Truest statement of the week II

Barack Obama can’t hide the fact that he is the One Percent’s president. Most of what he is dangling for the rest of us this election year turns out to be smoke and mirrors, yet he offers corporations a huge tax rate reduction – a gift that will keep on giving long after Obama is gone. It is typical Obama behavior. He sprinkles his speeches with phrases that mimic Occupy Wall Street, then turns around and promises the One Percent a bigger prize than George Bush could deliver.

Obama wants to lower the nominal corporate tax rate form 35 percent to 28 percent. For manufacturing industries, the rate would fall to 25 percent. Big Business has long complained – dishonestly – that American companies are put at a disadvantage by the highest tax rates in the world. But that’s only true on paper. When it comes to actually paying taxes, European corporations give a bigger share of money back to their governments and societies than U.S. companies do. The fact that the U.S. posts a higher official tax rate, while in the real world U.S. corporations pay lower taxes than Europe, is proof of the absolute corruption of the U.S. tax system, where corporations write the tax code and all of its loopholes.

-- Glen Ford, "Obama's Corporate Tax Scam" (Black Agenda Report -- link is text and audio).