[P2P-F] Fwd: Article : You Have More Money in Your Wallet Than Bank of America Pays in Federal Taxes

[Michel Bauwens]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Dante-Gabryell Monson <dante.monson at gmail.com>
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: econowmix at googlegroups.com, sustainable_solidarity at yahoogroups.com,
hc_ecology at yahoogroups.com


http://www.truth-out.org/you-have-more-money-your-wallet-than-bank-america-pays-federal-taxes68094

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.”




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