You Caused This Crisis. Now YOU Pay.

Imagine a parallel universe where the Great Crash of 2008 was followed by a Tea Party of a very different kind. Enraged citizens gather in every city, week after week—to demand the government finally regulate the behavior of corporations and the superrich, and force them to start paying taxes. The protesters shut down the shops and offices of the companies that have most aggressively ripped off the country. The swelling movement is made up of everyone from teenagers to pensioners. They surround branches of the banks that caused this crash and force them to close, with banners saying, You Caused This Crisis. Now YOU Pay.

It shifts the national conversation. Instead of letting the government cut our services and increase our taxes, the people demand that it cut the endless and lavish aid for the rich and make them pay the massive sums they dodge in taxes.

Enjoying record profits and taxpayer-funded bailouts as the economy slowly recovers from a financial crisis, nearly two-thirds of US corporations don't pay any income taxes, instead opting to abuse tax loopholes and offshore tax havens. According to this study from the non-partisan Government Accountability Office, 83 of the top 100 publicly traded corporations that operate in the US exploit corporate tax havens. Since 2009, America’s most profitable companies such as ExxonMobil, General Electric, Bank of America andCitigroup all paid a grand total of $0 in federal income taxes to Uncle Sam. Tax havens alone account for up to $1 trillion in tax revenue lost every decade, money that could be invested in K-12 education, colleges, public health, job creation and hundreds of other worthy public programs.
Shocking: Offshore tax havens of the US corporate elite

Others figuring prominently in the corporate tax-haven list are such varied firms as 3M, American Express, Caterpillar, Cisco, ConocoPhillips, Dell, Dow Chemical, Exxon Mobil, FedEx, GM, Kraft, Merck, Pepsi, Pfizer, Procter & Gamble, Wachovia.

"We need to put an end to the use of offshore secrecy jurisdictions as tax havens," he said. He noted that not all companies use such havens and some use far fewer than others. For example, he said, "Pepsi has 70 tax haven subsidiaries, while Coca Cola has eight; Morgan Stanley has 273, while Fannie Mae has zero; and Caterpillar has 49, while Deere has three." Democratic Sens. Byron Dorgan and Carl Levin, who released the report "The Government Accountability Office (GAO)"

Slide Show: 8 Corporations That Owe You Money