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WikiLeaks has gotten their hands on a video that ostensibly shows an Apache helicopter in Baghdad shooting—for no apparent reason—an unarmed Reuters employee, waiting for people to come to the aid of the badly injured man, and then killing them, too. This was in 2007. Officially, the military was putting down an active firefight by insurgents, something that nobody could possibly believe is going on in this video. I can't pretend to know for sure that what the video portrays is actually what happened, but I felt nauseous watching it.
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Exxon paid $0 in U.S. income taxes last year. They're an American company, headquartered in Texas. But they've got twenty subsidiaries located off shore to help them funnel their income to avoid supporting the very country whose prosperity allows them to exist. General Electric likewise paid no income tax to the U.S. last year; the prior year, their marginal tax rate was 5.3%. That must be nice. Maybe I should incorporate myself.
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$15 billion in taxes is still an effective tax rate of 47%. Their net income tanked last year. But in prior years they were paying a good deal in FIT. It doesn’t make a lot of sense to look at one year. Certainly as an individual tax payer, the deductions you can take advantage of change from year to year.
Though, I would agree that the tax code needs to be revisited in its entirety for both corporations and individuals.
That’s $15B in taxes to other countries, though. :)
Waldo, I wouldn’t say they were waiting for aid to come to shoot ’em up. Audio sounds like they were waiting for allied forces to arrive to the location and the van showed up first.
Well, if we want that tax to be paid here, we would have to substantially change our corp tax code. Even then you still might not get a lot of tax off of Exxon’s foreign sourced income. The countries in which they operate these days are pretty heavy on taxing oil revenues. You know the whole “it’s our country’s resources, we should be the ones profiting from it” deal. Some people have the craziest ideas! =)
The other thing omitted here is that to the extent that Exxon still produces oil in the states, it generates royalty revenues to the feds (assuming it’s on federal lands). So, it’s not like they paid nothing. Plus there are state and local taxes they pay. And they act like a giant tax collection agency in picking up all of these sales and excise taxes for both states and the feds.
“Royalty income” a lot of times means that it (or lease fees) are paid to the govt in $25 a barrel oil to the Nation Petroleum Reserve.
Quite a deal. For Exxon et al, not us citizens.
I didn’t mean to imply that they were baiting people into coming by injuring somebody, though I can see how it could be interpreted as that.
For no apparent reason? Watch the longer video. Their short version was conveniently edited for shock value.
This story was run in the NYT yesterday, and their article points out that the “attacks took place amid clashes in the neighborhood and … one of the men was carrying a rocket-propelled grenade.”
And I look forward to more information coming out. When I wrote this, the sole source of information was that video, which was not advertised as being in any way edited or abbreviated.