Bad Deeds for 4/6/2010

 

General Electric and Exxon Mobil Paid No Income Taxes in 2009 – Last week, Forbes magazine published what the top U.S. corporations paid in taxes last year. “Most egregious,” Forbes notes, is General Electric, which “generated $10.3 billion in pretax income, but ended up owing nothing to Uncle Sam. In fact, it recorded a tax benefit of $1.1 billion.” Big Oil giant Exxon Mobil, which last year reported a record $45.2 billion profit, paid the most taxes of any corporation, but none of it went to the IRS:

Exxon tries to limit the tax pain with the help of 20 wholly owned subsidiaries domiciled in the Bahamas, Bermuda and the Cayman Islands that (legally) shelter the cash flow from operations in the likes of Angola, Azerbaijan and Abu Dhabi. No wonder that of $15 billion in income taxes last year, Exxon paid none of it to Uncle Sam, and has tens of billions in earnings permanently reinvested overseas.

Mother Jones’ Adam Weinstein notes that, despite benefiting from corporate welfare in the U.S., Exxon complains about paying high taxes, claiming that it threatens energy innovation research. Pat Garofalo at the Wonk Room notes that big corporations’ tax shelter practices similar to Exxon’s shift a $100 billion annual tax burden onto U.S. taxpayers. In fact, in 2008, the Government Accountability Office found that “two out of every three United States corporations paid no federal income taxes from 1998 through 2005.”

(So when your right-wing friends tell you how tough taxes are on business, you will know better. And do you think the executives of these companies pay much in taxes? They know the same tax attorneys. – JLV)

 

Massey Energy Mine Disaster Site Had 57 Safety Violations in March – The West Virginia coal mine where an explosion killed 25 workers and left another four unaccounted for in the worst mining disaster since 1984 had amassed scores of citations from mining safety officials, including 57 infractions just last month for violations that included repeatedly failing to develop and follow a ventilation plan. The federal records catalog the problems at the Upper Big Branch mine, operated by the Performance Coal Company. They show the company was fighting many of the steepest fines, or simply refusing to pay them. Performance is a subsidiary of Massey Energy. Another Massey subsidiary agreed to pay $4.2 million in criminal and civil fines last year and admitted to willfully violating mandatory safety standards that led to the deaths of two miners.

 

Massey Energy & Don Blankenship Are Million-Dollar Tea Party Sponsors – Don Blankenship is CEO of Massey Energy Company. Blankenship is also on the Board of Directors of the US Chamber of Commerce. He denies climate change, derisively refers to Speaker Pelosi, Senator Reid, and others as “greeniacs”, and calls them all crazy. In his mind, “the greeniacs are taking over the world.”

Massey Energy Company, Blankenship’s highly successful strip-mining and mountaintop removal operation is the parent company of Performance Coal Co, where a tragic explosion occurred on April 5th. As of this writing, 25 miners have died and 4 more are still missing. Twenty-five families are without a loved one. Four more may discover they have lost someone they love too. 29 families in all, forever changed by one single, violent event in a coal mine. One single violent event in a coal mine run by a company so obsessed with profit it runs roughshod over employees’ and neighbors’ health and safety.

Blankenship spent over $1 million dollars along with other US Chamber of Commerce buddies like Verizon to sponsor last year’s Labor Day Tea Party, also known as the “Friends of America Rally.” Here’s Massey’s pitch. Note how he makes it sound like he isn’t one of the corporate enemies of America.
The Friends of America Rally featured such notables as Sean Hannity, Ted Nugent, and Hank Williams, Jr., and was graced by Blankenship himself going off on a diatribe that seemed strange at the time, but has come to be commonplace these days. It concerned President Obama, Democrats, and anyone who doesn’t salute God, coal, and apple pie. Oh, and we’re also going to ‘steal their jobs,’ if Hannity is to be believed.

 

Senator Tom Coburn Messes With My Mind by Saying Something Nice and Something That Makes Sense – We have to give credit when due, and Senator Coburn earned some here.

Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK) told a crowd in Norman, Oklahoma, that Nancy Pelosi, the highest-ranking Democrat in the House, is a “nice lady” and the public should keep itself from “being biased by Fox News.”

Coburn also took the unusual step of correcting a mistaken belief about the Democrats’ recently passed health care overhaul.

When a member of the audience asserted that the government would have the power to jail people for not buying health insurance, Coburn said, “The intention is not to put any one in jail. That makes for good TV news on Fox but that isn’t the intention.”

Coburn took another shot at Fox News later in the discussion, when he said: “What we have to have is make sure we have a debate in this country so that you can see what’s going on and make a determination yourself. So don’t catch yourself being biased by Fox News that somebody is no good. The people in Washington are good. They just don’t know what they don’t know.”

 

Good News: New York Commercial Property Leasing is Up 84 Percent – First-quarter commercial property leasing in Manhattan rose 84 percent over last year, a major real estate group said Tuesday in the latest signal of recovery in the sector.

Cushman & Wakefield said increased leasing and investment in the first three months of 2010 showed movement to “capitalize on opportunities ahead of a recovery.”

New leasing totaled 5.7 million square feet (529,547 square meters), up 84 percent from the first quarter of 2009.

Regards,

Jim