Madison Ruppert
End the Lie

Thanks to tax loopholes and deductions, General Electric (GE) was able to pay a mere 2.3 percent in federal taxes on over $81 billion in profits over the last 10 years, according to analysis of the corporation’s tax filings conducted by Citizens for Tax Justice.

The Citizens for Tax Justice, a non-partisan watchdog group, said that GE’s latest filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) reveal that they were far under the supposed 35 percent corporate tax rate.

GE was able to rob taxpayers blind during years when their profits declined, all while paying taxes at a rate far below what most hardworking American individuals are saddled with.

Just last year we learned that GE’s 2010 tax return showed that the massive corporation paid no taxes whatsoever on a whopping $14.2 billion in profits.

In fact, GE actually reaped $3.2 billion in refunds and tax credits from the government, even with profits as massive as they were.

In response to these shocking numbers – which left many struggling Americans enraged, and rightly so – former Wisconsin Senator Russ Feingold expressed outrage at the fact that the man who Obama placed in charge of creating jobs was also running a corporation that paid no taxes and thus thoroughly exploited the American people.

“Someone like Immelt, who has helped his company evade taxes on its huge profits – and is now looking to workers to take major pay cuts after his compensation was doubled – should not lead the administration’s effort to create jobs,” he wrote in an email obtained by The Washington Post at the time.

The Citizens for Tax Justice reported that in 2010 GE paid just an 11.3 percent tax rate on their $14.8 billion in profits. Meanwhile, the corporation itself claimed that their tax rate in the United States was near 25 percent.

Even more disturbing, the Citizens for Tax Justice found that GE effectively had a “negative” tax balance from 2006 through 2011.

Indeed, they found that GE actually took back $2.7 billion from taxpayers during the period, even though they raked in $39.2 billion in U.S. profits before tax.

In a statement to media outlets Bob McIntyre, the director of Citizens for Tax Justice, noted just how foreign this tax rate really is to most working Americans.

“I don’t think most Americans would consider 11.3 percent, not to mention GE’s long-term effective rate of 2.3 percent, to be ‘normal,’” McIntyre stated. “But for GE, taxes are something to be avoided rather than paid.”

GE attempts to counter the findings of groups like Citizens for Tax Justice by claiming that their numbers are inflated due to foreign earnings being out of the Internal Revenue Service’s reach.

Obama has expressed interesting in taxing foreign earnings of American corporations and closing some of the tax loopholes for corporations while also lowering the corporate tax rate to 28 percent.

However, Obama’s word is worth absolutely nothing and the current 35 percent tax rate is already close to the lowest in the United States since the start of World War II.

Obama’s intimate relationship with GE and individuals like Immelt is also highly questionable, especially given Obama’s reluctance to do anything to compromise the profits of his major supporters on Wall Street and throughout corporate America.

The tax situation in the United States is wildly flawed, with average people footing the bill for the largest earners who are taxed at historic lows allowing major corporations to pay more to their executives than the IRS in 2010.

Warren Buffet has also come out against the astoundingly low corporate tax rate, writing in an opinion piece for the Wall Street Journal, “So our corporate tax rate last year, effectively in terms of taxes paid for the United States, was around 12 percent, which is well below those existing in most of the industrialized countries around the world.”

Polls have found that much of America supports raising taxes on the highest earning Americans, even amongst a majority of Republicans who were polled.

The poll, released by The Washington Post in October of last year, reported that a stunning eight in ten Americans support raising the tax rate on households earning more than $250,000 a year.

81% of Democrats, 67% of Independents and 53% of Republicans expressed support for the move, although I would say that instead of raising taxes, it might be more effective to actually make people pay the taxes they are supposed to be paying already.

I do not think that we would be forced to raise taxes on households earning 250,000 per year if corporations actually paid what they owed and we weren’t constantly paying off interest on ludicrous debt.

The unfortunate fact is that corporations work together with institutions like the private Federal Reserve to exploit and profit off the American people. Our government allows war profiteers to continue to bleed our nation dry and of course the Federal Reserve and their cronies in government love it since they get all of the interest on the bloated spending.

Raising taxes alone will not fix the problem. We need a radical overhaul of the financial system in the United States. We need to put the power of the purse back in the hands of the people and not a private banking cartel. We need to sever the ties between corporate interests and the federal government and stop the preferential treatment that corporations have enjoyed for far too long.

Without taking a full spectrum approach, there can be no true change and if nothing else Obama has proven that he has absolutely no interest in change.

This is where the lie ends. The American people are waking up to the fact that the mainstream media is controlled by a very small group of elite billionaires who decide exactly what stories to cover. We at End the Lie force politicians to address the real issues, force government to be accountable and transparent, and force real change to occur in our country. Every American needs to get informed and stand up for the principles upon which our wonderful country was founded. Do it now with End the Lie.

Did I miss something? Want to give me your opinion or tip me off to an important story? Email me at Admin@EndtheLie.com

Like GCN Live on Facebook and follow on Twitter for more great news, opinions, and announcements from GCN Live’s hosts and staff.

Madison Ruppert
End the Lie

While our nation is saddled with record deficits and debt, countless Americans are homeless or unable to find work, and analysts are predicting economic catastrophe, the prisoners at Camp 6 in Guantanamo Bay are getting a brand new $750,000 soccer field.

The project, which is just now getting finished up after being started in April of 2011, was shown during a tour of the facility to reporters who are covering the arraignment of Majid Khan in military court.

Khan is a former Baltimore resident and reportedly the only legal U.S. resident on trial at Guantanamo Bay. Khan was arrested in Pakistan in 2003 when he returned to visit his wife and is accused of being enlisted by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed to support and plan terrorist attacks against the United States and Israel.

