The AFL-CIO has long called for an end to tax subsidies for companies that ship jobs overseas. Now, in a new report, Citizens for Tax Justice shows just how much money these loopholes are costing us. The new report finds that U.S. multinational corporations are engaging in a massive amount of tax avoidance, particularly through tax havens in small countries like Bermuda. The corporations report that they "earned" large portions of their profits in tiny, low-tax countries in order to lower their tax rates, despite not having much, if any, actual activity or profit in those countries. Bermuda, for instance, is home to reported profits by American companies that are 1,000% of the country's actual GDP.

Take a look at that down-trodden family at the left. Maybe, they’re lining up for shelter after a natural disaster, or waiting for the food bank doors to open or at a donation center to gather up winter coats for the kids. Damn, they look so sad.

But no, none of the above is true. They live in “Wall Street Journal World.” It’s a place where, according to a recent Journal story on the impact of the new federal tax rates, most Americans—those of us who make less than $180,000 a year and pay taxes—"don’t exist" (we're not mentioned at all).   

Calling something a “bipartisan reform” is quickly becoming Washington-speak for “cutting your health care and retirement benefits.”

In this next phase of the fiscal showdown, Republicans are continuing to threaten to tank the economy, starting with demands they want in exchange for more tax giveaways for the wealthiest 2%.

Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-Ohio) and Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) seemingly have rallied enough of their House allies to push the battle over causing a U.S. government default down the road, with a temporary three-month extension of the government's borrowing authority (or "debt ceiling"). But House Republicans have not changed their ransom demands. They've simply chosen a different hostage. For now.

A recent poll confirms what a growing number of politicians, community leaders and mainstream news media already suspected: Most Latinos, like most other Americans in battleground states, support a plan to reduce the deficit that includes more revenue from tax increases for the wealthiest people.

When Mitt Romney dismissed 47 percent of the population as shiftless riff-raff who pay no income taxes and live off government largess, the Republican presidential nominee “spit in the face of everyday people who know what it means to work incredibly hard and still sometimes fail to get by,” says AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka.

Last week, we discussed that the Republican Party platform is a road map to dismantle workers’ rights. Steven Greenhouse of The New York Times says the Republican platform “calls for numerous steps that could significantly weaken America’s labor unions” and, for the first time in years, doesn’t even acknowledge the right to form unions.

The New York Times reports, when doing a side-by-side comparison of the platforms, the two visions are “poles apart in their view of the nation.”

Let’s take a look at some of the major differences:

The U.S. public sees a danger in the nation’s growing income inequality and says the rich don’t pay their fair share of taxes (click on chart to enlarge), according to a new Pew Research Center survey released yesterday.

Nearly six in 10, or 58 percent, say the rich don't pay enough in taxes, while 26 percent believe the rich pay their fair share and 8 percent say they pay too much.

What do you think Mitt Romney is hiding by not releasing his tax returns prior to 2010?

The United Steelworkers (USW) union wants to know. Go the USW’s new website, www.WhatsMittsSecret.org, and submit your response.

Here are some samples from the site:

“Mitt’s hiding that he claimed Paul Ryan as a dependent.”

In refusing to turn over more than two years of his tax returns, Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney brags that he paid all his taxes but "not a penny more." Meaning no matter what he paid, he coughed up a pretty minimal amount, however you slice it. Not only can Romney get away with legally paying very little in taxes, but his low tax rate is within an already low national tax rate (click to enlarge chart).