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Wealthy Corporations Are Cheating Ordinary Americans Twice
This chart looks at the 10 firms in that group of 35 that shelled out the most in executive compensation. As you can see, they include many household names, such as Tesla, T-Mobile, Netflix, and Ford.
How Did Things Get so Wildly out of Control?
Big corporations have used their enormous economic and political power to push Congress to slash rates and blow huge loopholes in our tax code. They get to fleece Uncle Sam, and the rest of us get stuck with the bill.
According to Americans for Tax Fairness analysis of Bureau of Economic Analysis data, the effective corporate tax rate—what firms actually pay as a percentage of their earnings—in the middle of the last century was around 50% to 54% when including state and local taxes as well. As of 2022, the corporate rate was just 17%.
Another damning indicator of our broken corporate tax system: the disconnect between profits and tax revenue. For decades, corporate profits as a share of the economy have been generally rising. Higher profits should lead to higher tax revenue, but they have not. Instead, according to Bureau of Economic Analysis data, the gap between U.S. corporate profits and corporate taxes as a share of GDP doubled between 1980 and 2022.
Corporate Tax Dodging and Excessive Executive Pay Are Interrelated Problems
CEOs have a personal incentive for hiring armies of lobbyists to push for corporate tax cuts. Why? Because the windfalls from those cuts often wind up in their own pockets. It’s hardly surprising that as corporate contributions to federal tax revenue have plummeted, CEO pay has skyrocketed, leaving typical worker pay far behind.
According to Institute for Policy Studies analysis of Office of Management and Budget and Economic Policy Institute data, when corporate taxes made up 21.8% of all federal revenue in 1965, the average CEO-to-median worker pay ratio was 21 to 1. By 2022, corporate tax receipts had fallen to just 8.7% of federal revenue and the average pay ratio had risen to 344 to 1.
In the immediate aftermath of the 2017 tax law, America’s largest corporations used windfalls from this legislation to boost executive paychecks through a record-breaking stock buyback spree. Stock buybacks artificially inflate the value of a company’s shares–and the value of the stock-based pay that makes up the bulk of executive compensation packages.
In 2018, the first year of the Trump-GOP tax cuts, S&P 500 firms plowed $806 billion into stock buybacks, a massive jump from $519 billion in 2017. And buyback spending has stayed sky-high every year except the first year of the pandemic.
Ordinary Americans are getting cheated twice. Corporate tax dodging deprives the nation of billions of dollars in revenue that could be used to improve public infrastructure and services. At the same time, exorbitant executive pay siphons money from worker wages, R&D, and other productive investments to support a strong economy.
See our full report for ideas on how to make corporations pay their fair share of taxes. The Institute for Policy Studies has also co-published with the Congressional Progressive Caucus Center a summary of practical proposals for reining in CEO pay, from tax and contracting reforms to stronger regulations on stock buybacks and Wall Street bonuses.
Until we fix our tax and executive pay systems, we’ll never have an economy that works for all of us.
Triumph of Conventional Wisdom: AP Expunges Iran/Contra Pardons from Barr's Record
A president facing a major scandal, just as the highest-profile trial is about to begin, pardons the indicted or convicted officials around him to effectively stop the investigation that's closing in on his own illegal conduct.
Trump soon? We'll see. But this actually describes what President George H.W. Bush did in 1992.
The Iran/Contra scandal revealed, among other things, that the Reagan/Bush White House had secretly sold missiles to Iran in exchange for hostages held in Lebanon, using the proceeds to fund right-wing forces fighting the leftist Nicaraguan government in violation of US law.
On Christmas Eve 1992, just as the indicted former Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger was about to face trial, Bush pardoned him and five others, including former Assistant Secretary of State Elliott Abrams and and former National Security Advisor Robert McFarlane. The New York Times (12/25/92) reported this as "Bush Pardons 6 in Iran Affair, Averting a Weinberger Trial; Prosecutor Assails 'Cover-Up.'"
The attorney general for Bush who approved the pardons, William Barr, is now being nominated for the same position by Trump. Is this background relevant? Though current news columns are rife with speculation that Trump might likewise protect himself by pardoning his indicted or convicted associates, the dominant US news wire service doesn't seem to think so.
