03.24.11
Good Time for General Electric
While looking through usage logs today I noticed an employee from General Electric corporate had spent an hour here.
I’ve occasionally mentioned GE as a gigantic corporate whose new business model has a lot to do with economic parasitism despite two new strength-through-joy commercials, one with a prancing elephant on “ecomagination” and another with fake employees doing a jolly line dance to Alan Jackson’s “Good Time” as they work.
General Electric is mostly about offshoring, services and, according to today’s New York Times, tax avoidance and cheating.
The nation’s largest corporation, had a very good year in 2010.
The company reported worldwide profits of $14.2 billion, and said $5.1 billion of the total came from its operations in the United States.
Its American tax bill? None. In fact, G.E. claimed a tax benefit of $3.2 billion.
That may be hard to fathom for the millions of American business owners and households now preparing their own returns, but low taxes are nothing new for G.E. The company has been cutting the percentage of its American profits paid to the Internal Revenue Service for years, resulting in a far lower rate than at most multinational companies.
Its extraordinary success is based on an aggressive strategy that mixes fierce lobbying for tax breaks and innovative accounting that enables it to concentrate its profits offshore. G.E.’s giant tax department, led by a bow-tied former Treasury official named John Samuels, is often referred to as the world’s best tax law firm. Indeed, the company’s slogan “Imagination at Work??? (cue the dancing elephant, only tax avoidance lawyers also in the scene wouldn’t look so good — DD) fits this department well. The team includes former officials not just from the Treasury, but also from the I.R.S. and virtually all the tax-writing committees in Congress.
So of course, its CEO — Jeffrey Immelt — is the fellow our president tabbed to be head his economic advisory panel. Because the business of America is ripping off the government, and by extension, the taxpayers who can’t afford big tax avoidance law firms and lobbyists.
That someone from GE was actually here is astonishing. Perhaps their happy public relations commercials aren’t fooling anybody.
Coincidentally, Frank von Hippel, in an editorial piece on regulatory capture of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission:
Meanwhile, General Electric has applied for a license to build a [nuclear] plant that would use lasers to enrich uranium for commercial use, which could provide yet another way to produce weapons-grade material. A coalition led by the American Physical Society, a professional organization of physicists, has petitioned the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to assess the risk that this technology poses to non-proliferation efforts before it issues a license. The commission, predictably, has been reluctant to do so.
It is critical to find more effective ways to control such dangerous nuclear technologies.