The Corporate Tax Dodge US Style

According to a new study by the Economic Policy Institute and Americans for Tax Fairness, corporate tax dodging is at record levels while corporate profits have reached record highs. U.S. corporations have stashed $2.4 trillion offshore. It is estimated corporations could owe as much as $700 billion on those profits, much of which are earned in the United States. Some of the findings are below. I should like to point out that a recent report in the Guardian stated that US corporations were the best at avoiding taxes.

1. Corporate profits are way up, and corporate taxes are way down. In 1952, corporate profits were 5.5 percent of the economy, and corporate taxes were 5.9 percent. Today, corporate profits are 8.5 percent of the economy, and corporate taxes are just 1.9 percent of GDP.

2, Corporations used to contribute $1 out of every $3 in federal revenue. Today, despite very high corporate profitability, it is $1 out of every $9.

3. Many corporations pay an effective tax rate that is one-half (or less) of the official 35 percent tax rate.

4. One thing not mentioned by the study is that many US corporations pay no taxes and sometimes receive tax rebates on taxes they never paid, Verizon, for instance, paid no Federal taxes in 2009, 2010 and 2013, and received tax rebates in each of those years.

5. As of 2015, U.S. corporations had $2.4 trillion in untaxed profits offshore. This is roughly a five-fold increase from $434 billion in 2005. It stems largely from anticipation of a tax holiday.
Just two industries—high-tech and pharmaceutical/health care—hold half the untaxed offshore profits.

6. Just 50 companies hold over 75 percent of untaxed offshore profits. Ten companies hold 39 percent of these profits. Just four companies—Apple, Pfizer, Microsoft, and General Electric—hold one-quarter of all untaxed offshore profits.

7. About 55 percent of U.S. corporate offshore profits are in tax-haven countries. Corporations pay an average tax rate of between just 3.0 percent and 6.6 percent on profits in tax havens.

8. U.S. corporations pay very low tax rates—6 percent to 10 percent, mainly to foreign governments—on all their offshore profits. A tax break known as “deferral” allows them to delay paying U.S. taxes until the profits are repatriated to the parent corporation in the United States.

9. The U.S. Treasury will lose $1.3 trillion over 10 years—about $126 billion a year—due to the deferral of taxes on offshore profits.

10. Income shifting—which are making profits earned in the United States look as if they were earned offshore—erodes our corporate tax base by over $100 billion a year. U.S. corporations increasingly manipulate transfer pricing and bilateral tax agreements to make their U.S. profits appear to be earned in tax havens. Think Panama Free Trade Agreement and the looming Trans-Pacific Partnership.

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Is the Trans-Pacific Income Redistribution Agreement The Democrats Last Hope to Appease the Big Donors of Wall Street and Others?

Wall Street President Barack Obama has come one step further along with the announcement that the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) has been finalized in the Atlanta sessions that ended last weekend. His Democratic henchman, Wall Street Senator Ron Wyden, must have been smiling with the announcement, since he is the chief Democratic supporter of the TPP in the US senate.

The Democrats are desperate since they have been losing ground in congress and the polls since 2010. Their fundraising falls far short of Republican efforts, and their base is falling by the wayside for reasons described below. President Obama has been intent on securing the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) for his Wall Street benefactors, as well as other sources of big campaign contributions and other sizable perks. If he can’t secure this for Big Donors, what good are the Democrats?

The TPP will show how adept the Democrats are at caving in to Republican Party since the TPP is falsely marketed as a trade agreement when it is designed to redistribute income and political power from the 99 to the 1 percent, just like all previous so-called trade agreements.

In order to get his deal, the president and his negotiators had to engage in serious back door deals with senators, congressional representatives and foreign trade negotiators. For example, in order to get the deal out of the gridlock of negotiations, the president and his team caved in to all of Japan’s demands on agriculture. See why-japan-did-americas-dirty-work-in-the-tpp-ustr-gave-away-the-agricultural-store–nakedcapitalism.com.

The president also made it easier for Japanese automobile parts manufacturers to export their stuff to the US, which will cost the US jobs. The price to get Japan in on the deal was destroy US jobs in auto parts.

