Thursday, March 31, 2011

We Pay taxes. Big Corporate Skates.

You did not find this information in the Journal. It was in most responsible national papers on Friday and 60 Minutes on Sunday. The NYT broke the story and is running a series on how few taxes Big Corporate actually pay, but no series is in our Journal. The Journal does, however, try to keep us up on Charlie Sheen.

While huge corporations continue to scream about high U.S. Taxes, 60% of big U.S. corporations paid NO (none) taxes to the U.S. in 2005 (the last year we have this kind of data), and, according to 60 minutes and the network news, the number is growing rapidly.

I don't know about you, but this is a major untold story. My federal taxes are always in the 10%-20% range, and you can bet that local Albuquerque businesses are getting stuck for 20% to 35% while Big Corporate skates.

A fascinating NYT story is below:

General Electric, the nation’s largest corporation, had a very good year in 2010.

By DAVID KOCIENIEWSKI Published: March 24, 2011

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! (Same with Exxon) 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” 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.

While General Electric is one of the most skilled at reducing its tax burden, many other companies have become better at this as well. Although the top corporate tax rate in the United States is 35 percent, one of the highest in the world, companies have been increasingly using a maze of shelters, tax credits and subsidies to pay far less.

The rest of the story is here.

Saturday, March 19, 2011

Who's Afraid of Reforming Wall Street? The Journal!

You will not find an article like this in the Albuquerque Journal. From this week's TIME:

By Joe Klein Thursday, Mar. 03, 2011

"Three years after a horrific financial crisis caused by massive fraud, not a single financial executive has gone to jail," said Charles Ferguson, accepting a well-deserved Oscar for Inside Job, his documentary about the great Wall Street heist. "And that's wrong." Of course it is — but that shouldn't be a surprise. To put bad guys in jail, you need police and prosecutors. The financial police we have, agencies like the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), have been laughably inept in the era of financial deregulation. The SEC wasn't even able to spot the broad-daylight highway robbery committed by Bernard Madoff. And so, in 2010, the Obama Administration nudged through Congress the Dodd-Frank financial-reform bill, which was designed to put real cops, with real regulatory heft, on the financial beat. And now, in 2011, the Republican House seems intent on quietly gutting the bill under the sordid camouflage of budget cutting. "They're defunding the police after we had the biggest bout of looting in history," an Administration official told me. "That's just crazy."

Let's review the outrage: the heart of the financial collapse was a fraudulent effort to sell home mortgages to people who couldn't afford them. Some of these mortgages were truly mind-boggling — no money down (but a hefty interest rate hidden in the thicket of contractual codicils), no documentation (like proof of job and salary). The mortgages were then thrown together into giant, opaque bond packages and sold again as solid investments. (The ratings agencies, Moody's and Standard & Poor's, were essentially unindicted co-conspirators in the scam.) And those packages were then sliced up, resold and transformed into exotic derivatives, which were bet on by bond traders and investors. (See "The Demise of Bernie Madoff.")

Confused? Well, that was the point. According to Michael Lewis, whose book The Big Short is a riveting encyclopedia of the disaster, even the SEC was confused by the actual contents of the most far-fetched packages, called collateralized debt obligations (CDOs). Wall Street spewed terms like collateralized debt obligation in order to mislead: a more accurate abbreviation might have been RCLs —repackaged crappy loans. When the crappy loans couldn't be repaid, the housing market, Wall Street and the American economy imploded. The Wall Street traders pocketed hundreds of millions in profits; the American taxpayer, and homeowner, picked up the losses.

Read more here.

Remember, the Albuquerque Journal enjoys a near monopoly in this state. It should be held to a high standard, so if you have your own Untold Stories, send them to me. If you think this type of e-mail is a good idea, forward it to others, so they can request to be added the Untold Stories list.

Yours in media education,

Bob McCannon

Friday, March 4, 2011

Journal Ignores Petraeus' Apology for U.S. Atrocity

The story below was not on the Journal's front page–in fact not in the paper at all! Published by every major newspaper, most minor ones and national network news yesterday and the day before, it was not in the Albuquerque Journal, which did, however, publish stories about Charlie Sheen both days.

As a general rule the Journal ignores stories about our two wars that have destroyed countless lives and over four trillion dollars (source: Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz). (source: Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz).

Below are two stories about this event–one conservative, one liberal.

For a long list of such omissions, go to: http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=5652565662951898764

Coalition Apologizes for Deaths of Afghan Children (Wall Street Journal - March 3, 2011)

U.S. Gen. David Petraeus, the coalition's commander in Afghanistan, issued a rare apology Wednesday for a helicopter strike that killed nine children, hours after Afghan President Hamid Karzai condemned the allies for launching what he called a "ruthless attack."
[Rest of story here: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704728004576176644160681276.html]

Nine Afghan Boys Collecting Firewood Killed by NATO Helicopters (New York Times - March 2, 2011)

The NATO statement, which included an unusual personal apology by the commander of the NATO forces in Afghanistan, Gen. David H. Petraeus, said the boys had been misidentified as the attackers of a NATO base earlier in the day. News of the attack enraged Afghans and led to an anti-American demonstration on Wednesday in the village of Nanglam, where the boys were from. The only survivor, Hemad, 11, said his mother had told him to go out with other boys to collect firewood because “the weather is very cold now.”

[Rest of story here: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/03/world/asia/03afghan.html]