If You Are Not Going to Play By My (Corporate) Rules, I’ll Take My Toys (Business) and Leave

In a recent posting, I pointed out that Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison was very concerned for the big oil CEOs while Congress was attempting to increase their tax burden and reduce their profit by 0.6 percent a year over three years. This tax burden would have added only $16 billion dollars to the government’s take.

Well, now the same companies, Exxon Mobil, BP, ConocoPhillips and others are threatening to reduce their investment in oil projects for Alaska. Guess how large the tax burden is this time — $1.5 billion. This is less than 10 percent of the taxes Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison opposed or about 0.162 percent of their profits for the last three years — $927,000,000,000.00. That’s $1.62 out of every $1,000.00.

Combine this with all the corporate lobbyists on K Street in Washington D. C., and recent changes to the rules about media mergers between newspapers and television stations and you have more evidence of corporatism in the United States.

Power in this country continues to shift from we the people to other entities that don’t have the best interests of we the people in mind.

I’ll close with a related historical quote, “Fascism denies that the majority, through the mere fact of being a majority, can rule human societies; it denies that this majority can govern by means of a periodical consultation; it affirms the irremediable, fruitful and beneficent inequality of men, who cannot be levelled by such a mechanical and extrinsic fact as universal suffrage.” — Benito Mussolini