I pay more taxes than General Electric. You pay more taxes than General Electric.

Technically, they pay more, just not to the United States Government.

For some reason, though the bulk of their business income comes from this country, they always seem to lose money here and make tremendous profits overseas. Why didn’t TurboTax do that for me?

General Electric’s slogan is “Imagination at Work.” That’s nice. It would be nicer if some of that imagination devoted to tax law was diverted to something their customers could use. A truly imaginative act would be to bring jobs and tax revenue back home.

GE is known to have the premier tax law firm in the country. It is an in-house law department consisting of about 900 lawyers. While making massive layoffs elsewhere, it appears that department is safe from cuts. This, of course doesn’t count their lobbyists giving congressmen pre-written tax law changes that some of those 900 have developed.

Where do they find these imaginative tax experts? The IRS. The Treasury. Every tax-writing committee in Congress. While they propagandize you to believe that government can’t find its rectum with both hands, they find it to be a recruiting goldmine. Is it possible our bureaucrats aren’t overpaid riders on a gravy train?

One of the services the government is supposed to render is to regulate and inspect nuclear power plants. It turns out they are very shorthanded. It has been years since some of the 104 plants in the US have been inspected. GE is the leading builder of nuclear power plants in the world. They even have them in far off exotic places, like Japan. I’m wondering if they might be shorthanded because they are insufficiently funded.

GE hasn’t forgotten its poor, bedraggled executives. It generously gives $14,000 to each one to pay the costs of having their individual returns done. This payout is deductible, of course.

How many times have you heard that lowering the taxes on corporations and the wealthy will allow them to create jobs? In 2009 GE reduced its workforce by 19,000. That is a little misleading. They actually eliminated 35,000 jobs. It doesn’t look quite as bad because they acquired 16,000 new employees when they purchased a Central American bank. I am unaware of a lot of their US employees relocating southward.

The following are some figures cribbed from Senator Sanders web site.

Over the past five years, while General Electric made $26 billion in profits in the United States, it received a $4.1 billion refund from the IRS.

Goldman Sachs in 2008 only paid 1.1 percent of its income in taxes even though it earned a profit of $2.3 billion and received an almost $800 billion bailout from the Federal Reserve and U.S. Treasury Department.

Chevron received a $19 million refund from the IRS last year after it made $10 billion in profits in 2009.

Over the past five years, Carnival Cruise Lines made more than $11 billion in profits, but its federal income tax rate during those years was just 1.1 percent.

Those are just the tip of the iceberg. A study covering 1998 to 2005 found more than three-quarters of major corporations paid no tax. Major appears to be defined as revenue of $250 million or more. That doesn’t seem so major with so many raking in the billions.

You often hear the tools proclaiming that the US has the highest business tax in the world. Not true. Japan leads in that category. If we count what is actually paid, rather than the published rate, we would find the US at the bottom.

Companies don’t move overseas because of taxes. They move to pay lower wages, avoid health and safety rules and to employ more compliant workers. Do you like that iPad that was made in China by what the international community has called slave labor and child labor?

Apple admitted their Chinese factories used child labor. However, they did get upset when an audit showed that even the lax Chinese labor laws were being violated and the children were being poisoned by having to handle some of the components without protective gear. Is it possible that Steve Jobs would have a billion or two less if he didn’t take advantage of these kids?

The governors of Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio, Florida and, I feel certain, other states, quickly offered tax cuts to businesses. Then they try to compensate for the lost revenue by cutting education ($900 million in Wisconsin alone), police, firemen, unemployment compensation, parks, health and other services you might use.

Is the budget deficit a major problem? Yes. How are we going to deal with it? French fry fryers and Walmart greeters will just have to dig a little deeper. Personally, I think we can do it. I found a quarter on the sidewalk only yesterday.

In case you didn’t realize it, you are very generous to these corporations. Back in the 1950s, when our economic engine was hitting its best performance levels ever, the corporate share of the governments revenue was 30%. By 2009, their contribution had fallen to 6.6%.

Not only is a one-sided class war being waged against the people of this country, they are subsidizing the enemy.

I have never been eligible for the Alternative Minimum Tax. You may have noticed some mention of it. I was surprised to learn that there is also an AMT for businesses. It’s on the books but I find no evidence that it is being implemented. Enforcing that could go a long way towards making the deficit smaller.

How about putting our IRS ahead of tax collection entities of other countries? The law could easily be written to require a company that pays taxes to other countries to pay the full corporate tax rate on domestic income, without deductions, unless they pay the US tax, with deductions, on all income.

How could we justify taxing them on overseas revenues? How many billions do we spend defending and representing their interests around the world? How much do these other countries provide for them?