The final battle against the middle class will now be waged in the halls of congress. It will be led by Wyden and Obama, along with a bevy of Big Cash politicians from the Republican Party. The news media will remain largely mum on the subject. It’s better to keep the little people illiterate about the issue, than arouse their indignation and protests via honest reporting.

The Democratic base has been falling by the wayside since Obama began his tenure as president. “Hope and change” was a nice slogan as the president gave the rich everything they wanted, including 95 percent of all income growth since Obama took office. The 1 percent steal 37 percent of the nation’s income, up from 8 percent in 1980. That’s what they’re buying with those campaign contributions and other perks.

Little by little the Democratic base has come to realize how indifferent the president is to their concerns, how much he actually favors the rich, what a lie “hope and change” was, since there was no “change,” and this is reflected in recent elections as more and more of the base has increasingly decided to stay home at voting time. That’s precisely why the Republicans have such large margins in both houses of the US congress.

If the TPP passes through congress, within a decade the 1 percent will steal 50 percent of the nation’s income, driving millions of people into poverty in the process.

Take China for example. China is not a part of the TPP, but Vietnam is. Wages in China are about twice is high as in Vietnam. In order to keep jobs in China, the Chinese government will be forced to manipulate its currency vis-a-vis the US dollar. Chinese exports will become cheaper in the US, while US exporters will be encouraged to export US jobs to China. But there is also a devious side to this situation. Prices of Chinese imports won’t decrease in the US. Instead, profit margins will increase.

Any company manufacturing in China will see an increase of its profits, and they won’t need to do a damn thing to make that happen. Corporations like Microsoft, Nike, Dell, and Apple will see massive rises earnings and their stock prices, as income is redistributed from US export workers losing their jobs to US manufacturers producing goods in China. Their rich shareholders will reap a massive bonanza at the expense of people who actually work for a living. See Four-graphs-that-will-make-you-boiling-mad-about-the-trans-pacific-partnership-or-why-president-obama-along-with-executives-from-nike-microsoft-apple-and-other-us-corporations-steadfastly-support–JohnHively.wordpress.com

This isn’t lost on everybody. Some people are already coming out against

AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka:

“We are disappointed that our negotiators rushed to conclude the TPP in Atlanta, given all the concerns that have been raised by American stakeholders and members of Congress. The Administration had a hard time reaching this deal for good reasons: it appears that many problematic concessions were made in order to finalize the deal. We ask the Administration to release the text immediately, and urge legislators to exercise great caution in evaluating the TPP. As we’ve said, rushing through a bad deal will not bring economic stability to working families, nor will it bring confidence that our priorities count as much as those of global corporations. We will evaluate the details carefully and work to defeat this corporate trade deal if it does not measure up.”

Communications Workers of America President Chris Shelton:

“Negotiators from the 12 Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal countries, meeting in Atlanta, have announced an agreement. Despite all the hype, and given what we’ve learned over the past many months and years of negotiations, it’s clear that this TPP remains a bad deal for working families and communities. The corporate lobbyists who make up the majority of U.S. trade advisers have been pushing hard for an agreement, mainly because they’ve known all along that what’s in the TPP represents a sweet deal for multinational corporations and the 1 percent. For the rest of us—U.S. working families and communities, and workers in the other TPP countries—this agreement is bad news.”

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The Federal Reserve Decision on Maintaining Historic Low Interest Rates, 35 Years of Income redistribution, and the Coming Great Decession

The governors of the Federal Reserve Bank voted to keep interest rates at historic lows in their September 17, 2015 meeting. The bank has not raised interest rates in nearly a decade. Lucky us, or maybe unlucky us.

Chairwoman Janet Yellen cited a number of reasons why the bank decided to keep rates low. She mentioned, for example, the weakness of manufacturing in China.

However, she didn’t mention that nearly 50 percent of US manufacturing is done in China, which, quite naturally, indicates a slowing down of US outsourced manufacturing, which certainly impacts the US. Like a good politician, she also did not mention that the evil US trade deficit is fueled by US manufacturers exporting jobs overseas, like Microsoft, Apple, Nike and Adidas. These and hundreds of other companies manufacture their products in China and elsewhere, and export their stuff to the US.