In "Barr as Attorney General: Old Job, Very Different Washington" (1/14/19), Associated Press reporter Eric Tucker made no mention whatsoever of the Iran/Contra pardons. Rather than seriously examine the trajectory of presidential power and accountability, Tucker framed the story, as the headline indicates, as a stark contrast between the gentlemanly Bush and the "twice-divorced" Trump:
Serving Trump, who faces intensifying investigations from the department Barr would lead, is unlikely to compare with his tenure under President George H.W. Bush.
The false implication is that Bush did not himself face intensifying investigations from Lawrence Walsh, who operated out of the Justice Department's Office of Special Counsel. The misleading comparison is compounded by Tucker describing Trump as "breaking with the practice of shielding law enforcement from political influence" and ousting Attorney General Jeff Sessions for "not protecting him in the Russia investigation"--as if Barr didn't have direct experience in the first Bush administration with imposing political influence on law enforcement to protect a president from investigation.
Instead, Tucker cites Barr's supporters calling him "driven by his commitment to the department" and "very much a law-and-order guy." (The praise for the new head of the department Tucker regularly covers marks his article as a "beat-sweetener," a long and unfortunate tradition of journalists' making their jobs easier by sucking up to sources.)
This deceptive piece was apparently picked up by literally thousands of media outlets. A search of "unlikely to compare with his tenure under President George H.W. Bush" produces over 2,400 results.
As Consortium News founder Robert Parry, who broke much of the Iran-Contra story for AP, would later write in a review of Walsh's book Firewall: Inside the Iran/Contra Cover-Up:
The Republican independent counsel [Lawrence Walsh] infuriated the GOP when he submitted a second indictment of Weinberger on the Friday before the 1992 elections. The indictment contained documents revealing that President Bush had been lying for years with his claim that he was "out of the loop" on the Iran/Contra decisions. The ensuing furor dominated the last several days of the campaign and sealed Bush's defeat at the hands of Bill Clinton.
Walsh had discovered, too, that Bush had withheld his own notes about the Iran/Contra Affair, a discovery that elevated the President to a possible criminal subject of the investigation. But Bush had one more weapon in his arsenal. On Christmas Eve 1992, Bush destroyed the Iran/Contra probe once and for all by pardoning Weinberger and five other convicted or indicted defendants.
Parry, who died a year ago, left AP after many of his stories on Iran/Contra were squashed (Consortium News, 1/28/18).
"Conventional wisdom"--which in its current formulation depicts Trump's authoritarian tendencies as aberrations from the norms of US politics, rather than a continuation of the worst tendencies of his predecessors.
After I criticized AP on Twitter for the omission, a later piece by Tucker, co-written with Michael Balsamo, noted perfunctorily in the 16th graph: "As attorney general in 1992, he endorsed Bush's pardons of Reagan administration officials in the Iran/Contra scandal." (A search on "as attorney general in 1992, he endorsed Bush's pardons of Reagan administration officials in the Iran/Contra scandal" produced a mere 202 results.)
While much of the media obsesses over every bit of "Russiagate," some breathlessly anticipating the next revelation will surely bring down the Trump presidency, it's remarkable how little interest there is in the trajectory of presidential power.
Rather, much of the establishment media has gone to great lengths to rehabilitate officials from both Bush administrations, including the elder Bush himself when he died last month. (One exception to the generally hagiographic coverage of his death was Arun Gupta's "Let's Talk About George H.W. Bush's Role in the Iran/Contra Scandal"-- in The Intercept, 12/7/18.) Indeed, Trump naming Barr just after George H.W. Bush's funeral could be seen as a jiu-jitsu move: How could anyone object to his nominating the AG of the just-sainted Poppy Bush? It's as though Trump were saying, "If you all like him so much, I'll have what he had." See the Institute for Public Accuracy news release, "Barr as AG? Bush and Trump Dovetail."
AP's actions also fit into the institution-protecting mode of what Parry derided as the "conventional wisdom"--which in its current formulation depicts Trump's authoritarian tendencies as aberrations from the norms of US politics, rather than a continuation of the worst tendencies of his predecessors.
CIA Whistleblower to Civil Rights Groups: Where are You?
In a case that relied on circumstantial evidence, Sterling was convicted in January on nine separate felony charges, including seven counts of espionage.
