Yahoo has the story 20 U.S. companies that paid 0% in taxes.

It is amazing that these people can see the problem, but pretend not to see the obvious solution.

There needs to be international coordination of tax laws. There are countries that don’t want to play along, and want to offer low taxes for a fee that is large enough to support the small population. The rest of the international community can decide how they want to deal with those countries. No trade agreements or special tariffs for those countries might be some ideas.

It was George W that put a stop to the efforts at coordination. I don’t know if those efforts have been restarted.

For those people who think lowering taxes will increase business investment enough to make a difference, I have to ask “What part of no freakin’ customers do you not understand?” If there are not enough customers to buy stuff, why would any company want to invest in producing more stuff?

Elizabeth Warren has a post on her Facebook page where she says the following:

Last week, federal regulators acknowledged that all of the biggest banks remain Too Big to Fail. I’ve pushed these regulators to use the full extent of their authority, including breaking up the biggest banks, to make sure no bank’s failure can bring down the economy again.

Her posts leads to an article in USA Today and ultimately to the video below.

As the USA article says:

While the legislative process in Washington seems to be broken, congressional oversight shows occasional signs of being alive and kicking.

Case in point: Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., skewered Federal Reserve chairman Janet Yellen at a hearing in July on the subject of living wills that large banks are supposed to be submitting — credible plans on how bankruptcy of these behemoths could be handled in a rapid and orderly fashion without taxpayer bailouts.

Maybe what these plans may need to have is an estimated time that would be required to liquidate the banks with the proposed plan.

We need to make sure that the voters know that at least some parts of our government are working and just who the people are that are making it work.

The Daily Kos has the article Obama slams reporter’s right-wing adopted talking point as bogus.  The article provided the following excerpt of a transcript from the video below.

What I just find interesting is the degree to which this issue keeps on coming up, as if this was my decision. Under the previous administration, we had turned over the country to a sovereign, democratically elected Iraqi government. In order for us to maintain troops in Iraq, we needed the invitation of the Iraqi government and we needed assurances that our personnel would be immune from prosecution if, for example, they were protecting themselves and ended up getting in a firefight with Iraqis, that they wouldn’t be hauled before an Iraqi judicial system.
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So let’s just be clear: The reason that we did not have a follow-on force in Iraq was because the Iraqis were—a majority of Iraqis did not want U.S. troops there, and politically they could not pass the kind of laws that would be required to protect our troops in Iraq.

This is the kind of answer the President needs to give more often. He needs to educate the voters on why the premise of the question is all wrong. I have no idea how we get this answer to the Faux Noise viewers. The more we propagate this around the internet, the more chances that people, at least on the fringe of Faux Noise viewers, might stumble across this.

It won’t work to claim that placing the blame on George Bush is putting it in the wrong place. If George Bush did it, he has to own it. Nobody else should be forced to take ownership of what George Bush did.