This is precisely and the only reason why the US has a trade deficit. The US trade deficit, in other words, is with US job exporters, not with China, Pakistan, Mexico or elsewhere.

Anyway, keeping interest rates low was a good thing for the US economy. Typically, the Fed waits to raise interest rates until just after the US economy begins to slide into recession.

That process begins when US corporations see a slowdown in their earnings growth, in the aggregate. These businesses begin to lay people off, which jacks up their profits. Perhaps the folks running the Fed take this as some sort of sacred signal that everything is all right. However, laying enough people off throughout the economy ignites recessions in the process of jacking up those profits, because the demand for goods and services slackens, jobs and profits decline, and a recession begins even while corporate earnings expand.

This is why I mentioned the slowdown of Chinese manufacturing, which in all likelihood, represents something of a slowdown of US manufacturing abroad. Profit growth has been shaky the last two years, though still growing in fits and spurts with sudden quarterly declines followed by rapid growth.

In other words, the US and world economies are still quite weak, especially since the rich have stolen 95 percent of all income growth in the US since 2009, an historic high by a wide margin. This has meant sluggish US and world economic growth since the more money the 1 percent steal in the US and elsewhere, the weaker the demand for goods and services by the 99 percent.

Yellen has the brains to understand all of this. This is likely why the Fed has kept interest rates at historic lows for years. To maintain their standards of living, the 99 percent had to keep borrowing because they haven’t gotten a raise in 35 years on average and in real terms. Raise interest rates and the demand for goods and services begins to die.

Raising interest rates will likely be the straw that sends the world economy into the monstrous fangs of the biggest economic crisis since the Great Depression. This crisis may already be in its early less visible stages.

Not a single world leader has learned the lesson from the last Recession. The current US economic expansion is fueled by the same artificially created housing and stock market bubbles as the last recession. Wall Street executives are calling the economic shots in the White House, on Capital Hill and the US Supreme Court. That’s why nobody who could do anything did squat about the corrupt forces that brought about last recession, and now the bill is coming due.

The last recession was the worst since the Great Depression. The next one, as I have pointed out in my book, The Rigged Game: Corporate America and a People Betrayed, will be far more hideous.

The Fed has literally no tools to fight off this coming Great Depression, but it will print trillions of dollars to save billionaires and others from their foolish investment decisions. See breakdown-of-the-26-trillion-the-federal-reserve-handed-out-to-save-rich-incompetent-investors-but-who-purchase-political-power–JohnHively.wordpress.com

The federal government will be forced to expand the deficit, and instead of having 48 million people permanently on food stamps, the US will have 60 to 100 million, unless the madness of redistributing income from the 99 to the 1 percent via job exporting trade treaties, unsustainable and illogical immigration policies (both legal and illegal, HB1 visas), and privatization scams.

Much of this can be reversed simply by amending income redistribution schemes known as international trade agreements, limiting immigration by restricting the flow of people moving into the USA at least until wages begin to rise, enforcing current immigration laws, and putting a halt and reversing many privatization follies.

All three of these policies have stolen jobs from American citizens, while enriching the politically and financially affluent in the process, all at the expense of people who produce goods and services.

Of course, that is precisely what the corrupt US government (all three branches), and both corrupt major political parties, have been driven to do by the money unleashed in the political markets since and because of the Reagan tax cuts for the rich.

The ultimate end game of Reaganomics is coming to its ugly conclusion.

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What you pay and don’t pay in taxes: How the corporate press manipulates You

The first duty of any editor of the corporate propaganda corps, sometimes mislabeled a free press, is to manipulate the sentiments of their readers so that those feelings are in harmony with the political and economic goals of the 1 percent, which, coincidentally, are their advertisers, such as Microsoft, Apple Inc, Motorola, Shell Oil, Exxon, and all the other big money players in politics.

One of those sentiments is apathy and perhaps hatred of your fellow 99 percenters. So there’s always news stories about those who are gaming the system, but only of the small folk. The press also wants you to feel sympathy with the people and corporations that are robbing you blind, the rich folks.

