If you have an iPhone, make sure you take a minute to download the new free app, BizVizz. BizVizz people track taxes, government subsidies and political campaign donations of major corporations. Once you download the app, simply enter a company’s name or snap a picture of its logo and then the company information pops up. Future developments include creating an Android version of the app and expanding the catalog of corporate information. 

If the bad guys in the classic movie, “Treasure of the Sierra Madre,” had been corporate apologists or obnoxious Trump-like rich tycoons, the classic line about badges might read this way, “Government? We don’t need no stinkin’ government.”  

In a column on AlterNet Paul Buchheit dispels what he calls “the bull of Wall Street” and cites five good reasons why the super-rich and big business may need government more than the rest us.

We regularly hear variations on that theme from the wealthy in the form of the tired old saw “I made it on my own…didn’t need any government help.” Corporate CEO’s and lobbyists rail against rules and regulations that supposedly stifle entrepreneurship and eat profits.

Chris Garlock, communications director of the Metropolitan Washington [D.C.] Council, AFL-CIO, and managing editor of Union City, sends us this.

If The Wall Street Journal is complaining about it, "The Newsroom" must be doing something right for working people.

“For the second week in a row, Charles and David Koch were strafed by HBO’s show ‘The Newsroom,’ the one-hour drama about a fictional cable TV news show and its volatile anchorman,” huffed The Wall Street Journal yesterday in “HBO’s ‘Newsroom’ Takes Aim at Koch Brothers.”

Evidence continues to mount that a so-called tax holiday for corporations’ overseas profits is a bad idea.

On the eve of tomorrow’s unemployment report for April, we get this news from Fortune:

Profits of the 500 largest U.S. corporations soar by 81 percent ($318 billion), the third largest percentage gain in list history…Wal-Mart holds the number one spot for the second year in a row…Exxon Mobil leads profits with $30 billion, for the eighth year in row.

In this cross-post from Our Fiscal Security, Tamara Draut, vice president of Policy & Programs at Demos, gives us a quick list of the top 10 tax stats.