Corporations don’t pull their weight

When young men avoiding the draft during the Vietnam years left the country it was clearly illegal; Apple making a deal with Ireland to shelter profits made in Europe and Asia is clearly legal. Apple can afford very good lawyers.

I like capitalism. It has, with its “invisible hand,” created a comfortable life for millions. I am also very fond of my body’s cell division for that is how I stay healthy; yet I fear that mysterious process going crazy because then I will have cancer. Corporations denying us the ability to pay the bills to keep our country functioning are a kind of cancer, albeit quite legal.

Ireland will no doubt have to answer the objections of its fellow European Union members for denying them the taxes Apple owes on products sold in their respective countries. I think we, as we read of yet another bridge crumbling from age, have to re- think laws that allow corporations to “defer” taxes owed on profits made from selling their products outside the United States. ( They of course await a period of amnesty when they can bring deferred money home at a much lower tax rate and then use those funds to award their higher- ups with lavish bonuses and their investors with dividends.)

But of course corporations possess not only shrewd lawyers but also slavish legislators ( or as Will Rogers would say, “the best little Congress money can buy.”) And therein lies the problem.

As long as we send people to Congress who preach that only the crumbs that fall off the rich man’s table ( the jobs that must be done within our borders) are the best we can hope for and for which we should be sooo grateful, bridges and the rest of our infrastructure will continue to crumble, and some of our youth will risk a charge of desertion rather than risk death in the unnecessary wars of the future.

Where are the legislators willing to give us a sane and fair country that we can pass on to our children with pride? We must find them… and soon.