$2.1 Trillion Withheld from Contributing to Nation’s Well Being

These corporate guys are like teenagers partying at what was once a nice location, tossing junk into the lakes, roaring up and down the roads, turning them into washboards and reading only beer can labels instead learning new and better ways of making the stuff of human nutrition.

Keep their profits off-shore, avoid taxes, contribute to the collapsing of the U.S. infrastructure and education of the young so that eventually the economic ecosystem that enabled their phenomenal growth collapses, and they along with it.

Eight of the biggest U.S. technology companies — including five from the Silicon Valley — added a combined $69 billion to their stockpiled offshore profits over the past year, even as some corporations in other industries felt pressure to bring cash back home.

Microsoft Corp., Apple Inc., Google Inc. and five other tech firms now account for more than a fifth of the $2.1 trillion in profits that U.S. companies are holding overseas, according to a Bloomberg News review of the securities filings of 304 corporations.

The total amount held outside the U.S. by the companies was up 8 percent from the previous year, though 58 companies reported smaller stockpiles.

There are mounting calls to bring back the military draft of young people so that “everyone has a stake” in the decisions to go to war or not.  I say, draft the corporations and the profits they make due not only to their own genius, hard work and good luck, but to the societal, legal and governmental structures that made it possible, and which all need on-going maintenance.  Take that away and the U.S. will soon look like an untended neighborhood, with abandoned houses, broken windows, listless residents and no way to find a way out.

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