Courtesy of a commenter over at Jerry Coyne's blog, here's a wonderful, impassioned speech by Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders itemizing the mass mental illness that has infected politics in this country.
Absolutely. But somehow the right wing seems to have control of the agenda and all the organs that promote the national agenda (and they are busy trying to defund or otherwise hamper whatever outlets are not promoting their cause); the uncomfortable truths which do not fit their template get no press coverage at all.
Politifact has taken its TruthMeter to a couple aspects of this speech, and they find that Sanders' claim about ExxonMobil having paid no taxes and even gotten a $156m refund to be "false." But even they argue that it's difficult to know exactly what has been paid as so much is secret and private. They estimate the real figure to be $500m, which, on $19b profit, seems very low indeed. If one subtracts the $156m refund from that, it really is virtually nothing.
They also claim that EM has paid billions elsewhere, though money paid in foreign lands (which it sounds like they can deduct from their US tax bill...) don't mean anything about their impact on domestic finances IMO.
3 comments:
Great clip. This should be played on all the major news stations. This is the real news.
Absolutely. But somehow the right wing seems to have control of the agenda and all the organs that promote the national agenda (and they are busy trying to defund or otherwise hamper whatever outlets are not promoting their cause); the uncomfortable truths which do not fit their template get no press coverage at all.
Politifact has taken its TruthMeter to a couple aspects of this speech, and they find that Sanders' claim about ExxonMobil having paid no taxes and even gotten a $156m refund to be "false." But even they argue that it's difficult to know exactly what has been paid as so much is secret and private. They estimate the real figure to be $500m, which, on $19b profit, seems very low indeed. If one subtracts the $156m refund from that, it really is virtually nothing.
They also claim that EM has paid billions elsewhere, though money paid in foreign lands (which it sounds like they can deduct from their US tax bill...) don't mean anything about their impact on domestic finances IMO.
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