Stupid White Men-- and Other Sorry Excuses for the State of the Nation! - Michael Moore [26]
I listen to them talk about how well they’ve done—the new home in the Berkshires, the trip they just took to Easter Island. They couldn’t be happier.
When I first moved into my building, it was occupied by artists and playwrights and half the cast of Saturday Night Live and some senior citizens. Now it’s pretty much just us, one of the Rangers, and my crazy friend Barry, the cinematographer; everyone else, it seems, is either rich enough to do without a job, or busy reaping huge profits from the various properties they own in poor neighborhoods, or living off some trust fund, or working on Wall Street, or from another country (here in New York overseeing the family’s foreign investments). The Fortune 500 corporations are their bread and butter. And I’m here to tell you, they’re loaded, and they’re not cutting back one bit for themselves.
If you don’t want to take my word alone, then let me offer you some neutral, objective statistics about just how well those at the top are doing:
• From 1979 until now, the richest I percent in the country have seen their wages increase by 157 percent; those of you in the bottom 20 percent are actually making $100 less a year (adjusted for inflation) than you were at the dawn of the Reagan era.
• The world’s richest two hundred companies have seen their profits grow by 362.4 percent since 1983; their combined sales are now higher than the combined gross domestic product of all but ten nations on earth.
• Since the recent mergers of the top four U.S. oil companies, their profits have soared by 146 percent during what we were told was an “energy crisis.”
• In the most recent year for which there are figures, forty-four of the top eighty-two companies in the United States did not pay the standard rate of 35 percent in taxes that corporations are expected to pay. In fact, 17 percent of them paid NO taxes at all—and seven of those, including General Motors, played the tax code like a harp, juggling business expenses and tax credits until the government actually owed them millions of dollars!
• Another 1,279 corporations with assets of $250 million or more also paid NO taxes and reported “no income” for 1995 (the most recent year for which statistics were available).
We are getting bilked in so many ways that listing them all might get me charged with inciting a riot. But who cares? Mercedes Benz, which has continually refused to meet American mileage and pollution standards, was being fined for its lawbreaking when it came up with an ingenious plan. For the years 1988 and 1989, the company deducted from their taxes the $65 million it had paid in fines as “ordinary expenses incurred ... in carrying on its trade or business.” That means that you and I paid $65 million so that a bunch of rich people could drive around in big, fancy cars and ruin our lungs. Fortunately, the IRS was on to this scam and denied their claim.
Halliburton, the oil company, set up a subsidiary in the Cayman Islands in the early nineties. Problem is, there is no oil in the Cayman Islands. Nor are there any oil refineries or distribution centers. So what was that Halliburton subsidiary doing there? Evidently the government was suspicious. From 1996 until 1998,
fourteen separate tax actions were filed against Halliburton entities. In one case, the government contended that Halliburton used these subs to avoid $38 million in taxes. Most of these cases have been resolved.
They aren’t the only ones interested in defrauding the federal government. A half-dozen major U.S. insurance companies now call Bermuda their “headquarters,” including insurance giants Chubb, Hartford, Kemper, Liberty Mutual, and others. Accenture, which used to be known as Andersen Consulting, recently