Paul Buchheit Posts

Apple, Walmart and McDonald's are among the largest corporate employers and profit-makers in the U.S., with a total of 2.6 million employees worldwide (1.6 million in the U.S.) and combined 2012 pre-tax profits of more than $88 billion.

Apple, Wal-Mart and McDonald's are among the largest corporate employers and profit-makers in the U.S., with a total of 2.6 million employees worldwide (1.6 million in the U.S.) and combined 2012 pre-tax profits of more than $88 billion.

Objections to the FTT seem superficial in light of the two main benefits: (1) The massive revenue potential; and (2) the likelihood of limiting the speculative trading that contributed to the financial meltdown in 2008. Informed Americans are in agreement on this. The tax is simple and effective and fair and long-overdue, and obvious to everyone except the business-friendly members of Congress.

CEOs are legendary for defending their tax paying records, and eager to imply that government is responsible for any of their tax delinquencies. Changing the tax rules is a specialty of big business. As is flouting the tax rules. The following four tales of corporate malfeasance are particularly disturbing.

A recent article by Les Leopold informed us that our nation is near the bottom of the developed world in median wealth, probably the best gauge for the economic strength of the middle class. The source of the information, the Global Wealth Databook, provides additional evidence of our decline from our once-lofty position as an egalitarian country with opportunities for nearly everyone.

We hear a lot about corporations avoiding federal taxes. Less well known is their non-payment of state taxes, which along with local taxes make up 90 percent of U.S. education funding. The total cost of K-12 educational cutbacks in recent years is approximately equal to the amount of state taxes left unpaid by these companies.

Young people in America, and their parents and grandparents, are all contributors to the greatest revolution in technology in the history of the world. Yet as we heap praise and money on tech leader Apple, and generate billions in advertising revenue for Google and Facebook, we're not getting back as much as we're giving.

In football terms, "piling on" means jumping on a player when he's down. In the economic new normal described by Bernie Sanders, it means taking most of the wealth and all of the income, moving profits and jobs overseas, and making impoverished people pay the bills.

Inequality is spreading like a shadowy disease through our country, infecting more and more households, and leaving a shrinking number of financially secure families to maintain the charade of prosperity.

The damage caused by the relentless corporate drive for profits has become more clear in recent years. In the most important areas of American life, devastating changes have occurred.

In the past twenty years, corporate profits have quadrupled while the corporate tax percent has dropped by half. The payroll tax, paid by workers, has doubled.

Too many Americans are unaware of the extreme disparities that have been caused by the unregulated profit incentive of capitalism. Our winner-take-all system is flailing away at once-healthy parts of society, leaving them like withered limbs on a trembling body.

Navigation through the hellish forms of the Securities and Exchange Commission is fraught with anguish and pain and bewilderment, causing the visitor to beg for release from its devilish grasp, to shudder when recalling the sign at the entrance: "Abandon all hope, ye who enter here."

Navigation through the hellish forms of the Securities and Exchange Commission is fraught with anguish and pain and bewilderment, causing the visitor to beg for release from its devilish grasp, to shudder when recalling the sign at the entrance: "Abandon all hope, ye who enter here."

Multinational corporations have built their businesses on the backs of American taxpayers. Yet they've turned around and mocked us with declining tax payments, low wages and dwindling retirement support.

Ronald Reagan's big fat lie: 93 percent of non-home wealth is now owned by the richest quintile of Americans, while everyone else has experienced a 35-year decline in income.

The first step is to learn the facts, and then to get angry and to ask ourselves, as progressives and caring human beings, what we can do about the relentless transfer of wealth to a small group of well-positioned Americans.

The first step is to learn the facts, and then to get angry and to ask ourselves, as progressives and caring human beings, what we can do about the relentless transfer of wealth to a small group of well-positioned Americans.

Essential human needs are being packaged into products to be bought and sold. The right to food and water, education, health care, public spaces, and unrestricted speech shouldn't be based on who can pay the most, or on who can generate profits with the slickest marketing pitch.

Economists have told us that the profit motive of privatization comes with an "invisible hand" that automatically corrects inequities in the market. It hasn't worked that way for health care.