Announcements 




Award-winning Investigative Journalist Robert Parry (1949-2018)

Award-winning investigative journalist and founder/editor of ConsortiumNews.com, Robert Parry has passed away. His ground-breaking work uncovering Reagan-era dirty wars in Central America and many other illegal and immoral policies conducted by successive administrations and U.S. intelligence agencies, stands as an inspiration to all in journalists working in the public interest.

Robert had been a regular guest on our Between The Lines and Counterpoint radio shows -- and many other progressive outlets across the U.S. over four decades.

His penetrating analysis of U.S. foreign policy and international conflicts will be sorely missed, and not easily replaced. His son Nat Parry writes a tribute to his father: Robert Parry’s Legacy and the Future of Consortiumnews.



Thank you for donating

If you've made a donation and wish to receive thank you gifts for your donation, be sure to send us your mailing address via our Contact form.

See our thank you gifts for your donation.



The Resistance Starts Now!

Between The Lines' coverage and resource compilation of the Resistance Movement



SPECIAL REPORT: "The Resistance - Women's March 2018 - Hartford, Connecticut" Jan. 20, 2018

Selected speeches from the Women's March in Hartford, Connecticut 2018, recorded and produced by Scott Harris




SPECIAL REPORT: "No Fracking Waste in CT!" Jan. 14, 2018



SPECIAL REPORT: "Resistance Round Table: The Unraveling Continues..." Jan. 13, 2018




SPECIAL REPORT: "Capitalism to the ash heap?" Richard Wolff, Jan. 2, 2018




SPECIAL REPORT: Maryn McKenna, author of "Big Chicken", Dec. 7, 2017






SPECIAL REPORT: Nina Turner's address, Working Families Party Awards Banquet, Dec. 14, 2017



SPECIAL REPORT: Mic Check, Dec. 12, 2017



SPECIAL REPORT: Resistance Roundtable, Dec. 9, 2017




SPECIAL REPORT: On Tyranny - one year later, Nov. 28, 2017



SPECIAL REPORT: Mic Check, Nov. 12, 2017



SPECIAL REPORT: Resistance Roundtable, Nov. 11, 2017



SPECIAL REPORT: Rainy Day Radio, Nov. 7, 2017



SPECIAL REPORT: Rainy Day Radio, Nov. 7, 2017




SPECIAL REPORT: Resisting U.S. JeJu Island military base in South Korea, Oct. 24, 2017




SPECIAL REPORT: John Allen, Out in New Haven



2017 Gandhi Peace Awards

Promoting Enduring Peace presented its Gandhi Peace Award jointly to renowned consumer advocate Ralph Nader and BDS founder Omar Barghouti on April 23, 2017.


Subscribe to our Weekly Summary & receive our FREE Resist Trump window cling


resist (Car window cling)

Email us with your mailing address at contact@btlonline.org to receive our "Resist Trump/Resist Hate" car window cling!

THANK YOU TO EVERYONE...

who helped make our 25th anniversary with Jeremy Scahill a success!

For those who missed the event, or were there and really wanted to fully absorb its import, here it is in video

Jeremy Scahill keynote speech, part 1 from PROUDEYEMEDIA on Vimeo.

Jeremy Scahill keynote speech, part 2 from PROUDEYEMEDIA on Vimeo.


Between The Lines on Stitcher

stitcher

Between The Lines Presentation at the Left Forum 2016

inequality
"How Do We Build A Mass Movement to Reverse Runaway Inequality?" with Les Leopold, author of "Runaway Inequality: An Activist's Guide to Economic Justice,"May 22, 2016, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, The City University of New York, 860 11th Ave. (Between 58th and 59th), New York City. Between The Lines' Scott Harris and Richard Hill moderated this workshop. Listen to the audio/slideshows and more from this workshop.





Listen to audio of the plenary sessions from the weekend.


JEREMY SCAHILL: Oscar-nominated documentary filmmaker "Dirty Wars"

Listen to the full interview (30:33) with Jeremy Scahill, an award-winning investigative journalist with the Nation Magazine, correspondent for Democracy Now! and author of the bestselling book, "Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army," about America's outsourcing of its military. In an exclusive interview with Counterpoint's Scott Harris on Sept. 16, 2013, Scahill talks about his latest book, "Dirty Wars, The World is a Battlefield," also made into a documentary film under the same title, and was nominated Dec. 5, 2013 for an Academy Award in the Best Documentary Feature category.

Listen to Scott Harris Live on WPKN Radio

Between The Lines' Executive Producer Scott Harris hosts a live, weekly talk show, Counterpoint, from which some of Between The Lines' interviews are excerpted. Listen every Monday evening from 8 to 10 p.m. EDT at www.WPKN.org (Follows the 5-7 minute White Rose Calendar.)

Counterpoint in its entirety is archived after midnight ET Monday nights, and is available for at least a year following broadcast in WPKN Radio's Archives.

You can also listen to full unedited interview segments from Counterpoint, which are generally available some time the day following broadcast.

Subscribe to Counterpoint bulletins via our subscriptions page.

Between The Lines Blog  BTL Blog

[an error occurred while processing this directive]

Special Programming Special Programming

[an error occurred while processing this directive]

Between The Lines Progressive Resources

A compilation of activist and news sites with a progressive point of view

Share this content:

|

Podcasts Subscribe to BTL

Podcasts:  direct  or  via iTunes

Subscribe to Program Summaries, Interview Transcripts or Counterpoint via email or RSS feed

If you have other questions regarding subscriptions, feeds or podcasts/mp3s go to our Audio Help page.

Between The Lines Blog

Stay connected to BTL

RSS feed  twitter  facebook

donate  Learn how to support our efforts!

