Robert Reich Quotes
Even if there's no way to stop U.S. corporations from shedding their U.S. identities and becoming foreign corporations, there's no reason they should retain the privileges of U.S. citizenship.
Reich, Robert. "How to Stop the Corporate Deserters." HuffPost, 22 Jul. 2014.
The Kochs are the very conservative funders, philanthropists, & activists David and Charles Koch. By this definition Abraham Lincoln was certainly a socialist but so were Dwight D. Eisenhower and Ronald Reagan.
A constant major issue in industrial democracies are the perceptions, rights and responsibilities of corporations. For those like Romney, corporations should have all the privileges, empathy, rights and obligations of individual people. To most others a corporation is morally and practically a different entity. See {586119}.
Samuel Langhorne Clemens, 1835-1910
Romney, a very wealthy businessman running for President as a Republican, had owned and controlled companies that had outsourced jobs abroad. In addition, he personally maintained large bank accounts in Switzerland and Caribbean tax havens and kept his tax returns secret to minimize his exposure. Ironically, there was nothing illegal in his maintaining such accounts, and most very wealthy people did. However, Romney, never secure in his own skin, didn’t want his opponents to focus on the fact that he did what rich people did and what most middle class and poor people rarely did and considered somewhat unpatriotic. So this insult was very effective as most people thought that when the American banks were in danger of collapsing in the Meltdown of 2008, and had to be bailed out by the taxpayers, he would not keep much of his money in the American banking system—easy to understand for a wealthy investor, but not so good for a politician claiming to have the nation’s interest as a first priority. Many conservatives argued that it was patriotic for a citizen to maximize his personal wealth and economic security and Romney should have defended his actions so Romney was caught in the middle, hence a good target for his opponents.
Inversion is an elaborate tax loophole whereby a large American corporation buys a tiny corporation in a country that has very low or no corporate income taxes. Once they own it, they Transfer the stock of the American Corporation to the small foreign corporation. Now the American corporation becomes a subsidiary of the foreign corporation whose headquarters is no longer in America. Then they move most of the profits to the “parent” corporation as most companies do. The difference is that the foreign corporation pays little or no taxes, and the American “Subsidiary” pays much less taxes than they used to pay. The have “inverted”—some say perverted--the ownership relationship. They do the same business that they did before in America, use America’s government services just as before, has America educate their workers as before, but they do not pay their fair share of taxes as before.
Brightstar, owned by Sprint, had 70 percent of the Venezuelan cell telephone market when leftist and anti-American Hugo Chavez was the President of Venezuela. The company served it’s Venezuelan customers well at competitive prices and created many jobs at all levels for Venezuelans. Chavez allowed them to stay in the market.
Robert Bernard Reich is an American economist, professor, author, and political commentator. He served in the administrations of Presidents Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter, as well as serving as the United States Secretary of Labor from 1993 to 1997 under Bill Clinton. He was a member of President Barack Obama's economic transition advisory board.
