---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Dante-Gabryell Monson <[email protected]> Date: Mon, Feb 28, 2011 at 5:20 AM Subject: Article : You Have More Money in Your Wallet Than Bank of America Pays in Federal Taxes To: [email protected], [email protected], [email protected] http://www.truth-out.org/you-have-more-money-your-wallet-than-bank-america-p... Saturday 26 February 2011 by: Zaid Jilani | *ThinkProgress | News Analysis*<http://thinkprogress.org/2011/02/26/main-street-tax-cheats/> ** <http://thinkprogress.org/2011/02/26/main-street-tax-cheats/>excerpt : ... as politicians are asking ordinary Americans to sacrifice their education, their health, their labor rights, and their wellbeing to tackle budget deficits, some of the world’s richest multinational corporations are getting away with shirking their responsibility and paying nothing. ThinkProgress has assembled a short but far from comprehensive list of these tax dodgers — corporations which have rigged the tax system to their advantage so they can reap huge profits and avoid paying taxes: - *BANK OF AMERICA*: In 2009, Bank of America* didn’t pay a single penny in federal income taxes,* exploiting the tax code so as to avoid paying its fair share. “Oh, yeah, this happens all the time<http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2010/03/26/91119/bank-of-america-wells-fargo-might.html>,” said Robert Willens, a tax accounting expert interviewed by McClatchy. “If you go out and try to make money and you don’t do it, *why should the government pay you for your losses?*” asked Bob McIntyre of Citizens for Tax Justice. The same year, the mega-bank’s top executives received pay “ranging from $6 million to nearly $30 million.”<http://www.charlotteobserver.com/2010/02/27/1276388/bofa-exec-pay-remains-hot-button.html#ixzz1F0IqvuVq> - *BOEING:* Despite *receiving billions of dollars from the federal government every single year* in taxpayer subsidies from the U.S. government, Boeing didn’t “pay a dime<http://www.ctj.org/pdf/boeing0211.pdf>of U.S. federal corporate income taxes” between 2008 and 2010. -* CITIGROUP: *Citigroup’s deferred income taxes for the third quarter of 2010 amounted to a grand total of $0.00<http://www.wikinvest.com/stock/Citigroup_%28C%29/Data/Deferred_Income_Taxes/2010/Q3>. At the same time, Citigroup has continued to pay its staff lavishly. “John Havens, the head of Citigroup’s investment bank, is expected to be the bank’s highest paid executive for the second year in a row<http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/25/business/25citi.html> , *with a compensation package worth $9.5 million.”* - *EXXON-MOBIL:* The oil giant uses offshore subsidiaries<http://wonkroom.thinkprogress.org/2010/04/06/exxon-zero-taxes/> in the Caribbean to avoid paying taxes in the United States. Although Exxon-Mobil paid $15 billion in taxes in 2009,* not a penny of those taxes went to the American Treasury.*This was the same year that the company overtook Wal-Mart<http://www.autoblog.com/2009/04/20/exxon-mobil-topples-wal-mart-to-sit-atop-fortune-500-list/> in the Fortune 500. Meanwhile the total compensation of Exxon-Mobil’s CEO the same year was over $29,000,000.<http://www.companypay.com/executive/compensation/exxon-mobil-corp.asp?yr=2010> - *GENERAL ELECTRIC: *In 2009, General Electric — the world’s largest corporation<http://www.richestpersons.net/top-10-biggest-companies-in-the-world/> — filed more than 7,000 tax returns and *still paid nothing to U.S. government. *They managed to do this by a tax code <http://wonkroom.thinkprogress.org/2009/04/22/corporate-tax-offshore/>that essentially subsidizes companies for losing profits and allows them to set up tax havens overseas. That same year GE CEO Jeffery Immelt — who recently scored a spot <http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-01-21/obama-taps-ge-s-immelt-for-economy-panel-replace-volcker.html>on a White House economic advisory board — “earned total compensation of $9.89 million.”<http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704869304575103960593817310.html> In 2002, Immelt displayed his lack of economic patriotism, saying, “When I am talking to GE managers, I talk China, China, China, China, China<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=suN-9FrBi7E>….I am a nut on China. Outsourcing from China is going to grow to 5 billion.” *- WELLS FARGO: *Despite being the fourth largest bank in the country<http://www.americanconsumernews.com/2010/03/no-taxes-for-bank-of-america-nyse-bac-and-wells-fargo-nysewfc.html>, Wells Fargo was* able to escape paying federal taxes* by writing all of its losses off after its acquisition of Wachovia. Yet in 2009 the *chief executive of Wells Fargo also saw his compensati**on “more than double” *as he earned “a salary of $5.6 million paid in cash <http://www.reuters.com/article/2010/03/03/us-wellsfargo-stumpf-idUSTRE6225P020100303>and stock and stock awards of more than $13 million.” -- P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net Connect: http://p2pfoundation.ning.com; Discuss: http://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation Updates: http://del.icio.us/mbauwens; http://friendfeed.com/mbauwens; http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens