WE'RE STARVING! GIVE DADDY MORE!

Gee, do you think maybe this is part of the reason the government is hurting for money?

Of last year's 100 highest-paid corporate executives in the United States, 25 earned more in pay than their company recorded as a tax expense in 2010.

Those 25 firms reported average global profits of $1.9 billion. Among the 25 were Verizon, Bank of New York Mellon, General Electric, Boeing and eBay....

For example, Bank of New York Mellon paid its chief executive Robert Kelly $19.4 million last year, while the company got $670 million in what amounted to a tax refund, according to the [Institute of Policy Studies] report....

Kelly has complained about the high U.S. corporate tax rate in the company's annual meetings....

I know people in Vermont and upstate New York whose lives have been turned upside down by flooding from Irene. Some of them are in towns that were poor and struggling to begin with. Yet the congressional emissaries of our Galtian overlords insist that any federal disaster relief be offset because, as Ron Paul tells us, we're bankrupt.

Many Americans are not bankrupt. Many Americans are rolling in it.

But we've turned America into a personality cult. In place of David Koresh or Warren Jeffs, we put every top CEO in America. They're the "job creators," so we do what those CEOs tell us to do. We go without so they can have more, because we believe they protect us. We believe they protect us even when they refuse to protect us. We believe they protect us even when they deliberately hurt us.

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More on the study at the IPS site.