Corning: Made of Ass

The Future Starts Here

Remember A Day Made of Glass, Corning’s “vision for the future with specialty glass at the heart of it”? Turns out, Corning’s future as a rich, clean, and utterly privileged bubble is even more deeply into Eloi territory than I thought.

All these gigantic corporations with even more gigantic profits paying no taxes? Corning isn’t one of them. No, they got negative taxes! The bill was -0.02% on $3 billion earnings, or $4 million refund from 2008 to 2010.

But why stop here! They sent a senior executive to Congress to tell the House Ways and Means Committee that America’s high corporate tax rate was putting Corning at a disadvantage:

American manufacturers are at a distinct disadvantage to competitors headquartered in other countries. Specifically, foreign manufacturers uniformly face a lower corporate tax rate than U.S. manufacturers, and virtually all operate under territorial systems which encourage investment both abroad and at home.

What’s Corning advocating here is a “territorial system” that would reward the offshoring of profits even more and further reduce the amount of taxes corporations had to pay if they paid any in the first place. The “Trickle Down Effect” works great, of course, when no taxes fill the community coffers and jobs are outsourced overseas. As Jon Stewart put it: “tax cuts will trickle down like a golden stream of oddly hot champagne.”

Oh, and I heard that some $21 trillion dollars have been misplaced. So if Corning and other corporations believe that their tax refunds are insultingly inadequate, I suggest we sent them out to find and return these missing wads for a cut.

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Tagged as: habitats, temes & transitions