We’ve seen this movie before. A company goes before a local or state government and promises jobs and an economic boost, but they need just one little thing first—tax breaks! But after pocketing taxpayers’ money, guess what? No jobs, just broken promises. (See T-Mobile.)

This week in Fort Wayne, Ind., the Northeast Indiana Central Labor Council had enough.

Next time you write your tax check to the Internal Revenue Service, imagine which multibillion-dollar corporation may get some of your hard-earned pay.

How about drugmaker Abbott Laboratories, which in 2011 claimed a $586 million tax refund for its 64 subsidiaries operating in 16 countries considered tax havens?

Or maybe Chesapeake Energy, a company that last year made $2.8 billion in pre-tax U.S. profits—but whose effective tax rate over the course of its 23-year history has averaged only about 1 percent?

We’ve been talking a lot lately about the current financial state of play in electoral politics. Despite the mega-finances poured into the current election cycle, working families have more power than they think—power at the polls.

It’s not just the presidential race that’s being flooded with money. Every political race—from your local sheriff to state and local judges to your state governors and legislators—is receiving more donations from an ever greedier financial elite.

Last week, we told you about how mega-donors are drowning out the voices of everyday folks in the presidential campaign. A small handful of people with the deepest of pockets have been shelling out more cash on this election than most of us will even see in our lifetime.

Via The Fix, we see that the Sunlight Foundation has a revealing, shocking analysis. As The Fix summarized, “One-hundredth of one percent of the American public is responsible for one-quarter of all the cash given to political campaigns.”

Captain America wouldn’t take kindly to someone raking in U.S. taxpayers’ dollars and then turning around and shipping American jobs overseas. Neither does the American Federation of Musicians of the United States and Canada (AFM). But that’s exactly what Marvel Entertainment did with the musical score for its blockbuster, "The Avengers," and that’s why AFM members today will picket the Wilmington, N.C., location where Marvel (a Walt Disney Co. subsidiary) is shooting "Iron Man 3."

Some folks have been trying to make political hay with the easy availability of union financial information. As noted in an earlier post, however, The Wall Street Journal’s methodology in “discovering” the levels of labor union spending was fatally flawed and painted a false (and politically advantageous) picture.

And now Steven Law, the president of American Crossroads, a Republican super PAC, is using ridiculous fictions to try to defend the activities of the Karl Rove-backed group, claiming that the hundreds of millions of dollars that American Crossroads will spend on the election will somehow be dwarfed by what unions will spend.  

“There is simply a better payoff by courting seven-figure donors,” said Matt Schlapp, a former White House political director for George W. Bush, in a Politico story Tuesday.

The story, “Election 2012: The Myth of the Small Donor,” details the meteoric rise of the mega-donor. Multimillion-dollar donations from people like Sheldon Adelson, Frank VanderSloot and the Koch brothers are “quickly diminishing one of the few avenues—outside of voting—for average folks to shape elections, help determine candidates’ viability and affect the course of the country.”

The “Hyatt Hurts” campaign continues this week, with support from the International Union of Food, Agricultural, Hotel, Restaurant, Catering, Tobacco and Allied Workers' Associations (IUF) and virtually every union representing hotel workers worldwide. Additionally, nearly 5,000 individuals and organizations have pledged to honor boycotts.

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.

Mitt Romney tries to walk the walk of a friend of working people but he certainly doesn’t talk the talk: whether he is attacking the American auto industry or insulting the British workers organizing the Olympics, Romney remains an out-of-touch voice of, by and for the richest 1%.