- November 27, 2012
The (San Francisco) Beyond Chron features report “A Pension Deficit Disorder: The Massive CEO Retirement Funds and Underfunded Worker Pensions at Firms Pushing Social Security Cuts”
Visit the publisher's website • See the reportA new Institute for Policy Studies report released on November 27 examines CEOs of public companies who have endorsed the “Fix the Debt” campaign. It finds that these CEOs, while calling for ordinary Americans to take cuts in Social Security and Medicare, are sitting on an average of $9 million each in retirement funds. Most are also running large deficits in their own employees’ pension funds.
“These CEOs paint a stark picture of hypocrisy,” said Scott Klinger, a report co-author. “They are feathering their own retirement nests while trying to deny ordinary Americans — including their own employees — their hard-earned nest eggs. They’re simply taking advantage of the so-called ‘fiscal cliff’ to push the same old agenda of more corporate tax breaks while shifting costs onto the poor and elderly.” - November 26, 2012
Fortune features report “A Pension Deficit Disorder: The Massive CEO Retirement Funds and Underfunded Worker Pensions at Firms Pushing Social Security Cuts”
Visit the publisher's website • See the reportWhat should boards pay CEOs for anyway? A new study raises questions about the structure and size of CEO pay that deserve answers -- and fast.
An analysis from the Institute for Policy Studies' (IPS) released earlier this month shows that CEOs will reap huge personal moolah if a fiscal cliff campaign some of them are undertaking is successful. According to the report, the Fix the Debt campaign "has raised $60 million and recruited more than 80 CEOs."
. . . Certainly, putting people to work just because is not on many company agendas. The IPS study states that the "63 public companies in the Fix the Debt campaign" currently have more than "$480 billion in cash on their balance sheets, enough to pay living wage salaries for 10 million workers."
- November 26, 2012
Fortune features report “The CEO Campaign to ‘Fix’ the Debt: A Trojan Horse for Massive Corporate Tax Breaks”
Visit the publisher's website • See the report"An analysis from the Institute for Policy Studies' (IPS) released earlier this month shows that CEOs will reap huge personal moolah if a fiscal cliff campaign some of them are undertaking is successful. According to the report, the Fix the Debt campaign 'has raised $60 million and recruited more than 80 CEOs.'"
- November 26, 2012
Bernie Sanders Senate Page features report “The CEO Campaign to ‘Fix’ the Debt: A Trojan Horse for Massive Corporate Tax Breaks”
Visit the publisher's website • See the report[Reprint from Huffington Post]
The corporate CEOs who have made a high-profile foray into deficit negotiations have themselves been substantially responsible for the size of the deficit they now want closed.
. . . As part of their push, they are advocating a "territorial tax system" that would exempt their companies' foreign profits from taxation, netting them about $134 billion in tax savings, according to a new report from the Institute for Policy Studies titled "The CEO Campaign to ‘Fix’ the Debt: A Trojan Horse for Massive Corporate Tax Breaks" -- money that could help pay off the federal budget deficit.
Yet the CEOs are not offering to forgo federal money or pay a higher tax rate, on their personal income or corporate profits. Instead, council recommendations include cutting "entitlement" programs, as well as what they call "low-priority spending."
Many of the companies recommending austerity would be out of business without the heavy federal support they get, including Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase, which both received billions in direct bailout cash, plus billions more indirectly through AIG and other companies taxpayers rescued. - November 25, 2012
The Huffington Post features report “The CEO Campaign to ‘Fix’ the Debt: A Trojan Horse for Massive Corporate Tax Breaks”
Visit the publisher's website • See the reportThe corporate CEOs who have made a high-profile foray into deficit negotiations have themselves been substantially responsible for the size of the deficit they now want closed.
As part of their push, they are advocating a "territorial tax system" that would exempt their companies' foreign profits from taxation, netting them about $134 billion in tax savings, according to a new report from the Institute for Policy Studies titled "The CEO Campaign to ‘Fix’ the Debt: A Trojan Horse for Massive Corporate Tax Breaks" -- money that could help pay off the federal budget deficit.
