You paid your taxes last year. Your friends and neighbors did. But 82 of the largest corporations in America didn't.

http://www.tompaine.com/action/#002003

Fancy that. If you paid any taxes last year, you paid more in taxes than dozens of wealthy corporations.

The entire US economic system is rigged to enrich the wealthy at the expense of everybody else.

The rich always want something for nothing. They want the benefit of operating profitably in the US, but don't want to have to pay for the roads, the schools, and everything else that it takes to make it profitable to operate in the US. They would much rather have the US worker buy all those things for them.

The combination of economic and political power in the same hands is a sure recipe for tyranny.

- Milton Friedman

It is to be regretted that the rich and powerful too often bend the acts of government to their own selfish purposes.

- Andrew Jackson

There are two ideas of government. There are those who believe that, if you will only legislate to make the well-to-do prosperous, their prosperity will leak through on those below. The DEMOCRATIC idea, however, has been that if you legislate to make the masses prosperous, their prosperity will find its way up through every class which rests upon them.

- William Jennings Bryan

The communism of combined wealth and capital, the outgrown of overweening cupidity and selfishness which assiduously undermines the justice and integrity of free institutions, is not less dangerous than the communism of oppressed poverty and toil which, exasperated by injustice and discontent, attacks with wide disorder the citadel of misrule.

- Grover Cleveland

We can have a democratic society or we can have the concentration of great wealth in the hands of the few. We cannot have both.

- Louis Brandeis

Merchants have no country. The mere spot they stand on does not constitute so strong an attachment as that from which they draw their gains. I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial by strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country."

- Thomas Jefferson

Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration.

- Abraham Lincoln

When I gave food to the poor, they called me a saint. When I asked Why the poor were hungry, they called me a communist.

- Dom Helder Camara, Archbishop of Recife, Brazil.

Civil government, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defense of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all.

- Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations

http://tompaine.com/Archive/others/tax_dodging_with_dubya.php

September 23, 2004

Since George W. Bush came into office, there have been some very good years for large corporations. How good? Well, according to a report prepared by Citizens For Tax Justice and the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, 28 large companies enjoyed negative federal income tax rates each year between 2001 and 2003. And 82 companies had negative tax rates at least one of these years. How did they do it? The huge influx of corporate lobbyists to Washington and Bush and Congress' willingness to stand with corporations meant that lots of loopholes were exploited and lots of heads looked the other way. SEE THE REPORT

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