That’s why they’re always going to have negative stories about people on SNAP, or unemployment benefits, and virtually nothing but positive things said about the tax money you pay toward the rich, such as corporate subsidies, and defense spending. There are massive profits in these corporate subsidies and defense spending, which push corporate profits higher, share prices higher, and dividends up, up and away.

In other words, the first duty of the press is to divide the 99 percent against each other, while doing their best to make the 99 percent lap dogs of the 1 percent.

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Four Graphs that Will Make You Boiling Mad About the Trans Pacific Partnership–Or Why President Trump, former President Obama, along with executives from Nike, Microsoft, Apple and other US corporations Steadfastly Support China’s Currency Manipulations

Originally published May 19, 2015 by John Hively

When China manipulates its currency vis-a-vis the US dollar it increases the profits of US job exporters that produce stuff in China and exports that cheap stuff to the USA.

That’s most likely why former President Obama said he will veto any congressional legislation that seeks to stop the Chinese government from manipulating its currency.

Why do President Obama and executives of US based multinational corporations, like Nike, want the Chinese government to manipulate its currency? And what does this have to do with the Trans Pacific Partnership and Fast Track Authority?

The answer to one of these questions is simple: the TPP will force China to manipulate its currency even more than is currently the case.

Take a look at the graph below. On the left side is the Yuan, which is the Chinese currency. On the bottom line is the dollar. Now look at the two intersecting lines, which is the supply and demand for dollars. In this example, 600 yuan can purchase $100 in the currency markets, which is roughly what the two currencies currently exchange for.

So when Nike, Microsoft or Apple Inc. manufacture a product in China that costs the consumers, say, 600 yuan in China, given the exchange rate, the same product will cost $100 in the United States, after, of course, it is exported from China to the USA. Assume these US corporations have a 25% profit margin. That means these companies get 150 Y profits in China per product, and $25 profit when they export their products to the United States.

The same is true for companies that manufacture products in the USA, and then export them to China. American manufacturing companies earn $25 per $100 of product sold in the USA, and 150 Y when their products are exported from the USA to China.

The government of China has been accused of manipulating the value of its currency. So what happens when it does this? It purchases dollars. This shifts the D1 line to the left, because there are less dollars on the market, which is shown in the graph below as line D2. This makes the Yuan less expensive in terms of dollars.

Why would President Obama encourage the Chinese government to manipulate its currency by threatening to veto US legislation aimed at stopping it? Why would Wall Street Senator Ron Wyden only pay lip service to the evil of Chinese currency manipulation, while apparently supporting it? Why are the higher up folks at Nike, Microsoft, Apple and every US corporation that is producing goods in China for export to the United States against any legislation that seeks to address Chinese currency manipulation? There is a very good reason they’re all for this.

Look at the example in the next graph below. When the Chinese government manipulates it’s currency by purchasing dollars, 800 Y will now purchase $75. Do the math; 600 Y will purchase now $56. What does that mean?

It means that when Nike manufactures a pair of shoes in China which costs 600 Y there, in the US it should cost $56 rather than $100, thanks to China’s currency manipulation, but that rarely happens. The US corporate propaganda machine will lie to you and tell you it makes Chinese imports less expensive. However, the truth is that China’s  manipulation increases the profits of Nike.

Nike still gets 25%, or 150 Y, in profits when its shoes are sold in China. When it exports the same shoes to the USA from China, Nike still gets 25% profit on $56, which is $14 dollars. However, Nike still sells it’s shoes for $100 in the United States, which means another $44 in earnings per pair, in addition to the $14.

That means Nike’s profit margin on a $100 pair of shoes goes from 25% at the old exchange rate to 58% at the new exchange rate. This sends its earnings and stock prices higher. The same thing occurs with Microsoft, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Apple, and every US corporation manufacturing in China, that are exporting their products to the United States.

So who pays the price for this?

