Lying, stealing, hypocritical pigs at the trough

If you find it necessary to declare on national television that “I am a serious person,” you’re probably not.

Meet Michele Bachmann. She’s currently running for president, but suffering a few credibility problems. One is that she keeps creating her own fanciful version of history. For example, she recently bewildered Iowa voters by asserting that the Founding Fathers had magnanimously included every American in the nation’s new government: “It didn’t matter the color of [people’s] skin,” she marveled. “It didn’t matter whether they were of a higher class or a lower class, it made no difference.” Seriously.

Indeed, Bachmann plowed straight ahead into a fantasy about the Founders’ glorious work to free the slaves. She insisted that these wealthy, white, slave-owning men “worked tirelessly until slavery was no more in the United States.” Seriously.

No surprise, then, that the congresswoman also invents her own personal history. While she unsparingly attacks “Washington’s spending addiction,” she apparently doesn’t own a mirror. It turns out that her husband’s counseling clinic has received thousands of dollars in state and federal grants. Oh, she dodges, those tax dollars didn’t come to us. Seriously? Yes, she explains, the money went to train our clinic’s employees—as though that’s not a subsidy for their business. Then there is the $260,000 in subsidies for her family’s farm. Oh, she dissembled, that went to my father-in-law, adding that, “I have never gotten a penny from the farm.” Seriously? But wait, she’s listed as a partner in the farm, and her financial disclosure forms report that, in fact, she has received $105,000 in income from it.

Bachmann says she wants to take government back—and, in all seriousness, it looks like she’s already clawing back her piece of it.

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They’re back. Citigroup, Coca-Cola, IBM, Merck and dozens of other major U.S. corporations are back in Washington, D.C.—like hogs at the trough—demanding to be fed another tax boondoggle.

This is not the first pig-out for these oinkers. In 2005, having stashed huge profits in foreign countries and tax havens, the multinational giants came to Washington offering Congress a heck of a deal: We’ll bring this money back to the U.S. and invest it here, creating beaucoup jobs, IF you give us a sweetheart tax rate on our profits of only about 5 percent, rather than the usual 35 percent rate.

The Bushites and GOP Congress enthusiastically took the bait. Sure enough, $312 billion came home. But instead of investing it in job creation, top executives and big shareholders simply put it in their pockets. Sixty percent of the boondoggle was gobbled up by only 15 of America’s biggest multinationals—many of which actually shut down American plants, fired thousands of workers, and moved more of their production abroad. Merck, for example brought nearly $16 billion home in October 2005, then announced a restructuring plan the next month to close U.S. plants and cut some 3,500 jobs. You could almost hear the executives chortle and say, “Thanks, suckers.”

Well, look out, for a corporate lobbying front is working with Republican House leaders to sucker us again. The group includes such superrich computer giants as Apple, Dell, Google and Intel, pushing for what they call a “repatriation holiday.” With a big stage wink, they promise to create jobs in exchange for that same, dandy, five-percent tax deal.

What gross hoggishness! State and national budgets are being slashed—and these fat greedheads are trying to scam America with a tax holiday for themselves. To fight their greed, go to www.usuncut.org.