This icon of American industry is a company full of good employees who make some good products (and is the parent company of a huge media outlet), but GE is also a large American corporation that pays virtually no corporate income taxes despite earning worldwide profits of $14.2 billion last year, $5.1 billion of it in the United States. In fact, they claimed a tax benefit of $3.2 billion, meaning they received more of our hard earned tax dollars than they contributed. How is that possible? It’s because not only do they shelter their money from taxes, but they also get many tax credits, loans, government grants, and other benefits from the federal government that our smaller businesses couldn’t even imagine being able to profit from.
NYT writer Anand Giridharadas actually offers her some praise for her position. The NYT column is behind a registration wall, so I'll also link an Examiner column about the NYT column.
The Examiner columnist, Anthony Martin, calls it like it is. 'Crony capitalism' isn't any kind of capitalism at all. We need to call it by its proper name:
True capitalism stands on its own. It does not need nor seek special favors from government. In fact, when capitalism crawls into bed with big government, what you have is 'Fascism' and not capitalism.
It may be difficult to see how it is fascism. We associate fascism with government oppression, but when the government picks the winners in the economy, it also picks the losers, just like Mussolini picked the winners and losers. If you aren't in the right political crowd, in the politically-picked 'winners,' you are relegated to be a 'loser' and are oppressed by 'crony capitalism,' by fascism.
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