You do; if you work for a living in the United States, or if you’re a  small or medium size business owner. Here’s how. Suppose you are a US manufacturer producing shoes in Oregon that sell in the USA for $100. You ship them to China at 600 Y for $100, and earn 150 Y, or $25, in profits. Now suppose the Chinese government, with the encouragement of your corrupt government and many US business leaders, manipulates its currency by purchasing tens of billions upon tens of billions of dollars. The supply of dollars on the international currency markets shrinks, making dollars more expensive, and as noted above, the D1 line shifts to D2, which represents the new supply of money. BTW, the space between D1 and D2 represents the amount of dollars the Chinese purchased.

Those $100 US made shoes now costs 1000 Y in China. Okay, my graph isn’t too high tech, but the actual figure is 1066 Y, if you do the math, but let’s stick with the 1000 Y, for simplicity sake. There’s still a 25% profit margin per pair of shoes, but at the 1000 Y price, there’s not a whole lot of buyers in China. The US manufacturer could lower the price of the shoes to 750 Y, but he or she isn’t making a penny at that price, and they’re still overpriced for the Chinese market. Say goodbye to the Chinese market for all US products at the new exchange rate.

US exports to China are going to shrink quite rapidly under this scenario. This means fewer American jobs, and less wages for everyone. It means less tax dollars going to schools and other government services, it means no retirement pay for a larger percentage of the 99 percent. Rich folks don’t need the money they’re going to steal from us, except to keep the latest stock market bubble surging, at least until it pops. However, greater profits mean the bubble can keep expanding for a while longer.

So how can US corporate leaders and their corrupt politicians encourage the Chinese government to manipulate its currency even more than it already has?

The scams that have been created to do this are called the Trans Pacific Partnership and Fast Track Authority. So what do these two things have to do with Chinese currency manipulation? More importantly, why would the Chinese

government want to engage in currency manipulation?

The answer in one word; Vietnam.

Vietnam is one of the nation’s involved in negotiating the Trans Pacific Partnership. As you can see from the graph below, China’s annual minimum wage is nearly twice that of Vietnam. The wages in China at those Nike and Microsoft and Apple and Hewlett-Packard factories and their suppliers and contractors and subcontractors have been going up rapidly over the past fifteen years. Those labor costs have been able to go up because the Chinese government has increased the profit margins of its US manufacturers by manipulating its currency. But there’s another reason why China needs to manipulate its currency vis-a-vis the dollar.

As you can see from the map below, there are nearly 313,000 Nike workers toiling in Vietnam, and nearly 250,00 in China. Vietnam clearly has lower labor costs than those in China. The Chinese government, however, can offset its labor cost disadvantage by manipulating its currency. So it can keep those jobs in China, and still allow the wages of Chinese workers to expand. But that might not be the case should the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) become a reality.

Tariff is another word for tax. When a US company like Nike manufactures its products in Vietnam, and then exports them to the US, a tariff is charged against the products of between 10 and 15 percent. So another $10 to $15 dollars is added to the cost of a $100 pair of Nike’s Vietnamese made shoes exported to the USA. That means less profits, lower dividends, and lower share prices than would otherwise be the case without tariffs. The US tariffs on US corporate goods manufactured in Vietnamese factories helps to offset some of the Vietnamese labor cost advantages vis-a-vis the cost of Chinese labor.

Under the TPP, should it become law, those tariffs will likely be gone, giving Vietnam a much larger labor cost advantage over Chinese workers.

In which case, the Chinese government will have two options; let millions of Nike and Dell and Apple and Microsoft jobs head south to Vietnam, along with the jobs of contractors and subcontractors, or manipulate its currency even more, which means all of those US corporations manufacturing stuff in China for export to the US will see unprecedented and explosive growth of their profits; and all of this will occur at the expense of small and medium sized US companies that make stuff in the United States and export them to China.

That means several unpleasant things will occur to the US economy: US unemployment will grow with the TPP, as exports to China diminish, inequality in wealth and income will continue to increase during the reign of Obama and Wyden, the stock market bubble will continue to expand, the coming stock market crash will be even worse than imaginable, US businesses will need to export more US jobs to China, and all of these bad things will trickle down to more crowded classrooms, less government services, reduced wages, fewer jobs, more poverty, and much more negative stuff for the 99 percent. However, the super rich will become even more super rich. And Chinese currency manipulation will not be the only thing in the TPP contributing to all of these things. See https://johnhively.wordpress.com/2015/04/21/how-the-trans-pacific-partnership-will-destroy-american-jobs-by-destroying-us-exports/

The political game in the US over the TPP and Fast Track Authority currently being played out is a complete farce.

