G-S Sex Sells/"Only Little People Pay Taxes" After Bailout By American Taxpayers, General Electric Pays ZERO U.S. Taxes, Pretends All Profits Overseas

(EXTRA: If anyone could make a contribution to my PayPal account (or otherwise - contact me for further info), it would be sincerely appreciated as I've just gone off the cliff financially. I really appreciate everything that my kind readers have done for me in the past financially and otherwise. Now . . . back to your regular viewing.) You know I've been calling it the GoldMan Sex scandal from the first. After all, sex sells; and they've sold themselves dearly. Today in the New York Times I finally see that Paul Krugman agrees with me! (No wonder they hate raising the minimum wage - they are afraid everyone will discover their gambit! I'd almost have to say (NOT) that the so-called Social Security/Medicare coming catastrophe of not getting enough tax funds from the rapidly disappearing corporate tax base relates directly to the prospect of knowing that the Treasury has been robbed by the same guys who promise you almost daily that you can no longer afford to receive the benefits you've paid in all your working life, and please, please, please let them manage your retirement savings for profit in the stock market. Which is guaranteed! Yeah. Where is that smart ass Pete Peterson and what is he planning for your working retirement now?)

Looting: The Economic Underworld of Bankruptcy for Profit.

Our theoretical analysis shows that an economic underground can come to life if firms have an incentive to go broke for profit at society’s expense (to loot) instead of to go for broke (to gamble on success). Bankruptcy for profit will occur if poor accounting, lax regulation, or low penalties for abuse give owners an incentive to pay themselves more than their firms are worth and then default on their debt obligations.

Obviously, Goldman wasn’t trying to run itself into the ground (although if there’s more like what we’ve just heard, it may have succeeded all the same). But creating securities that are bound to collapse in value, so that you can profit off that collapse, is in the same family of strategies.

And there’s nothing to get our analytical juices flowing like a good Sachs scandal.

Although, possibly you might "get (y)our analytical juices flowing" when you know that Mitch McConnell wants to get rid of the local fire departments. "

Firefighters, he declared, “won’t solve the problems that led to recent fires. They will make them worse.” The existence of fire departments, he went on, “not only allows for taxpayer-funded bailouts of burning buildings; it institutionalizes them.” He concluded, “The way to solve this problem is to let the people who make the mistakes that lead to fires pay for them. We won’t solve this problem until the biggest buildings are allowed to burn.”

O.K., I fibbed a bit. Mr. McConnell said almost everything I attributed to him, but he was talking about financial reform, not fire reform. In particular, he was objecting not to the existence of fire departments, but to legislation that would give the government the power to seize and restructure failing financial institutions.

But it amounts to the same thing.

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ And did you know that "After Bailout By American Taxpayers, General Electric Pays ZERO U.S. Taxes, Pretends All Profits Overseas?" Yeah! That's the same GE that was bailed out by lowly taxpayers most of whom are barely making minimum wage (if they have a job today). It's nice to know we could help out. Isn't it? A few more patriots like these and we are finished. Done. Toast. Kaput! What a great country!!!!!!! From Washingtons Blog:

Saturday, April 17, 2010

After Getting Bailed Out By American Taxpayers, General Electric Pays ZERO U.S. Taxes, Pretending that All of Its Profits are Overseas

General Electric got bailed out by American taxpayers.

Specifically, it was given $139 billion in FDIC guarantees and used the Federal Reserve program supporting it's commercial paper (see this).

So you'd think that GE would return the favor by paying American taxes, right?

Wrong. GE paid no U.S. taxes for 2009.

As CNN points out:

GE had plenty of earnings last year - just not in the United States. For tax purposes, the company's U.S. operations lost $408 million, while its international businesses netted a $10.8 billion profit.

Unfortunately, GE is not alone.

As I wrote in November:

The Washington Post notes:

About two-thirds of corporations operating in the United States did not pay taxes annually from 1998 to 2005, according to a new report scheduled to be made public today from the U.S. Government Accountability Office...

In 2005, about 28 percent of large corporations paid no taxes...

Dorgan and Sen. Carl M. Levin (D-Mich.) requested the report out of concern that some corporations were using "transfer pricing" to reduce their tax bills. The practice allows multi-national companies to transfer goods and assets between internal divisions so they can record income in a jurisdiction with low tax rates...

[Senator] Levin said: "This report makes clear that too many corporations are using tax trickery to send their profits overseas and avoid paying their fair share in the United States."

Indeed, as Pulitzer prize winning journalist David Cay Johnston documents, American multinationals pay much less in taxes than they should through a variety of widespread schemes, including:

• Selling valuable assets of the American companies to foreign subsidiaries based in tax havens for next to nothing, so that those valuable assets can be taxed at much lower foreign rates

• Pretending that costs were spent in the United States, so that the companies can count them as costs or deductions in the U.S. and pay less taxes to the American government

• Booking profits as if they occurred in the subsidiary's tax haven countries, so that taxes paid on profits are at the much lower safe haven rate

• Working out sweetheart deals with certain foreign governments, so that the companies can pretend they paid more in foreign taxes than they actually did, to obtain higher U.S. tax credits than are warranted

• Pretending they are headquartered in tax havens like Bermuda, the Cayman Islands or Panama, so that they can enjoy all of the benefits of actually being based in America (including the use of American law and the court system, listing on the Dow, etc.), with the tax benefits associated with having a principal address in a sunny tax haven.

• And myriad other scams

As Johnston documents, the American economy is hurt by the massive underpayment of taxes by the huge multinationals.,

Suzan _______________