Jim Hightower: What Are the Big Oil Companies Thinking When They Fight Having to Pay Taxes?

[marmar]

AlterNet / By Jim Hightower

What Are the Big Oil Companies Thinking When They Fight Having to Pay Taxes?
Last week, the heads of 5 multibillion-dollar oil behemoths strode into a U.S. Senate hearing room and took wild swings at the Close Big Oil Tax Loopholes bill, which then failed.

May 18, 2011 |


The big five of Big Oil might want to mull over a bit of advice that baseball great Ted Williams once offered to rookies: "If you don't think too good, don't think too much."

Apparently, the chieftains of BP, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobil and Shell thought that a bit of gruff, CEO bluster would be just the thing to brush back public anger over the industry's all-star avarice and arrogance. Bad thinking.

Last week, the head of these multibillion-dollar behemoths, pumped up on narcissism, strode into a U.S. Senate hearing room and took wild swings at a bill titled: Close Big Oil Tax Loopholes.

In a time of $4-a-gallon gasoline, stratospheric rises in petro profits and a federal budget deficit severe enough that Republicans have called for killing Medicare, the spark that exploded the public's fury at oil giants was the revelation that the big five are on the government dole, drawing more than $2 billion a year in corporate welfare payments. ............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.alternet.org/economy/150987/what_are_the_big_oil_companies_thinking_when_they_fight_having_to_pay_taxes/

[Donnachaidh]

1. kick baby kick!

:kick:

[bemildred]

2. It's ideological, not pragmatic, they have drunk their own KoolAid. nt

[Demeter]

3. They Are Afraid

that once America gets a tax payment, it will want another, and another, until Big Oil has been bled dry, just as the buyers of gasoline have been bled dry...

It's a clear case of projecion. Besides, what's the point of having all that power, if you don't use it to protect your loot?