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Hightower Lowdown
"Everybody does better when everybody does better." -- Jim's dad, W.F. "High" Hightower
April's Lowdown
The great American medicine show, a spectacle of deceit, manipulation, and flimflammery
Butterflies waft across a beautiful field of spring flowers. A delightful young family bicycles joyously down a country lane. A couple on a park bench leans sensually into each other. A 40-something woman's face radiates with both perfect beauty and internal happiness. "All's right with the world," is the message... as long as you've taken your dosages of Lunesta, Celebrex, Cialis, and Botox.
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In This Issue
In the past two years 55 percent of workers have lost a job or taken a cut
Corporate kings grab our tax subsidies but create no new jobs. Obama fiddles.
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BIG OIL'S GUSHER OF FED FUNDS
That Deepwater Horizon oil rig that went down in the Gulf, causing such massive destruction? Thank you for that.
'You' being American taxpayers. Not that we taxpayers caused the catastrophe, but we helped pay for the very existence of Deepwater Horizon. BP, which rented the drilling rig from Transocean cor-poration, took 70 percent of the rent it paid off its taxable income. This deduction added up to a savings of $225,000 a day for BP.
Not to be outdone, Transocean moved its corporate address offshore in 1999 in order to dodge its tax obligations. First it re-located from Houston to the Cayman Islands, then to Switzerland--slick moves that have allowed the giant corporation to avoid paying $1.8 billion in U.S. taxes.
No industry gets the sub-sidies that Big Oil gets-- at every stage of their operations, including to search for oil in our public waters. As one political leader put it in 2005, "With $55 oil, we don't need incentives to the oil and gas companies to explore."
That was George W. Bush talking! Today, oil is $80 a barrel and the industry is pocketing record profits --yet, the giveaways continue. Last year, Exxon Mobil raked in $19 billion in profit--then it took sub-sidies to get a $156 million tax refund.
In the past two years, BP, Exxon and the rest poured $340 million into lobbying to keep their subsidy pipelines flowing. A proposal to slash these boondoggles was killed in a June Senate vote, 61 to 35, with every Republican and 21 Democrats backing Big Oil.
For more, go to the Center for American Progress, http://www.americanprogress.org