He was given a 42-month sentence in May, which Norman Solomon, executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy and coordinator of whistleblower advocacy organization ExposeFacts.org, described as "the continuation of a war on whistleblowing and journalism, to clamp down on the absolutely essential flow of information for democracy."
As torture whistleblower John Kiriakou previously explained, Sterling "didn't sell secrets to the Russians. He didn't trade intelligence for personal gain." He continues:
He reported to the Senate Intelligence Committee that the CIA had botched an operation to feed false information about nuclear technology to Iran -- and may have actually helped Iran's enrichment program instead.
Largely based on this, the government accused Sterling of leaking details about the program to journalist James Risen, who wrote about it in his book State of War.
Even worse, the feds claimed that Sterling, who is black, did it out of resentment over a failed racial discrimination lawsuit against the agency -- in effect using Sterling's willingness to stand up for his rights against him.
"Where were you when I, one of the first black officers to do so, filed a discrimination suit against the Central Intelligence Agency?" Sterling asks in his letter.
"Where were you when the justice system of the United States dismissed my discrimination suit because the U.S. government maintained that trying my suit would endanger national security?"
He goes on to ask: "Where were you when the United States put me -- the only person and only black face investigated over a 10-year period of time -- on trial in federal court on Espionage Act charges, claiming that I am a traitor to national security?"
The Missouri native refers to the groups' presence in the wake of the killing of Michael Brown, but says that the his own injustices have been largely ignored by the civil rights groups.
"I am now in prison for a crime I did not commit," he writes. "Where are you?"
In Defense of Art & Artists
In 2008 the owners of Mama Ayesha's, a Middle Eastern restaurant in Washington D.C., commissioned award winning artist Karla Cecilia Rodas Cortez, popularly known as Karlisima, to paint a large mural on the outside wall of the restaurant.
The mural work was meant to honor the founder of the eatery, Ayesha Abraham, a Palestinian born in Jerusalem in the late 1800's who came to the U.S. as an emigre in the late 1940s. Abraham opened her restaurant, originally named Calvert Cafe, and it was a success in the community and frequented by the politicos that worked in Washington. When Ayesha died in 1993, her family renamed the business Mama Ayesha's in her honor.
Karlisima's mural depicts Ayesha Abraham in traditional Palestinian dress, flanked on her right by presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Baines Johnson, Richard M. Nixon, Gerald R. Ford, and Jimmy Carter, while on her left Abraham was flanked by Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama. In the background one can see blossoming Cherry trees and the White House. The mural is framed on both sides by a border set in mosaic tile that depicts the U.S. flag. No doubt the restaurant owners wanted to praise Ayesha, but they also wanted to laud their establishment as a favored bistro with government workers, ambassadors, and political dignitaries.
It took three years on a scaffold for Karlisima to paint her Presidential Mural. The cost of producing the artwork was $25,000, and the funding was provided by the Abraham family, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the D.C. Commission on the Arts & Humanities. The artist hired some assistants, but most of the work she did by herself. $25,000 is a pittance for three years of labor, is it not? Allow this proletarian artist to explain the concept for you. I support the fifteen dollar an hour movement, so I know that a 40-hour-a-week job that pays the current federal minimum wage of $7.25 nets a worker a yearly salary of around $13,926, or $41,778 for a three year period. This is wholly inadequate as a living wage, but it also means that in three years of hard work Karlisima earned far less than a worker laboring in a fast food business.
On the night of August 6, a vandal, or possibly a group of hooligans, shot up Karlisima's mural using a paint ball gun or guns loaded with bright red paint. It took time to methodically place over 50 shots in the groin area of the presidents. The central figure of Ayesha Abraham was not destroyed. One of the hoodlums supposedly signed the work with a scrawl reading, "The War Thugs." Channel 4 NBC Washington reported that the manager of Mama Ayesha's, Amir Abu-El-Hawa, responded to the destruction by saying: "It's sad. My family has worked hard for this restaurant - blood, sweat and tears over the past 55 years." The television station also spoke to the artist, who simply said: "I'm just so devastated."
