Weep for the poor oppressed multinationals

As noted earlier, the usual gaggle of wingnut bullshit artists like Jeff Schreiber, Jim Hoft (the biggest fucking liar on the Internet), and Dan Riehl have been crying great fat tears of horror at the prosopect that giant corporations will no longer be able to deduct from their taxes the bribes they were given by the Bush administration — bribes paid for by US taxpayers. Now comes more terrible, heart-wrenching news about the dreadful situation these huge, conscienceless corporations find themselves in:

Last week, Forbes magazine published what the top U.S. corporations paid in taxes last year. “Most egregious,” Forbes notes, is General Electric, which “generated $10.3 billion in pretax income, but ended up owing nothing to Uncle Sam. In fact, it recorded a tax benefit of $1.1 billion.” Big Oil giant Exxon Mobil, which last year reported a record $45.2 billion profit, paid the most taxes of any corporation, but none of it went to the IRS:

Exxon tries to limit the tax pain with the help of 20 wholly owned subsidiaries domiciled in the Bahamas, Bermuda and the Cayman Islands that (legally) shelter the cash flow from operations in the likes of Angola, Azerbaijan and Abu Dhabi. No wonder that of $15 billion in income taxes last year, Exxon paid none of it to Uncle Sam, and has tens of billions in earnings permanently reinvested overseas.

Mother Jones’ Adam Weinstein notes that, despite benefiting from corporate welfare in the U.S., Exxon complains about paying high taxes, claiming that it threatens energy innovation research. Pat Garofalo at the Wonk Room notes that big corporations’ tax shelter practices similar to Exxon’s shift a $100 billion annual tax burden onto U.S. taxpayers. In fact, in 2008, the Government Accountability Office found that “two out of every three United States corporations paid no federal income taxes from 1998 through 2005.”

I don’t know about the rest of you, but I think I need to curl up in bed and weep for a week, so distraught am I. O, the humanity!

(hat tip: Climate Progress)