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GOP House Chooses Big Oil Over Granny
Now, let's check today's sports scores: 4, 10.7 and 21-and-a-half.
Those tallies are from the oil league, and the winner, of course, is the league's powerhouse, ExxonMobil.
Four, as you might have guessed, is the $4 that Exxon is siphoning out of your wallet these days for 1 gallon of its petrol.
Next comes 10.7. That's the $10.7 billion in profits that this oil giant has soaked up in just the first three months of this year — a new record, not achieved by any managerial genius, increased productivity or improvement in customer service, but solely by the jack-up in gasoline prices.
Finally, 21-and-a-half. This is the big score made by Rex Tillerson, Exxon's CEO. The chief pulled down $21.5 million in personal compensation last year, making him the highest paid executive in the oil league and one of the most richly paid CEOs in the entire country.
Wait ... this late-breaking score is just in: 0. That's from the special tax game that ExxonMobil consistently wins in Washington. Last year, ExMo powered through loopholes created by its slick lobbying team to pay an income tax of zero on the $19 billion it had racked up in profits the year before. But, wait again, here's a surprising update on that score: Exxon's taxes were actually less than zero! How's that possible? Because Big Oil's lobbyists have so skewed the tax system that Exxon was able to extract a $156 million rebate from us taxpayers last year.
So Exxon is soaking us at the gas pump and sacking our public treasury to gain record profits for itself, while bestowing a royal fortune on its CEO. It wins, we lose.
With a record like that, you wouldn't think the oil league would need more handouts from government — but then, you're not a Republican congressperson.
The GOP recently pushed its appropriations priorities through the House, touting the bill as a revolutionary, politically responsible, tax-saving piece of legislative art.
Well, art is in the eye of the beholder. The Repubs "saved" money by essentially killing Medicare and drastically slashing Medicaid, Head Start, EPA, food stamps, and dozens of other popular and effective programs that Americans overwhelmingly support. Having taken their blunt budget ax to these programs that support our nation's notion of the common good, GOP leaders then scampered to save one of the least popular and least effective federal programs on the books: the annual taxpayer subsidy for Big Oil.
As gasoline prices were rising toward $4 a gallon and higher, House Republicans voted unanimously to let the oil giants continue siphoning $4 billion a year out of our public treasury. All 241 of the Republican/tea party House members — with not even one dissenter in the bunch — declared that in this time of a supposed budget "crisis," the neediest among us are not the elderly and the poor, but the little waifs of Big Oil.
As Casey Stengel once asked of the bumbling New York Mets team he was managing, "Can't anyone here play this game?"
Meanwhile, ExxonMobil just announced a 69 percent leap in profits this year, while Chevron, ConocoPhillips and others are enjoying similar jumps in theirs. Guess what percentage of those enormous profits the corporations are likely to pay in taxes?
Zilch. Last year, ExxonMobil, Chevron and ConocoPhilips each banked multibillion-dollar profits, yet far from paying even a dime in taxes, all three worked the loopholes to get multimillion-dollar refunds from us.
Republican lawmakers had a clear choice in dealing with the deficit. So why did they choose to cut off your granny's health care, while helping these corporate billionaires make off like bandits? I guess it's a matter of who you really love.
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19 Comments so far
Show AllThe GOP philosophy is the moral virtue of kicking the suffering while they are down.
It is time we recognized that we cannot bring words to a gunfight. Arguments that their solutions will bring on disasters fall on deaf ears. It is god who brings on disasters; they are merely calling for god's will. As they are committed to dismantling the social safety network, so we must be committed to dismantling them.
I really don't see what the problem is. Now that corporations are people, they are entitled to representation in Congress just like any of us. The republicans are representing their constituents, and the democrats are representing theirs. Since almost all Congressional representatives are worth over a million dollars, they represent the 1% or 2% of the people who have all the money. This means corporations as well. The rest of us 98% are without representation. Obviously, this means we all must now incorporate so that we can be represented. It's a bit more paperwork, but our democracy is worth it!
Seems to me the SCOTUS has not only made corporations people, they've made "we the people" nothing, without representation in Congress, without the legal recourse we once had, and when other issues that are coming down the pike get to them, there's no telling what we'll be left with.
How many people does it take to become a corporation? One? Obviousley the slaves at the bottom who keep it going don't count.
Jim, I would love your commentary if you would just extract one item, used repeatedly. GOP. There is the loyal "opposition" as well. And in tandem the Vichy Deux party system has rigged the whole thing into the status we find ourselves. Dismantled banking regulations, uninforced laws, carte blanch Presidencies, the funneling of wealth to the parasite robber barons, wars on people disguised as wars on drugs or terror or welfare "reform", others here have the best lists on save. Keep writing if you must but please don't shill for the half in sheep's clothing anymore.
Netminnow, your comment prompts me repeat part of a comment I wrote on March 11th of this year.*
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[...] As the other commenters have pointed out, this author, like several others, still dwells upon "Republicans" as the political villains.
There's a presumption that Amerika's political nemesis, the parasitic power elite metastasizing and devouring the common weal and enslaving ordinary unprivileged citizens, is the Republican Party.
This analysis and argument in this article, like so many others lately, would be vastly improved if the text were edited with a "find and replace" that removed "Republican" and substituted "capitalist politician".
I realize that "capitalist politician" is redundant, since ALL politicians in a capitalist state must be capitalists, or capitalism-advocates, by definition. But off the top of my head, I can't think of a term to readily describe politicians who implicitly and absolutely buy into the triumphalist premises of capitalism.
Oh, I have a sentimental fondness for traditional rhetorical expressions like "capitalist running dogs", but they're a little too florid and clichéd to resurrect. Those who try ain't gonna make it with anyone, anyhow.