He is also accused of being trained to attack gas stations, poison water supplies and even allegedly was planning to assassinate Pervez Musharraf, former President of Pakistan.

The soccer field is one of two other recreation facilities provided to “highly compliant” detainees at Camp 6 and is available for prisoners 20 hours a day.

Fox News reports that the field was specially constructed in order to give detainees “maximum access” to the field, meaning around 20 out of 24 hours.

Passageways have been built in order to allow detainees to travel to the costly new field without even being escorted by military personnel.

A representative of the military police who went unnamed said that giving the prisoners access to high levels of activity outdoors helped to decrease the behavioral problems within the camp itself.

This anonymous representative also said that it cut down on the interaction between the military guards and the detainees.

Like four other cases, Khan is expected to cut a deal with the prosecution. Since Guantanamo Bay opened in 2002, only six cases have been prosecuted.

Khan’s appearance will mark the first time a single person outside of the American military or intelligence community has laid eyes on him.

Since he was captured, Khan has been shuffled around in secret CIA black sites around the globe which Fox claims were “formerly maintained by the CIA.”

The treatment of suspected terrorists at Guantanamo Bay is not nearly as wonderful as Fox News seems to be attempting to make it out to be.

Indeed, the families of dead Guantanamo Bay detainees have challenged the Pentagon’s claims that three individuals committed suicide in 2006.

This story was almost laughable in its absurdity given that medical examinations found that one of the individual had his esophagus ripped out “and his body bore signs of torture, including several injection marks on his hands.”

American soldiers even came forward with eye-witness testimony of the horrific events, yet Fox News seems to be attempting to give readers the impression that the Obama administration is being soft on suspected terrorists.

They write, “Even some of President Obama’s most ardent supporters suggest the administration seems eager to close the camps and reduce the detainee population, and plea agreements with minimal jail time are a sweetheart deal for all involved.”

As evidence, they point to the fact that Osama bin Laden’s personal cook and driver are spending less time in prison than American citizens who were prosecuted in federal courts on less serious charges.

They bring up the case of a Charlottesville, Virginia man named Zachary Chesser who was convicted for allegedly making threats against the creators of the television show “South Park” and for giving support to Harakat al-Shabaab al-Mujahideen, more commonly referred to as al-Shabaab based out of Somalia.

Chesser was sentenced to 25 years having never so much as fired a shot on any battlefield, while Omar Khadr who allegedly killed an American soldier in Afghanistan is already almost half way through an eight year sentence at Guantanamo.

While this definitely does seem unfair, I reject the attempts to make it look like the detainees at Guantanamo Bay have it easy.

That being said, do I think we should build them a $750,000 soccer field? No, in fact I think it is absolutely ridiculous that they would ever spend such a thing.

Instead, how about we actually investigate these individuals and release those who are innocent? Files published by WikiLeaks last year revealed that there were some clearly innocent individuals being held including an 89-year-old Afghan villager with senile dementia and an innocent 14-year-old.

The simple fact is that we are holding many people without charge or trial, and if they’re lucky enough to get a trial it is a military tribunal which can only be characterized as a kangaroo court.

Obama’s “reform” of the process was criticized by both the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), saying it is “institutionalizing indefinite detention of terrorism suspects who have yet to be formally charged or designated for transfer to another country.”

“The creation of a review process that will take up to a year — designed to be repeated every four years — is a tacit acknowledgment that the Obama administration intends to leave Guantanamo as a scheme for unlawful detention without charge and trial for future presidents to clean up, despite the fact that senior officials acknowledged today that keeping the prison open continues to hinder our national security in the long run,” the CCR said in a statement.

Even if detainees are found innocent (which is doubtful in a rigged trial), the American government has no responsibility to release the individual.

Building these detainees a fancy new soccer field which they can use 20 hours out of the day is going to do nothing for the tarnished image America has abroad due to the horrific human rights record of the government of the United States.

This is just putting more money in the pockets of contractors who enjoy intimate relationships with the government while draining non-existent funds from the American taxpayer.

There is absolutely no benefit that can come from this, in fact I find it absurd to even entertain the notion that a soccer field will do anything to improve the lives of these unfortunate people who are caught in the grip of the American “War on Terror.”

The unfortunate fact is that we could see Americans put in camps similar to – and likely even worse – than Guantanamo Bay, based on nothing more than suspicion thanks to the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2012 (NDAA), which comes into effect March 1.

This is evidenced by solicitations put out by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and KBR, a major government contractor.

Not to mention the fact that the U.S. government has actually imprisoned American citizens without charge or trial in the past under the designation of “civilian internee.”

Hopefully our so-called government will stop this insanity and the atrocious insult to the principles upon which America was built that is embodied by Guantanamo Bay and legislation like the NDAA.

However, they seem more happy to spend $750,000 of taxpayer money (which we don’t even have) on a soccer field rather than address the complete loss of justice that has been brought about by the sham that is the “War on Terror.”

This is where the lie ends. The American people are waking up to the fact that the mainstream media is controlled by a very small group of elite billionaires who decide exactly what stories to cover. We at End the Lie force politicians to address the real issues, force government to be accountable and transparent, and force real change to occur in our country. Every American needs to get informed and stand up for the principles upon which our wonderful country was founded. Do it now with End the Lie.

Did I miss something? Want to give me your opinion or tip me off to an important story? Email me at Admin@EndtheLie.com

Like GCN Live on Facebook and follow on Twitter for more great news, opinions, and announcements from GCN Live’s hosts and staff.