Apple’s sleazy tax dodge is saving lives and keeping America safe. Don’t give those billions to the feds – they’ll just use it to buy killer drones! Cash is much safer in the Caymans.
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Ted Rall
Ted Rall is a syndicated political cartoonist for Andrews McMeel Syndication and WhoWhatWhy.org and Counterpoint. He is a contributor to Centerclip and co-host of "The Final Countdown" talk show on Radio Sputnik. He is a graphic novelist and author of many books of art and prose, and an occasional war correspondent. He is, recently, the author of the graphic novel "2024: Revisited."
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Mr. Rall, keep on hammering away against the drones, please! I can’t think of anything more wrong and destructive going on. Further, time and again, you have shown just how astoundingly relevant the drone issue is to almost every other current political issue. Never once have I thought it was an awkward or forced mention! As you laid out in step 8 of the 12 Step Recovery from Stupid Capitalism :D, we should find common ground and cause with anyone possible. We have some allies on the right on the drone killing a la Rand Paul’s filibuster which impressed me frankly.
I recognize the tongue-in-cheek at play here, but this cartoon reminds me that almost none of our taxes go to anything important to society. How much should I care that a company weasels out of paying? Other than social programs, most of what I care about hardly registers on the pie chart: environmental, food & drug, and financial regulations and research and education and NASA.
Really, truly, I am beginning to wonder why the Left insists that corporations pay their fair share of taxes. If this were 1942, in Germany, wouldn’t it be better if Germans cheated on their taxes?
Just tell me – How is it even f#@king possible that American people don’t even recognize that they have been at war with several countries for about 12 years or so, and that they think the War in Iraq is over, while we maintain more than 30,000 people there? Why in the world don’t most of them know that the drones are more like a carpet bomb than a smart weapon, and why don’t most of them seem to care? We continue to go after politicians and movie stars that have sexual scandals, but we barely even blink an eye at lies and murder by our ofishals. Is Bill Maher right ? – are most Americans drooling nitwits? Excuse me, but maybe I don’t understand how important The Voice, American Idol, or the Kardashians are? Gosh darm, if I was much younger, I might not be the grumpy old man, huh? Whoops – “Error establishing a database connection” – normal for trying to access Ted Rall’s place nowadays….and very cool, since it looks like Ted is becoming more useless through his inability to keep his website accessible…Clowncrack is much more accessible.
As for the website, apparently it will run faster if I eliminate the archives of cartoons. Should I do that?
Americans are not stupid but they are oblivious. To this day, they are unaware of the fact that the Clinton Administration was bombing Iraq weekly or more throughout the 1990s.
Apple Computer used perfectly legal tax incentives to avoid paying that money; incentives that were legal because of laws passed by Congress. Perhaps if Congress is so upset, they should be shown a mirror?
rikster, Americans who only casually pay attention have been conditioned for decades to believe the official story and not to dig deeper. We are just the fringe, not to be trusted. I’ve explained this to people and they don’t believe me because their media and president has told them otherwise. They don’t even bother to look into it. Their benevolent president says drones are good and so do the experts. And as sexually liberal as America appears to be, we are actually obsessed with gossip, shame, and taboo; it’s more exciting and easier to understand than real scandals.
Bruce, yeah I haven’t followed this story much, but that was my guess…how is it a story at all that a multinational corporation used tax loopholes…? On The Daily Show 5/22, Jon showed the Senate fawning over Apple during Tim Cook’s hearing and asking him what they should do with the tax code…even worse than the IRS hearings in which the IRS leaders denied knowledge repeatedly. I’ve come to expect every important Congressional hearing to be one of those two scenarios.
Apple (at least as far as I am aware) broke no laws when it filed its taxes. Even if Apple lied its ass off, Congress will probably enact no new rules or restrictions to prevent a corporation that’s pulling in billions in profits from continuing to pull in billions in profits and paying little or nothing in taxes.
This ties in perfectly with rikster’s point/question: Are Americans drooling nitwits in that they don’t seem to understand how pervasively and badly they’re being lied to?
It’s not that they’re nitwits. It’s that they’re shallow and mostly live lives of consumption which are dependent on not thinking too far about things.
Example: Tammy grabs her Apple box of lights and drives to the drive-thru, where she orders a burger and soda. She updates her Facebook page while taking an illegal left across four lanes of traffic and searching for something to listen to on the radio. She gets to the nearby clothing store and buys some shirts. Not a single troublesome thought has furled her precious brow.
She has not wondered:
About the working conditions of the factory employees who assembled her Apple toy.
About the treatment of the animals that were slaughtered to make her hamburger.
About the health effect of sub-standard workplace conditions on the quality of her food.
About the health ramifications of high-fructose corn syrup.
About the wars being fought over the oil that allows her to zip around in a big-ass gas guzzler.
About how everything on the radio now is pretty much programmed by corporations, rather than DJs.
About the conditions of the factories that assembled her clothes (but, to give her credit, Tammy does have some sense of what the Triangle Shirt Waist Fire was. Sort of.)
If Tammy were to think about these things, she might start making connections. She might start paying attention to the noise around her. High-fructose corn syrup is bad for you? We’re fighting a war for oil? People die in terrible factories so that I can get a great deal on some shirts?
And there’s no profit to all that because it makes all of life harsh and bleak. Every chicken leg comes now as the concluding step in a chain of suffering that started right about the time that chicken got the front end of its beak burned away with a hot knife and was then shoved into a 10 x 10 inch cage. So no more chicken. High-fructose corn syrup is bad for you? So the corporations don’t love me? They just want to sell me as much as they can for the most they can get?
Far better to simply let it all wash over you, like a boulder in a stream. Accept the “facts” that allow you to live a life of chicken legs, soda, and corporation-selected music on the radio.
And keep updating facebook.
Exactly Alex, and Facebook? How in the world would I be able to maintain contact with my friends and relatives without it? They are all programmed to use it as their main source of contact now. They no longer use email much because it’s a tiny bit more difficult and personal. If “Tammy” realized what was going on around her, (♫ surely, won’t stand the light of day♫) she might drive her SUV into the next bridge abutment, but wait!, the bridge might collapse because its no longer safe after so many years of disrepair….. It’s been a long time come’in, and it’s it’s going to be a long time gone….
Ted, I just watched I think it was a ‘History’ Channel documentary about black ops. It mentioned a CIA plot to force Hussein out of power and then said Clinton wouldn’t back it and implied there was no good reason for Clinton not to go ahead with a rather flimsy sounding plan with tanks and some turncoat general…odd that Clinton would be so aggressive in Iraq but not in that instance.
In a society in which our government worked for us, which people like to believe is our own, corporations would pay their ‘fair share.’ In a society otherwise…
For what it’s worth, the speed of the site is not that annoying to me. I’d much rather you keep the archives.
Good that the US federal government has figured out a way to keep absolutely essential programmes – the ones that kill people outside the country and spy on those inside it – going, despite allowing major corporations to «legally» (thanks, Congress !) evade taxes….
Henri