On August 7, 2015, the Common Dreams website published an article by Sam Husseini with the awkwardly sophomoric title of: On Shooting the 'War Thug' Presidents in the (Paint) Balls. A writer and left-wing political activist, Mr. Husseini is the communications director of the progressive Institute for Public Accuracy. His articles on pop culture, media, and political matters have been widely published, from the Nation to the Washington Post, but his Paint Balls essay is utterly reprehensible. From the opening paragraph to the last moral high-horse sentence, Husseini's anti-art diatribe made my blood boil; this passionate article is the result.
I will be direct, Sam Husseini is a philistine, a classic example of an individual who knows absolutely nothing about art. The fact that he writes about pop culture and media, and his rubbish is published, points not only to the intellectual squalor of our times, but to the bankruptcy of America's so-called "left."
In the malicious opening sentence of his article, Husseini informs the reader that Karlisima's mural had been "transformed" or "made more whole, reborn" by its defacement! He completely dismisses the artist, barely mentioning her, saying only that "the mural was originally labored over by Karlisima Rodas."
Of Mayan ancestry, Karlisima was born in San Salvador, El Salvador, and was considered a prodigy for her artistic abilities. As a child Karlisima was mentored by none other than Jose Mejia Vides, a printmaker, sculptor, and painter now considered to be an outstanding luminary in Salvadoran art. One does not need to dwell on the conditions suffered by El Salvador in the 1980s. As an artist I worked hard to oppose the "death squad" democracy the U.S. hoisted upon the unfortunate Salvadorans at the time, creating a multitude of prints and drawings that depicted that country's bloody "civil war." Karlisima left El Salvador in 1984 and emigrated to the United States where she settled in Washington D.C. In 1992 she graduated from Washington University with a Bachelor degree in Fine Arts, and went on to work at the National Gallery of Art and the National Museum of African American Art as a silk screen specialist.
Husseini goes on to call the paint ball vandalism "a sort of art work that is literally paint as paint," and that for the destroyed mural "there's a case to be made that this more completes the piece than defaces it." Husseini adds the wisecrack that "some people, including Karlisima, now seem upset by the addition of the paintballs, but murals are not typically done to glorify the high and mighty." In what would not be his final spasm of mental incapacity, Husseini jeered that "the original mural is not destroyed, it's not painted over, but used to make a perhaps unexpected point." Ah, there it is, the postmodern gobbledegook. You see, an anonymous street artist has merely "appropriated" and "repurposed" Karlisima's mural! It is with the most bitter sarcasm that I must point out that our paint ball vandal could enjoy a lucrative career in today's trendy art world, if he or she would only step out of the shadows.
Instead of criticizing Karlisima's artwork, perhaps Mr. Husseini should offer some critical analysis of America's progressive movement. The U.S. antiwar movement totally collapsed with the ascendancy of Mr. Hope and Change, the "antiwar" president; the left simply folded itself into the Obama campaign and the democratic party, willingly and mostly uncritically. It has not since recovered, and I have serious doubts that it will. The left's ineptitude and total incompetence has prevented it from impacting the American political scene, and now out of sheer frustration, lefties are attacking an artist for painting the portraits of eleven U.S. presidents.
What really stuck in Husseini's craw was that Karlisima dared to paint 11 U.S. presidents without giving them devil horns and fangs. In Husseini's words: "From using nuclear weapons to bombing Vietnam and invading Iraq to deploying killer drones in country after country, the thuggish-ness of these presidents is hard to compete with." He went on to say that "an augmented mural could include mushroom clouds in the background, and perhaps jet fighters, bombers and killer drones flying overhead." Yes, but... we are not talking about the augmentation of an artwork, we are talking about artless pillage. Husseini completely disregards Karlisima's right to freedom of expression because he deems her artwork "politically incorrect."
I am in no way opposed to the creation of acerbic works of art that malign the war making ruling class, I have created such images myself. Here I must mention the brilliance of English artist Gee Vaucher. In 1977 she joined the anarchist punk rock band Crass, producing extraordinary hand drawn images that everyone thought were photomontages. In 1980 Vaucher drew the cover art for the band's Nagasaki Nightmare single, an antiwar musical masterwork. The artwork depicted the leaders of nuclear armed powers and their allies standing on the pulverized remains of Nagasaki, the charred body of a child at their feet. Vaucher's drawing and the band's lyrics continue to haunt me: "They've done it once, and they'll do it again, they'll shower us all in their deadly rain." If Husseini actually knew anything, he might have told his readers about Vaucher's works, instead he went for the denigrating cheap shot by belittling an artist and praising a vandal. Crass did not destroy anyone else's artwork in order to make their point.