But I think it's appropriate and desirable for commenters to keep picking at this persistent error of emphasizing "Republicans" as the root of the festering plutocratic, duopolistic tyranny ascending from coast to coast-- though it may perplex naïve visitors and aggravate the dwindling rearguard of simple-minded Democratic True Believers.
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* http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/03/11-1
Who denounces the accomplice shields the criminal.
Indeed, unless the criminal is convicted, the accomplice must be adjudged innocent.
'Pardon' me but do you remember a fellow named Marc Rich?
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/05/04/us-glencore-ipo-idUSTRE7430EF20110504
I thought so.
More cud-chew'n by the Master Cud-chewer himself.
Sorry Jimbo, but the bigger story here has all been told before.
Even in endless cyberspace, these type stories take up way too much territory.
I guess this pretty well tells us who is running the government. Corporate America.
Like Robert Reich said today on NPR, GE, Caterpillar and other MULTINATIONALS are racking up big profits overseas while America sinks. They are hiring many thousands of workers overseas while downsizing the work force here. And they are being given subsidies and tax breaks.
The Supreme Court conservatives are basically allowing multinationals like GE to fund American candidates and decide our elections. With their Citizens United ruling, the four conservative Supreme Court justices have perpetrated a FRAUD on the American people and possibly TREASON and SEDITION.
Justices Roberts, Alito, Thomas and Scalia should be recalled and tried for abuse of power and capital crimes.
it feels more like competition / neo or malthusian darwinism....me and my grandmother, together with the other me's and their grandmothers benefiting from and sustaining the modern corporation against everyone else (and their grandmothers) ...winners winning and losers left to die or whatever; plus the breaking down of human and ecological infrastructure or, as economists say, externalities,.. the corporation, served and sustained by humans, is NOT HUMAN ITSELF.... it seems to resemble most of all a kind of fatal parasite...
I seem to recall a windfall profits tax similar to something Venezuela has just imposed that was passed in the 70's. Did we forget how it's done? I mention it because I have not heard the subject broached. I am going to suggest it to my congresscritters and even my Calif. legislators that haven't even been able top pass an extraction tax ever.
I remember the windfall profits tax, too. But these crooks aren't being taxed at all. Mr. Hightower is absolutely right. The Democrats are far from innocent and becoming less so everyday, but the Republican Party is a party of hypocrisy and deceit, the likes of which this so-called Democratic Republic has never seen. They should be shut down. To listen to their self-righteous prattle about budget deficits when we have them to thank for the creation of this 13 or 14 Trillion deficit, to hear from these forked tongues about streamlining, especially of all programs that protect the little people, so they can give more to their crooked rich friends makes you want to join the NRA.
Karl Rove? Give me a break! David Brooks? Another horned degenerate. The Koch Brothers? The list goes on. How do they sleep at night? Their intent is nothing short of destroying this nation. Until the Tea Party and the other befuddled elements (a few of whom have shown up here) who spend too much time watching daytime soap opera, wise up, we teeter on the edge. Now that OBL is dead, I'm waiting to see how the Republicans will continue to justify all these wars for empire they have started. They are the driving force that is breaking our bank and giving it all to Wall Street crooks, to Halliburton and to the oil companies who tiring of destroying the habitats of others are now destroying are own, all in the name of the mighty buck. They are drilling in publicly owned preserves for oil, not one penny of which goes back to the people. A so-called enemy of the people such as OBL could not have devised a more stealthily brilliant means to destroy a nation by befouling its water supply than have the oil companies under the leadership of criminals like Dick Cheney, the CEO of Exxon Mobile (and their crooked crony friends in other places, like BP). They are not only enemies of the people, they are enemies of the earth. Why do you think they want to shut down the EPA? Why do you think they cry "foul" and climate-gate when talk of global warming arises? Take a look at the documentary GasLand. These people lie with impunity. Know your enemy. And stop prattling about Democrats! Compared to the Republicans, the Democrats are babes in Heaven... and until someone comes up with a winning third party, we are stuck with them. And better Obama than Dick Cheney or a rerun of the village idiot from Texas (which will truly be the end of us).
“Ryan claimed that we need to give tax cuts to the corporations and the rich so they can create jobs... “(See Ryan in Wisconsin elsewhere in this email.) This is the kind of self-serving nonsense that the Republicans serve up as if we’re all stupid or blind and can’t see with our very own eyes where all that tax cut money is going.
Be very careful about listening to people who throw Republicans and Democrats into one pot. This is exactly the way the Koch Brothers and other enemies of the people want us to believe... that their nefarious, deceitful and nation-destroying activities are positions shared by the Democrats. They are not. The Tea Party was foisted upon us by behind-the-scenes machinations of the Republicans and their think tank spawns like The Heritage Foundation and Americans for Prosperity which has nothing to do with Americans and everything to do with a handful of very rich, very deceitful, very destructive crooks. Their mission is to bleed this country to death and blame it on the Democrats. So again, be careful to whom you listen and know that these con artists, who are a thousand cuts below Bernie Madoff, operate under cover and might be blogging nonsensical gibberish right before your eyes.
And here’s another little tidbit that is necessary-to-know information “...a concerted Republican campaign to make it much more difficult to vote in dozens of states across the country described last week by The Advancement Project, a civil rights advocacy group, as ‘THE LARGEST LEGISLATIVE EFFORT TO SCALE BACK VOTING RIGHTS IN A CENTURY.’” We already know what the Republicans have been up to in places like Michigan and Ohio, not to speak of Wisconsin. So if you want to lose your voting rights and hand the country lock, stock and barrel over to the likes of Dick Cheney and the Koch Brothers, keep ignoring any and all distinctions between Democrats and Republicans.
Kudos to Mr. Hightower for telling it like it is.