Many of the companies recommending austerity would be out of business without the heavy federal support they get, including Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase, which both received billions in direct bailout cash, plus billions more indirectly through AIG and other companies taxpayers rescued.
Just three of the companies -- GE, Boeing and Honeywell -- were handed nearly $28 billion last year in federal contracts alone.
[Honeywell executive] Cote ranked 11th on a list compiled in a recent study conducted by the Institute for Policy Studies of executives who have saved the most from the Bush tax cuts. According to the IPS, Cote's taxable compensation for 2011 was a bit more than $55 million, and he did not pay about $2.5 million thanks to the Bush tax cuts.
- November 19, 2012
Al Jazeera features report “The CEO Campaign to ‘Fix’ the Debt: A Trojan Horse for Massive Corporate Tax Breaks”
Visit the publisher's website • See the reportIf politics were truly rational and truly democratic, the tax-cutting Santa would be history. We've run the experiment not once, but twice, and the results were exactly what you'd expect in the first place: It didn't work. Revenues go down, deficits go way up: The tax-cutting Santa brings diamonds for millionaires, but only lumps of coal for the rest of us.
But politics is neither rational nor democratic - at least not without a great deal of struggle to make it so. It is a game of power, which usually means a game that those with money control. A classic example of that is the "bipartisan" "Fix The Debt" campaign, the subject of a recent report from the Institute for Policy Studies,
- November 18, 2012
The Athens News
Visit the publisher's websiteBack in the U.S., a group from Occupy Wall Street, which itself was inspired in part by the Spanish M-15 movement against austerity that began on May 15, 2011, has taken a creative approach to the blight of debt that is afflicting millions. Calling itself "Rolling Jubilee," after the ancient practice of forgiving all debts every 50 years, the group is buying debt from lenders, for pennies on the dollar, and canceling it.
The amount may be symbolic, but an important message to President Obama and House Republicans as they wrangle over the future of the U.S. tax rates, deficit reduction and how to fund so-called entitlements. Sarah Anderson of the Institute for Policy Studies prefers to call Social Security and Medicare "earned benefit programs, because these are programs that American workers are paying into over their lives, and they have a right to that money, to have these basic social programs that have made us a much stronger society with a stronger middle class." Anderson told me, "The approach to the debt should be to look at the ways that we could raise revenues through ... taxing financial transactions ... cutting fossil-fuel subsidies and using carbon taxes, and cutting military spending. That kind of combination could raise trillions of dollars over the next decade."
- November 16, 2012
Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting
Visit the publisher's websiteThis week on CounterSpin: You're going to be hearing a lot more from corporate America, declares one press account, about getting the nation's finances in order. That's due to the Fix the Debt campaign, a group of CEOs and business heads with supposedly moderate reasonable plans to cut the deficit.
So for those concerned that we wouldn't be hearing enough from corporate America, worry not. What should we know about Fix the Debt and their plans? We'll hear from Sarah Anderson, director of the Institute for Policy Studies' Global Economy Project.
- November 16, 2012
The (Prestonsburg, KY) Floyd County Times features article “The Trojan Horse in the Debt Debate”
Visit the publisher's website • See the article - November 16, 2012
The Newark Star-Ledger features article “The Trojan Horse in the Debt Debate”
Visit the publisher's website • See the article
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Scott Klinger
In many countries around the world, there is growing momentum behind proposals to place a very small tax on transactions of stock, currency, derivatives, and other financial assets. Such financial speculation taxes are one of the few available options that could generate the enormous financial resources required to pay for the continuing costs of the global financial and economic crisis, including reducing the high rate of job loss, and to achieve key development, health, education and climate change objectives in developing countries. Even at very low rates, such taxes could also discourage the type of short-term financial speculation that has little social value but poses high risks to the economy.