Unless the Congress makes changes of this nature that require corporations to share the burden, they should not be taken seriously, nor be considered our representatives.

President Obama is concerned about the economy. He recently appointed Jeffrey Immelt as his chief outside economic advisor. By the way, Jeff is the CEO of General Electric.

I understand GE is to be banned from Gitmo, for humanitarian reasons.

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This section of the globe could be to show that we are a long way from the population center of the Earth.

Or, it could be showing those places that don’t care who wins the Stanley Cup (oops, I left out Nashville) or the NBA Championship, or whether Senator Nelson is looking out for Warren Buffet’s profits, or who the next Senator from Florida will be, or if Sarah Palin has read all of the newspapers, or if Dick Cheney has shot any friends in the face (who knew he had any).

Then again, it could be a map showing where all of our jobs have gone.

The first George Bush tried to give us NAFTA. Bill Clinton succeeded. Do you remember the promises, the promised benefits? There were too many to remember them all. Have you been enjoying them? Free trade has its benefits. It’s just that we don’t get them.

The promises made on behalf of “Free Trade” sounded nice. But, what are the results? China ships us $50 billion worth of computers and associated equipment. We ship them $8 billion worth of waste paper and scrap metal. Okay, who’s ahead, so far?

All the laid-off factory worker has to do is be retrained as an engineer and move from Akron to California, where schools for his kids are closing, the government is scaling back or closing down every service they can find, where earthquakes have dropped to the bottom of citizens’ worry lists.

The alternatives are flipping burgers, being a Walmart greeter, if you are old enough, or moving to Bangladesh. They did promise jobs, didn’t they?

Well, productivity has increased. The only problem there with the way it is calculated.

First, pay has not kept up with productivity as it is supposed to. That’s the theory. Or, at least that’s the song they sing to lure you into believing the American Dream is just around the corner (where you can’t see it).

The more output of widgets you have given an established amount of man-hours, the greater the productivity. Say you work on an auto assembly line. The engine was assembled abroad. So was the transmission. And the radio, the axle and transaxle, the electronic panel.

That factory is producing more cars with fewer American workers, so productivity is up. Wow! We won.

Another way of calculating productivity is one the corporations prefer not to emphasize to the general public. How much does it cost to produce a widget? Figuring in the 75-cent per hour cost of a child from China or Thailand brings the total labor cost down a little bit. Once again, productivity is up. Rejoice!

We get to indulge in fake lower prices at Walmart, if we have a job. The corporations have a prettier bottom line, so the executives can pay themselves that extra $5 million bonus. This keeps the executives relatively quiet when they see their luckier brethren on Wall Street getting half a billion a year.

Exxon had $37 billion in earnings last year, without having to pay any corporate tax in this country. Of course, many of their former employees didn’t have to pay any income tax either. We should give Exxon a pass though. They haven’t had any monumental accidents since their eponymous tanker Valdez dripped a bit into one of our major fishing areas. We know they learned their lesson because some day they will pay for all of the damage . . . oops, I forgot that the courts let them off the hook.

Well, anyway, enjoy the benefits of “Free Trade,” since some of you have a lot of spare time to do so.

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Despite what some may think, I was not around for the Dred Scott decision. That aside, I had comforted myself that the Supremes could not make a worse ruling than the one that gave us Bush the lesser.

I was wrong, horribly so.

We are now the only developed country in the world that allows corporations to legally spend unlimited amounts to control the government. Aren’t we special?

Stay with me a couple of minutes. You will see how stupid and/or corrupt at least five of the Justices really are.

How did we get here and what needs to be done? It is simple but the ramifications cannot be overstated.

First we are dealing with a bunch of hypocrites. The radicals of the Court loudly proclaim that they believe in following the intent of the Founding Fathers. They also maintain that the courts should not legislate, nor usurp the legislative role. Yeah, sure.

No Supreme Court has come close to the activism of the present Court. They have overturned more legislation, by far, than any Court of which I am aware. That tendency alone was sufficient to make all predictions on the latest travesty easy. Commentators from the entire spectrum got it right. This ruling was no surprise.

How about their claimed devotion to what they term ‘strict construction?’ That is also a gross mischaracterization. What was the Founding Fathers’ opinion of corporations? It may not be common knowledge but is far from a secret to any scholar or amateur enthusiast of our founders.

With the exception of Alexander Hamilton, all of the founders hated and/or mistrusted and/or feared corporations and the threat they represented to the nation to which they had given birth. This at a time when corporations were relatively rare and weak compared to the present. Back then one must prove a societal need, a benefit to the public, in order to obtain a charter.

