ExxonMobil Pay Taxes? Fugetaboutit!

I'm looking at having to pay the IRS almost a thousand bucks and another 4 hundred to the state of Delaware, so this kind of story burns my biscuits, big time. I cut up and returned my Exxon credit card following their response to the Exxon Valdez oil spill.  They begged me to reconsider for years, even sending me another card a few times.

There is this from Forbes via Think Progress:

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.”

Reinvested billions overseas?  Oh, that must be all the R & D they're doing for alternative solutions to the energy crisis.  Yeah, that's it.

There is something foul about corporations in this country.
More later.
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