Start with Fast Track Authority, which President Obama, Nike, Microsoft, Ron Wyden, Orrin Hatch, Mitch McConnell and just about every major US corporate CEO and investor desperately want Obama to have. Fast track will limit congressional debate on trade deals, it will scuttle any possible congressional amendments, and eliminate the use of the filibuster in the senate to stop the TPP. Fast track needs to pass through both houses of congress.

As a condition for bringing Fast Track Authority to a debate on the floor of the US senate, on May 13, a number of Democrats who traditionally vote to redistribute income from the 99 to the 1 percent (Ron Wyden, Harry Reid, Patty Murray, Heidi Heitkamp, Bill Nelson, Tim Kaine, Claire McCaskell, and Ben Cardin) agreed to first bring a vote for a bill by which the US will crackdown somehow on China for manipulating currency.

These folks know such a bill may not pass the senate, much less the house of representatives. If it did pass, then it will sit on Obama’s desk until Fast Track Authority passes both chambers of congress. Then he will veto the currency manipulation bill. There’s a ton of income to be redistributed from the 99 to the 1 percent resting on his shoulders.

Then the above senators will pretend to the folks back home that they did all that they could, when in fact, they did nothing when they could have done something to protect the folks back home from the TPP.

Every US senator and every US house representative knows this is the game, and many are willing to play this deadly game so as to justify their support for giving President Obama Fast Track Authority, even though the TPP will likely rip out the guts of the middle class, as well as the US economy.

If the above named Democrats were at all serious about Chinese currency manipulation, then they would agree to wait until Wall Street President Barack Obama signed the bill into law before opening debate on fast track authority.  That won’t happen.

Fast Track Authority is the only way the president can ram the TPP through congress. It’s an income and political power redistribution agreement falsely marketed as a trade agreement. Most of those in the know say the TPP is dead if the president doesn’t receive fast track authority. So fast track is the key.

Save the United States. Fight against this madness called Fast Track Authority. The TPP will only create greater trade deficits in the future than is currently the case. As US Congressman Alan Grayson famously and recently said, “You will find that the largest fourteen trade deficits in the history of the world have been the US trade deficits in each of the last fourteen years….What sane person can look at these trade deficits and conclude we need more free trade?”

The political fight over the Trans Pacific Partnership, Fast Track Authority, and Chinese currency manipulation isn’t about sanity; it’s about greed and government corruption. It’s about raising the already soaring share prices, dividends and earnings of US corporations that have exported millions of US jobs to China and other third world nations, and doing so at the expense of everybody else. It’s about redistributing your standard of living to a small minority of overly rich people who have corrupted and rigged your government in favor of themselves. It’s about redistributing your income and wealth to the 1 percent so as to keep the current stock market bubble expanding. It’s about redistributing the American dream to the 1 percent. It’s about taking the opportunities that once existed for the majority of American citizens and wiping them out by giving 100 percent of all income growth to the 1 percent, and leaving more and more people in poverty.

Currently, the 1 percent steal 37 percent of all income produced in the United States compared to 8 percent in 1980, back when opportunities for financial advancement existed for most Americans. Now the big boys, and the politicians they’ve bought off in one way or the other, want to eliminate your opportunities, as well as those of your children.

Call your senators. Call your congressmen and congresswomen. Stop Fast Track in the senate. Stop the corruption. Stop the insanity.

Over the past fourteen years, since China was granted most favored nation trade status, Nike’s stock price has risen over a thousand percent, from $10 a share to over a $100. Chinese currency manipulation has helped fuel this bubble. So if you purchased a million shares of Nike in the year 2000, today the value of those shares would be over $10 million. With the TPP and Chinese currency manipulation, the value of Nike’s stock will continue to increase, but only at the expense of everybody else. Much of the US stock market bubble is fueled by the same force, and that goes for the stock prices of Apple, Microsoft, Dell, Adidas, Hewlett-Packard and more. And if the TPP goes through, more US manufacturers will need to shift production to China.

