07.18.14
Life in Corporate Taxavoidination
We live in corporate Taxavoidination.
For the past two weeks, mainstream journalism has glommed onto covering US businesses moving swiftly to merge with foreign equivalents, specifically in countries where the economy is rigged to encourage legal corporate tax cheating by American businessmen. They’ve published so much the White House has been moved to ask for legislation, a request that hasn’t a chance of going anywhere, to stop it.
Two phrases keep cropping up, economic patriotism, and corporate patriotism, as in “why ain’t there any?”
Who would think there is such a thing living in this country for the last two or three decades? Who is surprised at its non-existence? Corporate patriotism? It’s to laugh, something to say with a sneer.
The article I’m about to excerpt and link to is entitled “America’s unrequited corporate love affair,” by Timothy Noah. It’s the latest in the official college of explainers’ discovery of the renouncement of status as American for tax purposes as the to do thing in the corporate fascist state.
But what’s this about unrequited love? Who loves big American corporations? How do they inspire love in us? Disgust, fear, contempt and anger seem far more common.
Are America’s corporations loved because they haven’t fired you yet, only increasing your workload by a third or even 100 percent without paying any more over the last ten years? Are they loved because they only filched twenty dollars from your bank account this week in administrative and courtesy fees rather than forty? Are they loved because they bankroll politicians who are climate change deniers which is better than bankrolling one who would try to cancel the food stamp program and make new law so that people who default on debt because they have been put out of work can be quickly put in jail?
Have you ever heard anyone say “I love [Big Pharmaceutical Company] or [Boeing] or [Verizon]”?
We do know the groupies of the world of Silicon Valley tech uber alles love Apple. But Apple doesn’t love them back. Apple hates everybody, except the financial instruments of Luxembourg and Ireland where it launders its money. It hates the people that assemble its phones so thoroughly they started committing suicide, then rioted. That’s a case of global corporate Stockholming, where the tormented are conditioned into a sick love for their tormentors.
The news piece is decent but not anything you haven’t seen commented on previously. In the last four years corporate tax avoidance through off-shoring maneuvers has so distorted the economic landscape of the country even the business news media can’t whitewash it.
Consider Heather Bresch, the daughter of Democratic West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin and the chairman of generic drug maker Mylan, who announced plans this week to reincorporate in the Netherlands. “Until now, Ms. Bresch ran an unabashedly proud American company based in a Pittsburgh-area suburb,??? a July 14 New York Times story notes. In 2011, the Times points out, Esquire magazine named Bresch “Patriot of the Year??? for her prominent role in promoting the Food and Drug Administration Safety in Innovation Act, passed in 2012, which tightened regulations on imported drugs.
Why would a U.S. industry executive be deemed patriotic for advocating a law that, however worthy, improved her company’s competitive position against foreign imports? Try not to be distracted by that excellent question. The salient point is that Bresch had a family connection in Congress and made effective use of it. Now she’s thanking the U.S. government by repatriating her company to the Netherlands to dodge taxes.
Bresch told the Times that she doesn’t want to play the inversion game, but has to because Congress won’t lower corporate tax rates. In fact, Obama’s proposed tax reform plan, currently stalled in Congress, would lower the corporate rate from 35% to 28%, and 25% for manufacturers. But as Bresch told the Times, Mylan already pays an effective tax rate of 25%. Reincorporating in the Netherlands will lower that to 21%, and eventually to the high teens.
Speaking in defense of corporate fascism and predation over the land, a writer of entrepreneurial self-help books delivers this at Yahoo Finance:
So this might be a reasonable way to way to define economic patriotism: Pay what you owe and nothing more, while finding other ways to show support for your nation and your countryfolk. If you’re a businessperson who profits by operating in America, set up mentoring programs to help young people get ahead, or go out of your way to hire the underprivileged, or find some other way to give back.
This is bad writing on many levels. At the core, it’s intelligence-insulting and bald-faced deception.
Who expects American corporations to set up mentoring programs that aren’t excuses to wring free labor internships out of young people? And what, pray tell, does corporate America do to hire the underprivileged when the message for the last decade is that the labor pool is unskilled and too stupid to fulfill its needs?
The answer to that is simple and obvious. Corporate America hires the underpriviliged and everyone else at rates of pay that don’t add up to a living wage.
Anyway, only some weird and warped corporate boot-lick uses the word countryfolk in a piece aimed at arguing maintaining the corporate status quo is the patriotic thing.
“[If] you’re an ordinary voter, you can show your economic patriotism by demanding the government adopt policies that make America indisputably the best place to start and run a business, instead of a winded giant that seems unable to keep up with the rest of the world,” recommends Yahoo’s Rich Newman, author of Rebounders: How Winners Pivot from Setback to Success.
And the best way to make America a place to start and run a business is to always lower the corporate tax rate. It’s the best argument: If American corporations are engaged in massive tax avoidance and financial legal frauds which fail to serve even the slightest social good, change the rules so they pay even less.
Now do your patriotic duty and click up the number on Taxavoidination, either version. Don’t thumb your nose, now. I can tell.