Thursday Morning Links

This and that for your Thursday reading.

- Sarah Anderson studies how corporate tax cuts enrich CEOs, but don't do anything to help workers. And she then follows up with this op-ed:

If claims about the job-creation benefits of lower tax rates had any validity, these 92 consistently profitable firms would be among the nation’s strongest job creators. Instead, we found just the opposite.

The companies we reviewed had a median job-growth rate over the past nine years of nearly negative 1 percent, compared with 6 percent for the private sector as a whole. Of those 92 companies, 48 got rid of a combined total of 483,000 jobs.

At the companies that cut jobs, chief executives’ pay last year averaged nearly $15 million, compared with the $13 million average for S&P 500 companies.

Instead of tax-rate cuts for these big corporations, the coming tax debate in Congress should focus on making wealthy individuals and big corporations pay their fair share.

American multinationals hold $2.6 trillion in profits “offshore,” on which they would owe $750 billion in federal taxes if the money was repatriated. In most cases, these foreign profit stashes are merely an accounting fiction. Companies retain full access to these funds for use in the United States and could, if their executives so chose, use them to create jobs here.

Ordinary Americans have to pay all the taxes they owe each and every year. Offshore corporations should be required to do the same.

- Meanwhile, Bryce Covert points out how the Amazon-Whole Foods takeover - like other unchecked corporate consolidation - can be expected to harm workers in the long run.

- Jerry Dias discusses how NAFTA served to convert desirable jobs in Canada (and the U.S.) into exploitative ones in Mexico. But Sean Higgins reports that it's the Trudeau Libs who are fighting to preserve corporate-biased dispute resolution systems which have been used mostly to challenge Canadian governments.

- Scott Santens reminds us of the devastating ripple effects of personal financial insecurity which could be solved with a basic income. And Frances Ryan writes about the UK Cons' thoroughly inhumane policy of punishing people for being too ill to report for social services appointments.

- Finally, Selena Randhawa talks to Indigenous people about the suicide epidemic among First Nations youth and the hopelessness which drives it.