Instead of challenging their corporate masters on their tax dodging ways, Republicans are pretending that our crumbling infrastructure is unrelated to corporate protection racket.
Rep. Keith Ellison pointed out on The Ed Show, it isn’t a coincidence that bridges are collapsing while corporate giants are avoiding taxes.
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Rep. Ellison spoke about the unfairness in the tax system, “They’re going to do it as long as the american people don’t hold them accountable. But I think americans all over the country are really started to get animated. Two thirds of all american corporations don’t pay any taxes. Apple is actually fighting for the right to not pay taxes, but add GE to the list, and Boeing, and Bank of America. For the small businesses out there, the one third that do pay, they’re shouldering the burden for the rest of the corporate sector. It’s not not fair to them. If you’re a coffee shop or a small manufacturing business, you may have to pay all of your taxes because you don’t have a lobbyist to get out of them like Apple and some of the other ones do.”
Ellison connected our collapsing infrastructure to corporate giants dodging taxes. He said that Republicans apologizing to Apple reminded him of Republicans apologizing to BP after the Gulf oil spill, “It reminds me of when Joe Barton apologized to BP when they ruined the Gulf in the oil spill. It’s kind of a trend with my friends on the other side of the aisle. I mean, but you know what? The american people got to point out to them, you know taxes are not a punishment. Taxes are the dues we pay to live in a civilized society. You want to make sure we have decent infrastructure — by the way we had had a bridge fall just the other day. There’s going to have to be some taxes paid and it should be fair, and companies like Apple and GE and all the rest of them should pay their fair share. We have an effective corporate tax rate that is actually pretty low. nobody pays all those taxes. We need to have more people, more corporations paying their fair share so that working people and middle class people don’t have to pay as much.”
The chairman of the NTSB called the Washington bridge collapse a wakeup call, and said, “This is a really significant event and we need to learn from it, not just in Washington but around the country.”
Our infrastructure is literally falling while 31 corporations and banks have dodged $128 billion in federal taxes. The fact that Republicans were apologizing to Apple showcased the silent killer at work in our political system. Money is destroying our political representation. Senate Republicans were acting like they work for Apple, because they do.” The people who were thrown into the water when the bridge collapsed in Washington don’t have lobbyists. They aren’t making big campaign contributions, so they don’t exist.
As our infrastructure rots and endangers lives, Senate Republicans were more interested in protecting corporate giants like Apple from paying their fair share. It isn’t a coincidence that corporations and the super rich are getting wealthier than ever at the same time that our nation is falling apart.
In order to prevent future bridge collapses, we have to fix the bridges. However, there will never be funding for the repairs as long as our politicians continue to operate on a cash only basis.
The Apple hearing demonstrated that our bridges aren’t the only thing that is crumbling in this country.
Citizens United and corporate money are causing our representative democracy to disintegrate.
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