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US Senator Jeff Sessions on the Devastating Consequences of Passage of the Trans Pacific Partnership

US Republican Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama has come out against the Wall Street wings of the Republican and Democratic Parties by opposing giving Wall Street President Barack Obama Fast Track Trade Authority, which is known simply as Fast Track. Fast track would provide little debate over trade agreements, call for an up and down vote in congress over any trade agreement, eliminates any amendments to the agreement, and eliminates any filibusters in the senate when it comes to trade agreements.

The looming Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) is a massive income and political power redistribution corporate power grab falsely being marketed as a trade agreement by such Wall Street senators as Ron Wyden, Mitch McConnell, Orrin Hatch, as well as the president.

The TPP is a knife into the heart of the middle class and the American dream.

On his website, Sessions gives five reason for his opposition to fast track.

1. Fast track consolidates power in the executive branch of government, although, while true, fast track cedes and consolidates federal political power to Wall Street investment banks, unregulated hedge funds, and other major corporations, through the president. This is why Wall Street senators Wyden, Hatch and McConnell are behind this boondoggle.

2 The TPP will increase trade deficits. Sessions seems to have a good understanding of this, although he doesn’t mention that the US trade deficit will increase because more US jobs will be shipped overseas via the TPP, and the products formerly made in the US will be exported from Vietnam to the US, and this will increase the US trade deficit.

Think about this; when was the last time you purchased something from a Chinese company? Probably never. But you have bought plenty of things “Made in China” by US companies like Nike, Apple, and Microsoft, just to name a few.

3. Ceding Sovereign Authority To International Powers.

4. Currency Manipulation. The biggest open secret in the international market is that other countries are devaluing their currencies to artificially lower the price of their exports while artificially raising the price of our exports to them.

5. Immigration Increases. There are numerous ways TPA could facilitate immigration increases above current law—and precious few ways anyone in Congress could stop its happening.

Check out Sessions website by clicking on the link below for greater explanations on why he opposes giving the president Fast Track Authority.
tr
http://www.sessions.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/news-releases?ID=955DBDEC-E383-4401-AC3C-4E5EE06E99D1

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The Easy Case Against Corporate Personhood Part 4

Anywhere in the world, a thing is a thing, a person is a person, and an idea is an idea, except in the United States, where an idea is a person with more constitutional rights and political power than citizens, thanks to the soundly corrupted legal logic of the Koch Brothers wing of the United States Supreme Court.

Anybody with half a brain can see that a business corporation is “an imaginary business model given the legal rules to exist and operate by legislative authorization under the legal fiction of being an “artificial person.”

Only in the good old USA can ideas own things like furniture, antiques, computers, I-phones, office buildings, and factories. Hell, ideas can also hire people, and use slave labor overseas, and it’s all because of something state legislatures created two hundred years ago called a corporate charter, which has been a hell of a good idea for a few organic persons such as shareholders, CEOs, politicians, rich investors, and most likely more than a few US supreme court justices along the way. Got that?

General Motor’s (GM) owns things, like factories, office buildings, and land, but GM is still only an idea, in this case “an imaginary business model given the legal rules to exist and operate by legislative authorization under the legal fiction of being an “artificial person.”

GM is a business model given the legal rules to exist and operate. It doesn’t actually do anything since it’s only an idea given legal sanction. The investors in GM vote for a brain to operate the company and this brain is called the board of directors, which is based on the “rules to exist and operate.”

Next, these people hire another brain called a Chief Executive Officer (CEO) to actually make the decisions for General Motors, because GM is simply an idea without any parts, and without any tangible assets, until the CEO makes decisions on what to purchase, and what business strategies to follow, based on the “rules to exist and operate,” because the idea called GM can’t think for itself.

That’s how GM and Microsoft and Apple Inc. wind up owning tangible stuff. That could also be stated as, “That’s how intangible ideas wind up accumulating billions of dollars of tangible stuff, and distributing income and wealth to its investors and CEOs.”

