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As it has evolved, the company has used, and in some cases pioneered, aggressive strategies to lower its tax bill. In the mid-1980s, President Ronald Reagan overhauled the tax system after learning that G.E. — a company for which he had once worked as a commercial pitchman — was among dozens of corporations that had used accounting gamesmanship to avoid paying any taxes.

“I didn’t realize things had gotten that far out of line,” Mr. Reagan told the Treasury secretary, Donald T. Regan, according to Mr. Regan’s 1988 memoir. The president supported a change that closed loopholes and required G.E. to pay a far higher effective rate, up to 32.5 percent.

That pendulum began to swing back in the late 1990s. G.E. and other financial services firms won a change in tax law that would allow multinationals to avoid taxes on some kinds of banking and insurance income. The change meant that if G.E. financed the sale of a jet engine or generator in Ireland, for example, the company would no longer have to pay American tax on the interest income as long as the profits remained offshore.

Known as active financing, the tax break proved to be beneficial for investment banks, brokerage firms, auto and farm equipment companies, and lenders like GE Capital. This tax break allowed G.E. to avoid taxes on lending income from abroad, and permitted the company to amass tax credits, write-offs and depreciation. Those benefits are then used to offset taxes on its American manufacturing profits.

G.E. subsequently ramped up its lending business.

an actual 32.5% corporate tax rate? sign me up…

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While they are works of fiction and, therefore, subject to exaggerations, they do capture the class bound us-versus-them quality of that era. People truly were economic slaves, as much by low wages and poverty as by deference to authority based on wealth and family. And factory owners, the good ones at least, lacked the concepts and language needed to create trade unions on the European model (you know, somewhat equal partners in the government and economy, unlike here). The bad factory owners were simply evil.

BTW, these books and more are easily available online through Project Gutenberg and the free Stanza phone app. There’s no excuse not to be eddicated.

Also, to the point of this article, it includes a lot of telling detail about how GE’s tax dodging in the 1980s raised the wrath of St. Ronnie Reagan, to the point he helped push for higher corporate tax rates. A telling detail how far we’ve come. Even Obama, a Democrat in name only, does not object to corporate tax cheats.

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Yeah, that was kinda my point. As though another 150 years of class war is really what anybody needs…. But you’re right. They think that the war’s over and they won. It’s up to us to convince them that it’s only just begun.

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Of course, there are too many people today that think that public opinion on its own will move policy. It’s worth remembering that our move away from Hooverism was a product of a confrontational mass mobilization, as expansions were a product of organized political action, not simply because of what people thought.

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I’ve just been reading Marx’s account of the English Factory Acts of the 1830′s-40′s, and the clever ways around them thought up by the plutocrats of the day. Dickens is usually who we think of when we think about such things, if we think about such things. We even make charming musicals out of his stories of starving waifs.

The reality was far, far worse. If these assholes want to take us all the way back there — and it does appear that they do — then the furies they unleash will consume pretty much everything and everyone they know, including their own smug selves. (This has been today’s episode of Santayana’s curse. Unfortunately, it looks as though there’ll be many, many more episodes to come.)

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This movie has played before, as American and European corporations (largely in the financial sector) created crises in places like Asia and Latin America and then used those crises to force through so called austerity measures that allowed them to speculate more freely and buy up firms in those countries for rock bottom prices (while busting unions and neutering political opposition).

The elements are all quite similar, down to the language used to describe and justify it. I consider this more evidence of the central idea for progressives – we are all in this together.

Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.

This assault is happening on many fronts, yet there has been only limited efforts to draw on those people who provide us a framework for making sense of it all (in the world, I mean, not here).

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