Husseini attempts to justify the destruction of an artwork that he does not politically approve of, and he makes light of it. His tone is more appropriate for TMZ or Buzzfeed. He condones the ruining of an artist's depiction of U.S. presidents, because "all these presidents have used violence." I find the crudeness and philistinism of Sam Husseini to be frightening. By giving a green light to the defacement of Karlisima's Presidential Mural, my fear is that he incites some screwball to visit the U.S. National Portrait Gallery and begin defacing the museum's historic Portraits of the Presidents collection; justifying the vandalism of art is a slippery slope.
Furthermore, Husseini assumes the "transformation" of the mural was carried out as a left critique of power. How does he know the defacement was not carried out by your garden-variety lunatic, or simply as an act of teenage vandalism? The signature "The War Thugs" could have been left by anyone and should not be considered evidence for political motivation.
More to the point, it is so much easier to destroy a work that took an artist three years to create, than it is to produce your own artistic statement. Husseini did not call for artists to step forward to create skillful and persuasive works of art to open minds and touch the human soul, no, he made excuses for an act of sheer brutish intimidation, and no American should put up with it.
What would Husseini have written about the City of Los Angeles partially white washing the Siqueiros America Tropical mural on Olvera Street in 1932? Would he have written that it had simply been "transformed" or "made more whole, reborn?" I have to wonder how Husseini would respond to a pro-Palestinian public mural being defaced on U.S. streets with red paint ball splats. Would he say that "the paintball artist perhaps admirably exercised restraint from engaging in figurative head shots," like he did when referring to the ruined Karlisima mural?
It seems so obvious that I hesitate to bring it up, but history has shown us many examples where art and artists were destroyed for political purposes. Starting in 1947, the House Un-American Activities Committed destroyed the lives and careers of hundreds of directors, screenwriters actors, and other professionals in the Hollywood motion picture industry, because they were accused of being communists. In the late 1930's the Nazis began to ban artists that they perceived to be "un-German" and "degenerate," in particular banning Jewish and communist artists. Husseini's claptrap regarding Karlisima's mural reminds me of the Nazi Degenerate Art exhibitions (German: Entartete Kunst), where the fascists exhibited modern art for ridicule and derision before destroying the canvases, sculptures, and prints, or selling them overseas for profit.
I am a dedicated realist painter and printmaker with a lifelong commitment to creating socially conscious works of art. If Sam Husseini, his minions and supporters, would care to go through my online portfolio of artworks and writings published on my Art For A Change website, they will find nothing that even remotely smacks of reactionary politics. That being said, I strongly denounce Husseini's vile contention that Karlisima's mural was "transformed" and "made more whole, reborn," by a wretched act of vandalism.
In 1758 the French philosopher Claude-Adrien Helvetius published a controversial book titled On the Mind. The work was banned by the Parliament and the Sorbonne while Helvetius came under relentless attack. The Enlightenment philosopher and writer Voltaire was unimpressed by the book, but when he heard it had been publicly torched, he resolved to support Helvetius.
In 1919 the English writer Evelyn Beatrice Hall published a book that summarized Voltaire's position regarding Helvetius in the following words: "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." Hall's phrase is what Husseini should have proclaimed when announcing his displeasure with Karlisima's mural. Hall's words should be ringing in our ears. The act of vandalism approved of by Husseini clarifies her words and brings them new life and meaning.
Truth be told, I don't really care for Karlisima's Presidential Mural, as I do not believe an artist's role is to give uncritical support to those at the top. Let us just say it is the Francisco Goya in me. But when goons attempt to physically obliterate her work, and slippery eels publish rationales and apologia for those attacks... I will stand with Karlisima as a fellow artist. I would hope that I would have the same support, were my own works ever defaced.
The manager of Mama Ayesha's, Amir Abu-El-Hawa, has set up a GoFundMe page to raise the money necessary to restore the damaged mural; the goal is to raise $4,000 dollars. At the time of this writing, $3,285 dollars have been raised. Please join me and contribute whatever you can to the restoration of Karlisima's Presidential Mural.
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