Corporations are not mentioned in either the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution. The last time I checked, the wording was still “We the people . . .” Corporations had only the latitude to function as was delineated in its charter. Where did this idiotic concept of corporations having a legal personality originate? Not from the Supreme Court. It came from an essentially parenthetical couple of sentences by one Justice.

The year was 1886. The case was Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company. The doctrine of corporate personhood was included by Justice Morrison Remick Waite before the beginning of arguments. He stated, “The court does not wish to hear argument on the question whether the provision in the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which forbids a State to deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws, applies to these corporations. We are all of opinion that it does.”

So, two sentences by a single, junior Justice changed the Constitution, laws and the dictionary definition without argument, without discussion, without any attempt at rationality. It subsequently became the very foundation of corporate law.

Let’s look at this. It doesn’t require looking too deeply. It doesn’t require a degree in Constitutional Law. It does require more intelligence than five of the present Justices. It requires common sense. It requires an absence of devotion to the plutocracy, a jettisoning of ridiculous ideologies. Here we go.

Everyone acknowledges that a corporation is property. It, and/or its shares, not only can be owned, by its very nature it must be owned. If it is a person, it enjoys the constitutional prohibition of slavery. You are not permitted, under any circumstances to hold a person as property. Ask your wife.

A corporation speaks with one voice. Although the textbooks tell you that the shareholders control it, or that the directors control it on behalf of the shareholders, the reality is that management rules. Management’s priorities are rarely the same as the stockholders. Stockholders also are further removed from participation by mutual funds, hedge funds and similar devices. Does anyone believe that corporate lobbying efforts are always (sometimes) consonant with the interests or opinions of shareholders?

While many other legal and logical arguments reach the same, or supportive, conclusions, no serious arguments have been proposed that contradict those arguments. We have no need to pursue any further the irrationality of claims for corporate personhood. Let’s proceed to the ramifications.

The last presidential campaign was easily the most expensive in history. The estimates I saw last year were well over $1 billion but less than two. I haven’t seen your checkbook but to me that is significant change. Actually, I consider that amount obscene. It distorts and corrupts. There is no upside for anyone who values their right to vote.

Now let’s look at real money. The major Wall Street casinos have announced record, or near record, profits. These profits are after record amounts being set aside for bonuses. Have you paid attention? These bonuses total about $150 billion.

If Wall Street decided to redirect only half of that amount to campaign finance, we would never have to watch another non-political commercial in an election year (every other year) again. Although that might seem initially to be an attractive side-benefit, all you have to remember is how quickly campaign advertising begins to pall.

While we know better, politicians owned by special interests insist that they are not swayed by lobbyists’ bribes. Given the amounts now available to them, they likely will not even bother to address such questions. The $150 billion cited above represents only that available from the major institutional players of one corrupt industry. Factor in the insurance industry, PhRMA, agribusiness, energy and a host of others wanting laws that benefit them, to our detriment.

There would not even have been the sham of the healthcare debate with its foreordained outcome. The drug pushers could sell morphine as a toothing medication for infants again, as Bayer did before it became famous for its aspirin. The Department of Agriculture could eliminate all of those pesky areas and become a foundation to channel taxpayers dollars directly to ConAgra, ADM, et al. Exxon and its peers would not have to waste another nickel cleaning up after themselves. There no longer would be a need to debate global warming, or spending any funds on research. Government could really be streamlined.

How much have you ever donated to a political campaign? Look on the bright side. Now there is no need to.

I believe that there has never been a law or ruling which so drastically changes and damages our system.

Many people get upset about the power of the government. Permit me to reminisce. Back in the late 1960s or early 1970s there was a little flap at Delta Air Lines, where I was working. You need to understand that at that time aircraft mechanics were treated like royalty. They were the princes of the industry and highly prized by the airlines.

One of these princes let his sideburns grow to the level of the bottom of his ears. No, they were not mutton-chop sideburns. Though wild hairstyles could be seen everywhere across the country, his could not be considered wild by any definition. He was fired.

Except when I was in military service, I would never expect the government to be so intrusive, so controlling of the minutiae of people’s lives. Corporations are not bound to respect any of your rights, beyond the prohibition of discrimination. The government is constrained by the Constitution. With the Founding Fathers, I have always feared corporations far more than I feared the government – until now.

All is not lost. The Court struck down campaign finance laws, not corporate laws or regulations. The Congress unquestionably has the authority to control corporate behavior through changes in corporate law. It could be done by regulation. You and I are, as people, are not controlled by laws in this area so it cannot be claimed that corporations are being discriminated against or denied that to which people are entitled.

I would ask that you notify me the next time you see a bunch of corporations exercising their right of freedom of assembly or, perhaps, their freedom of religion. I would love to attend a baptismal ceremony for one of these ‘guys.’

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