Study Finds 25 Top CEOs' Pay Exceeds Corporate Taxes Paid

Real Audio  RealAudio MP3  MP3

Posted Sept. 14, 2011

Interview with Scott Klinger, Institute for Policy Studies associate fellow, conducted by Scott Harris

taxdodging

In response to continuing high unemployment and an anemic economy that threatens to turn into a double dip recession, President Obama addressed a joint session of Congress and the nation on Sept. 8 to propose a $447 billion package of tax cuts and new federal outlays designed to boost consumer spending and create jobs. Prospects for passage of Obama’s jobs legislation appear dim as congressional Republicans oppose the president’s plan to fund the jobs bill by raising taxes on the rich. Specifically, the White House wants to impose new limits on itemized deductions for individuals who earn more than $200,000 a year and families earning more than $250,000, which they expect to generate the $467 billion more than enough of what's needed to fund the new jobs bill.

The declining rate of taxation on America’s wealthiest citizens and profitable corporations is one major reason for decreasing revenues to fund federal programs. A new report by the Institute for Policy Studies, “Executive Excess 2011: The Massive CEO Rewards for Tax Dodging,” highlights stark problems of fairness in the U.S. economy. The group’s 18th annual investigation of CEO compensation found that of last year’s 100 highest-paid corporate executives in the United States, 25 took home more in pay than their company paid in 2010 federal income taxes. And of the 25 companies that paid their CEO more than they paid in taxes, 20 also spent more on lobbying congressional legislators than they paid to the IRS.

Between The Lines’ Scott Harris spoke with Scott Klinger, an IPS associate fellow and co-author of the “Executive Excess” report, who summarizes the findings of the investigation and the urgent problem of growing income inequality in America.

SCOTT KLINGER: We first noticed this trend last year in 2009. There was one of the highest paid CEOs that made more than his company, Oxidental Petroleum, paid in income taxes. And we thought that was horrendous. We couldn't believe it. Here, all the things of value that a corporation gets from the government – from an educated workforce, to infrastructure, to regulatory programs that ensure their products and services are safe, even things like patent protection and courts to protect intellectual property – all those things of value, companies feel quite comfortable telling the government "that's worth less than the services of one man or woman who leads our company."

And so, we began to look at that as a theme coming into this year and the proxy reports tend to come in right after the first of the year in the spring. And we began to see that more and more companies were paying their CEOs more than they paid in federal corporate income taxes. And by mid-year, when pretty much most of the results were in, we looked at the top 100 highest paid CEOs in the United States, and found that 25 of them received more in compensation in 2010 than their companies paid in federal corporate income taxes. We think that's a shameful number. Most of these companies, virtually all of them were quite profitable. On average, they had $1.9 billion in profits. So these aren't companies that were struggling and didn't have any income to pay taxes on. It was that they were very profitable and found ways to avoid their taxes.

The other thing that we looked at was sort of "how does this happen?" And one of the things we thought about is the companies are really writing the tax codes, are telling Congress what to write in the tax codes. We found that 20 of the 25 companies spent more on lobbying Congress than they paid in federal corporate income taxes. Eighteen of them made higher investments in corporate political campaigns than they paid in corporate income taxes.

Lastly, one of the numbers we tracked every year is the ratio of average CEO pay to average worker pay. And last year, it sky rocketed. It was up to 325 to 1, which was up from 263 to 1, in 2009. So that was one of the largest jumps we've seen, and still not back to the record levels before the recession in 2007. But it's getting awfully close.

BETWEEN THE LINES: Scott, another issue that this country has seen unfold in recent decades is the growing income inequality in the United States, where we have the gulf between the rich and the poor widening to the greatest point of any industrialized nation in the world right now. And I wonder how you feel your investigations into tax rates of big corporations and the gulf between worker and CEO pay relates to growing income inequality?

SCOTT KLINGER: Well, it's certainly at the crux of the economic problems that we all face right now, including the problems faced by business, because the problem the businesses are facing aren't that their taxes are too high, it's that they have no demand for their products. And the reason they don't have any demand for their products is because the middle class is getting poorer and poor people are getting poorer, and people don't have money to spend at businesses to buy things, to create more jobs with their demand. I talked to a business person today, a small business owner and he said, if he had 100 people in his neighborhood by his business, he'd rather all of them making an average of $80,000 instead of having three make $10 million and the rest make $10,000. That's the sort of scenario we have, and he kind of followed that up and said, the rich can only buy so many toasters.

So the fact that we have all the pooling of money in very few hands is not a system that serves anyone, including business.

BETWEEN THE LINES: Scott, just a final question before we say good night. And that is, in this election year that is coming up, one of the big debates is going to be over tax policy. Whether rates on wealthy corporations should be raised even to the levels they were during the Clinton administration, the Republicans and their corporate allies seem determined to freeze things in place, not to move in increasing them in any direction. And I wonder, where do you think the public opinion stands on the idea of taxing the rich at higher rates here as the country faces this deficit crisis that a lot of these same Republican and conservative politicians are screaming about on a daily basis?

SCOTT KLINGER: Well, I think the tide is really turning, and I think the polls I've seen suggest that more and more people believe that the rich should pay more and taxing the rich is an appropriate way to preserve Social Security and preserve the kind of community investments and jobs for teachers and policemen and firefighters that we all have come to count on and support. And I think there's incredible outrage when companies are making billions of dollars in profits end up not paying any taxes at all.

So, we're not in favor raises on corporations, but we are in favor of dramatically closing loopholes and making sure all companies pay a fair share, and large corporations end up paying more like what they used to pay in terms of supporting those services the federal government provides.

For more information about the Institute for Policy Studies, www.ips-dc.org

Related Links: