finding work soon. Six in 10 underemployed Americans are not hopeful they will find work or move from part-time to full-time work in the next four weeks. That translates to 12% of the workforce that is both underemployed and not hopeful they will find their desired amount of work. The lack of change suggests that underemployed Americans anticipated long-term difficulties in finding work well before the administration's formal announcement was made...
Keiser Report: Food Stamp Army
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Sunday, April 3, 2011
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3 comments:
I can understand and agree with the disgust at a tax code so complex and convoluted that some get out of taxes entirely and some take it on the chin. However, corporations don't pay taxes, they collect them. The customers that buy the products and services from corporations pay them. Flat tax. Flat tax. Flat tax.
I agree with this to a point. Why do companies look to show profitability? Because it increases the bonuses of the executives and Board members of the corporation. This is short-sighted. We need companies to reinvest in their labor force and plant and equipment. That is the way that you create jobs.
The problem lies with chartering. We have companies given a free rein to do whatever they please. They love the American consumer, but apparently despise the American worker. We need tariffs tpo reduce the ability of multi-nationals to offshore jobs to third world slave labor.
As a friend tried to point out this week, he has bought into the globalist explanation that Smoot-Hawley exacerbated the depression of the 1930s. Frankly, I believe it had very little effect and we had a greater domestic manufacturing capacity at that time.
This person believes that tariffs would be inflationary. I assume because it would protect domestic jobs , which pay more money. Well then would that not mean that outsourcing to cheap foreign labor should be deflationary? Because paying someone in China to do a job for $1/hour versus an American being paid $15/hour should significantly reduce costs as much as vise versa would cause an increase in prices, but what we have seen is huge multi-national conglomerates owned by the elite are hording those profits for themselves.
You know I am not a socialist. I just believe in our country. The United State should come first. Do you believe in the nation state?
It is as bad too have wide open borders when it comes to trade as it is to have wide open borders when it comes to immigration. If you believe that there should be regulations set forth and obeyed when it comes to immigration, then why does the same not apply to corporations bringing foreign goods into our country?
That nis the reason that I like what Donald Trump is saying. he has the cajones to say what needs to be said; while the feckless politicians, save a few, who are being bought off and bankrolled by the corporations are trying maintain the negative staus quo at the expense of the average middle class person who is seeing their future walloped by this current system.
There were people who never wanted to see corporations chartered in our country, because they limit the liability of individuals who may break the law and/or operate unethically. People are ignorant and kept ignorant about the subject of corporate law. We need to get back to controlling these corporate charters, because I truly believe that this is where we have gone wrong!
http://reclaimdemocracy.org/corporate_accountability/history_corporations_us.html
The states also imposed conditions (some of which remain on the books, though unused) like these:
* Corporate charters (licenses to exist) were granted for a limited time and could be revoked promptly for violating laws.
* Corporations could engage only in activities necessary to fulfill their chartered purpose.
* Corporations could not own stock in other corporations nor own any property that was not essential to fulfilling their chartered purpose.
* Corporations were often terminated if they exceeded their authority or caused public harm.
* Owners and managers were responsible for criminal acts committed on the job.
* Corporations could not make any political or charitable contributions nor spend money to influence law-making.
A few weeks ago, I wrote of labor unions and took the tack of not finding them as inherently evil as they have been painted by Mayor Wright, et al. Today I read the thesis for the argument I presented in general terms those few weeks ago, plus some. Corporations have become these monolithic entities; eating, absorbing, digesting, smaller corporations and resources. They exist for their own existence; a notion often perpetuated concerning government and both are guilty.
While it may be considered protectionist, and the most rabid capitalist out there would argue for a true free market economy, a mistake made by Herbert Hoover that drove the fiscal policies of The Great Depression deeper into the continuum of failure during the 1930’s, I think tariffs should be in place…for those countries that flood our markets with cheap, disposable, counterfeit, garbage that passes as consumable goods. Those countries tariff goods made in this country at a different rate than those materials which are used to make goods used in that country. Sounds like double speak, doesn’t it? An illustration provided me will suffice here. Brown glue is used in this region to join wood to wood in the manufacture furniture. If that brown glue is exported to China, the tariff is, for example, 60%. If the base ingredients to make brown glue are exported and brown glue is thus manufactured in China, the tariff is 12%. With no copyright or patent protections provided by the People’s Republic of China, and lets not forget, this is a communist nation and all dealings are eventually given tacit approval by the State, the Chinese could care less whether that corporation leaves or not. With the manufacturing processes and the knowledge base secure within their borders, coupled with what could only be described as a tenet labor force that works for pennies per day, it doesn’t take an active imagination to grasp what is going on. Who paid the price? Our manufacturing ability as an entire country and the almost complete blighting of the labor force associated with it, for the sole purpose of feeding the corporate minions higher bonuses and dividends.
That might be a big stretch in some folks’ eyes. But when you spend billions of dollars to lobby the lawmakers to make the rules in your favor and then you exploit it and those same lawmakers likewise strip the workforce of any ability to negotiate or bargain as equals to improve their working conditions, doesn’t that make a corporate totalitarian fascist State? And except for the individual ownership of property, how does that really differ from a communist State…like China?
Oh sure, you get to vote every couple of years and feed the notion of participation in a Republic based on representative democracy…that power is derived from the people through consent to be governed. Then the corporations swagger up to the bar with bags of cash and prizes to ply the lawmakers with. Then, you buy ads to tell the masses whatever it is they want to hear. Say one thing, do something else. And for the life of me, people still don’t get what is being done to them.
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