Earn Thousands At Home – Set Up Your Own Internet Company – Oh, Good Grief, You’d Think This One Would Get Old!

But it doesn’t and people still wind up losing thousands of dollars and sometimes, their life savings. I am including a video explaining one of the basic internet offers. It has two of the basic elements of these kinds of deals. First, it is a retiree. The elderly are a favorite target. They tend to have savings or equity in a home. They are often lonely. Their children have moved away. Their friends have gone to retirement homes or just can’t get around. The second element (one that as a business law teacher drives me crazy), he didn’t read the contract. Basic Rule. Read the contract, okay!!

It’s nice non-boring professional newscast video a little more than four minutes long. It has a lot of useful information and I know something about scams.

And They Don’t Pay Their Share Of Taxes Either

I wrote in the previous post about how the fifty companies that laid off the most workers paid their CEO’s a total of 598 million dollars. But if you read the study itself, you discover that they also shirk their duties as good corporate citizens.

This is from the study -

Under current law, U.S. corporations face a 35
percent statutory tax rate on corporate profits. Of the 50
layoff leaders, only two reported paying this statutory
rate in 2009 and most paid substantially less, according
to an IPS analysis of domestic earnings and federal tax
payments in company 10-K reports.20 Hewlett-Packard,
under Hurd, remitted $47 million in federal corporate
income tax, a mere 2 percent of the company’s reported
$2.6 billion in pretax domestic net income.

Citizens for Tax Justice has used forensic accounting
methods to demonstrate that corporations
often pay an even lower tax rate than they report to
the SEC. Overall, as a result of various tax avoidance
schemes, U.S. corporate income taxes have plummeted
from almost a third of all non-Social Security federal
tax revenues in the 1960s to only a sixth of total taxes
today.22

In some extreme cases, major U.S. corporations
are actually paying less in taxes to Uncle Sam than
they pay, in compensation, to their CEOs. At Occidental
Petroleum, for instance, CEO Ray Irani made $31.4
million last year. That represented almost twice as much
as the $16 million the international oil firm paid in federal
corporate income tax for all the services the federal
government provides.

It is almost too obvious to mention that when corporations avoid their taxes, the burden falls on the middle class.

What is meant by CSR, corporate social responsibility? Are they just code words, that mean, “Get off my back and stop complaining,” or “Can’t you crazed citizens and nosy government officials recognize our good works and let the magnificent engine of capitalism grind on?”

I wonder if it is just a public relations thing. I bet you do too.

James Pilant

Job Cutting CEO’s Average 12 Million In Salary (not counting other benefits)

The fifty largest job cutting companies in the United States paid their chief executive officers a total of 598 million dollars.

Read some more -

The nation’s biggest job-cutting companies paid their top executives an average of $12 million last year, according to a report released today.

The 50 U.S. chief executives who laid off the most employees between November 2008 and April 2010 eliminated a total of 531,363 jobs, according to the Institute for Policy Studies, a research group that works for social justice and against wealth concentration.

In “CEO Pay and the Great Recession,” the institute said the $598 million in combined pay for the 50 executives would have paid one month’s worth of average-sized unemployment benefits for each of the laid-off workers.

The top 50 layoff firms reported a 44 percent average profit increase for 2009, the report said.

“These numbers all reflect a broader trend in Great Recession-era Corporate America: the relentless squeezing of worker jobs, pay and benefits to boost corporate earnings and maintain corporate executive paychecks at their recent bloated levels,” the authors wrote.

The complete article is here.

The complete study is found here.

Job killing has been profitable for many years now but the scale of the rewards are almost unimaginable. Reflect that 12 million dollars yearly is a million a month. In a thirty day month, that’s about 33,000 dollars a day or 4,166 dollars and hour or 69.44 a minute.

James Pilant

Gary Bender Adds His Thoughts On This Post: Business ‘Ethics’ Wrong Focus – Really?

Gary Bender is a friend of mine and more than that, he is well read and thinks. So I enjoyed his comment and share it with you.

Gary Bender writes -

Mr. DiLorenzo writes “Dishonest business people will be punished financially as customers cater to their competitors while suppliers refuse to do business with them. In cases of negligence, such as the BP oil spill, chief executives often lose their jobs, the company is sued, and the firm’s stock price plummets, as was in fact the case with BP. Such market feedback mechanisms do not guarantee ethical behavior, but they do reward it with customer loyalty – and profits. No such feedback mechanism exists in government, which is where much larger ethical problems exist.”

This is the usual nonsense we hear from the teabaggers and other blame-the-Democrats-I-mean-government right-wingers.

No, customers are not watchdogs. They buy for complex reasons that have little to do with the ethics of merchants. Likewise, suppliers sell to anyone.

As far as malfeasance, BP will continue to make huge profits long after the gulf spill is forgotten. Sure, a few people will lose their jobs, probably fewer than lost their lives in the explosion, and stock prices will rebound. Those who are intelligent enough to invest for the longterm will barely notice the stock dip.

It is in government where the people do have a feedback mechanism – their votes. Unfortunately, in the American two-party system, greedy capitalist are able to have more influence on government than the voters. Mr. DiLorenzo is one of those who would like to see more corporate influence on government. I believe that Benito Mussolini called the marriage of government and corporations fascism.

To suggest that capitalism and government are disjoint in America is disingenuous. To suggest that greed in capitalism is of no concern is downright evil.