government contracts

In the United States, we believe in equality. We like to believe that everybody has a chance at the American dream. We love to hear rags to riches stories. Whether it is Cinderella or the Prince of Persia or even Bill Gates, we’d all like to believe that we can be sitting at the head of that huge boardroom table. Yet, at the same time, we allow a system to exist where corporations get breaks that the rest of us don’t. We justify this dichotomy by saying, “well, they create jobs.” For some reason, this small phrase “justifies” our allowing corporations to get every break imaginable. They are allowed to consistently thwart our rules and regulations and yet we still defend them. Does this mean we’re schizophrenic or just insane?

More from Arianna:

You want Exhibit A of two sets of rules? According to the White House, in 2004, the last year data on this was compiled, U.S. multinational corporations paid roughly $16 billion in taxes on $700 billion in foreign active earnings — putting their tax rate at around 2.3 percent. Know many middle class Americans getting off that easy at tax time?

In December 2008, the Government Accounting Office reported that 83 of the 100 largest publicly-traded companies in the country — including AT&T, Chevron, IBM, American Express, GE, Boeing, Dow, and AIG — had subsidiaries in tax havens — or, as the corporate class comically calls them, “financial privacy jurisdictions.”

Even more egregiously, of those 83 companies, 74 received government contracts in 2007. GM, for instance, got more than $517 million from the government — i.e. the taxpayers — that year, while shielding profits in tax-friendly places like Bermuda and the Cayman Islands. And Boeing, which received over $23 billion in federal contracts that year, had 38 subsidiaries in tax havens, including six in Bermuda. (more…)