NYT’s Sorkin helps companies come across as victims

Jim Newell of Salon writes that New York Times business columnist Andrew Ross Sorkin is helping companies moving overseas to avoid U.S. taxes look like victims.

Newell writes, “Here we have an awful human being who just got finished cackling and slappin’ high fives with board members and shareholders about how they’ve slashed their tax bill. She loves that they’re reincorporating in the Netherlands. It is her favorite thing. But! Oops! May get some bad press! Not to worry, because Andrew Ross Sorkin will lend a sympathetic ear to her tale of Big Government and slap on this headline: ‘Reluctantly, Patriot Flees Homeland for Greener Tax Pastures.’ That may sound like Sorkin’s mocking her, but lines like this suggest he really might buy into this ‘reluctant’ business: ‘Ms. Bresch says she entered the deal reluctantly, and she genuinely seems to mean it.’

“There is a hilarious PR effort among corporate executives and their people in Washington to turn corporate tax reform into the most pressing populist cause of our time. That the very soul of America will dissipate if they continue to have to pay such burdensome rates. (Not that they all do, anyway. Let it be said that maybe Bresch isn’t a great CEO if she couldn’t even figure out another way to weasel out of paying fucking corporate taxes in this country.) This is a difficult hog to sell.

“Fortunately for them, they have Andrew Ross Sorkin out there to help them wage this life or death struggle. CEOs who relocate are the martyrs, refusing the government their productive services until these confiscatory rates are lowered.”

Read more here.