Anyway, probably the closest thing you might be able to relate to this is a person born without a brain and without parents (Pretend they died an hour after birth). A court (board of directors) decides who is going to care for the baby (corporation that is an idea only so it doesn’t have a brain or a body), the caregivers (CEOs) are going to make decisions for the brain dead person (corporation) based on their judgments. They might buy the brain dead person stock in a corporation, but that brainless person is no more the stock in a corporation than a business corporation is the factory it owns. Got that?

So business corporations are still only ideas, not buildings or machines, and the wealth these ideas accumulate do not make them any different than when an organic person buys a new car. The new car is not the person that owns it, although this is something the corrupt supreme court hasn’t figured out yet, and given the corruption within the court, it isn’t likely to do so anytime soon.

That’s because there are trillions of dollars riding on the court’s decisions, and some of the justices are duck hunting buddies of the rich, or their wives earn hundreds of thousands of dollars a year from the rich that bring their cases to the court (like Citizen’s United), or the justices get to go on nice prepaid retreats and hobnob with the wealthy, etc…. You get the picture.

Okay, that’s not the only reason the Koch Brothers wing of the US court decides stuff the way they do. The primary job of the US Supreme Court is to rig the political and economic games for the 1 percent and against the 99 percent. That’s what the Citizen’s United decision was all about.

No where in the US constitution does it mention business corporations or ideas, but you know these original intent justices like to make stuff up whenever such stuff benefits their billionaire buddies.

Check out more below about why shareholders are not corporations and don’t deserve person hood rights.

the-easy-case-against-shareholders-being-corporations-and-deserving-corporate-personhood-part-3–Johnhively.wordpress.com

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Washington D.C.: Lies Are Myths And The Golden Rule in Action

The golden rule is precisely why the 99 percent are fighting a rigged political and economic game. The golden rule is simple. He who has the gold makes the rules. The golden rule accounts for most of what goes on in government. Government isn’t really corrupt, instead, it’s an institution that has been corrupted by greed and money.

Myths capture our imagination. The 1 percent produce myths to advance their self-interest, and this is particularly at the expense of the 99 percent. These myths are used to deceive us. We read and hear the drum beat about government misuse of tax money, incompetent bureaucrats and politicians, and threats of big government. We’ve also heard about how cigarettes and GMO foods are safe, except when studies not funded by the corporations that produce the stuff are doing the studying. The US corporate media serves as a mouth piece for corporate propaganda, so the lies are grounded into our conciousness, over and over again.

Common sense should tell us that what is said about big government is also true of large corporations, for which there is a lack of transparency. Corporations hide their dastardly deeds while screeching against the supposed evils of big government, while also calling for less government interference, such as environmental, workplace, financial and other regulations that protect the 99 percent against the predations of the 1 percent and their corporations. Only fools and fascists will put more faith in supposed market forces than in a democratically controlled, transparent government. Unfortunately, the 1 percent have corrupted that government with their money, and to our detriment.

Wall Street, JP Morgan, Citibank, Goldman Sachs, General Electric, Apple Inc., the Koch Brothers, British Petroleum, Monsanto and many more do more harm to our environment, our health, our economic opportunities, and our overall quality of life every day, than any democratically elected, transparent government could do in a year. And much, but not all, of the damage done to us by corporations is through their money, and its corrupting influence on our government.

For example, where did our huge federal deficit come from? Taxes from corporations made up a third of federal tax revenue in 1950. Today, it’s less than 10 percent. Free trade treaties have shipped our jobs and tax base away with the difference between the old higher wages and the new lower wages going straight into the pockets of the 1 percent. The NSA illegal spying in violation of the US Constitution has corporate money behind it because corporations help with the spying and profit from it.

Don’t let the myths of the master’s of profits fool you. Their lies are working. They continue to tell us lies and more lies, over and over again, through their representatives and through their biased think tanks. Where did this formula for lies come from? You’ll be surprised at who their originator was. President Franklin Roosevelt knew where the lies originated. Click on the video below to find out.

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Apple Inc. Avoided Paying How Much in Taxes in 2012?

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The Apple Inc. Business Plan

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