Just when you think you’ve bottomed out on the
cynicism it’s possible to feel in response to Washington’s
constant kowtowing to the monied interests, along comes the American Jobs
Creation Act.
These days, whenever the White House and Congress put
a positive-sounding title on legislation, you can bet it does the exact
opposite of what its title so gloriously proclaims.
The American Jobs Creation Act, pushed by President
George W. Bush and enacted last fall, does not create a single job.
Instead, it’s a massive multibillion-dollar tax giveaway to global
corporations. Through this law’s “homeland investment”
loophole, corporations operating abroad are allowed to have some $400
billion in foreign profits taxed at the bargain-basement rate of only 5.25
percent rather than the normal rate of 35 percent.
To pass this gargantuan boondoggle for some of the
richest corporations in the world, Bush and his congressional cohorts had
to cloak it as an economic-development program, promising that it would
prompt a surge of new investments all across our land and create hundreds
of thousands of new jobs for U.S. workers.
They lied. Instead of building new factories or
producing new products, thus creating new jobs, such corporations as
Hewlett-Packard, Procter & Gamble, Pfizer, GE, and ExxonMobil are using
the billions they get from this tax windfall to buy out their competitors,
shore up their bottom lines, or simply finance their existing operations.
For example, Hewlett-Packard, which lobbied heavily
for the tax break, now says that far from hiring more workers, it plans to
reduce its American workforce. Likewise, Oracle says it will use its
windfall to help pay for its recent takeover of its rival PeopleSoft
— a takeover that will result in the cutting of 5,000 jobs.
Beware of corporate thieves lurking behind
noble-sounding legislative titles — the grander the title, the
greater the theft.
This article appears in Feb 17-23, 2005.
