Multi-national corporations are begging for U.S. tax breaks in the name of job creation, but refusing to reveal how many of those jobs are created overseas, Jia Lynn Yang reports for the Washington Post:

Some of the country’s best-known multinationals closely guard a number they don’t want anyone to know: the breakdown between their jobs here and abroad.

So secretive are these companies that they hand the figure over to government statisticians on the condition that officials will release only an aggregate number. The latest data show that multinationals cut 2.9 million jobs in the United States and added 2.4 million overseas between 2000 and 2009.

Some of the same companies that do not report their jobs breakdown, including Apple and Pfizer, are pushing lawmakers to cut their tax bills in the name of job creation in the United States.

But experts say that without details on which companies are contributing to job growth and which are not, policymakers risk flying blind as they try to jump-start the hiring of American workers.

All U.S. multinationals are required to report their overseas hiring data to the Commerce Department, but the government promises not to disclose these figures to the general public.

Asked by the Post why the government agrees to keep this information secret, a researcher at the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis gave the official equivalent of a shoulder shrug: “I don’t think it’s a question of companies feeling like they’re hiding dirty laundry by not giving this information out,” Ray Mataloni said. “I don’t think they really have anything to hide, but I don’t really know the logic of why that’s something they don’t just put in their annual report.”

Others see the government as complicit in concealing politically volatile facts about job creation, or lack thereof.

“Outsourcing has become a lightning rod, and the media coverage they’re likely to get is unfavorable,” Scott N. Paul, the executive director of the Alliance for American Manufacturing, told the Post.

The federal government is spending taxpayer dollars to keep track of outsourcing statistics from major multinational corporations and promising to keep that information secret, even though it bears on critical public policy decisions.

For example, Apple and Pfizer, two companies that stopped disclosing their overseas job numbers, are part of a corporate lobbying coalition clamoring for a massive temporary tax cut on profits earned overseas but repatriated to the United States. These gains would ordinarily be taxed at 35%, but if the lobbyists get their way, there would be a 1-year window to bring home the money at a tax rate of 5.25%.

Not to be outdone, Republican presidential hopeful Gov. Rick Perry suggested at a campaign event in New Hampshire last week that corporations should be allowed to bring home the fruits of offshoring at an even lower rate:

And here’s another issue from my perspective. Corporate profits that are offshore, that we tax at 35 percent. We know for a fact that money’s not coming back. They’re going to leave that offshore. So why not look at, and talk about, how you repatriate those dollars and have those dollars focused on job creation, but allow them to come back in at a substantially lower rate than 35 percent. Say, something like, if it’s clearly going for job creation, like zero, to get this economy working again.

The corporate lobbying coalition claims that what looks like a blatant giveaway to multinationals actually serves the greater good because the companies will use the money to create jobs. Of course, there’s no guarantee that companies will spend their tax windfall on hiring. In all likelihood, they won’t. Multinationals got a similar tax holiday in 2004, but subsequent analysis showed that very little of the money went to job creation, most of it went to pay higher returns to shareholders. Many firms that cashed in in 2004 went on to lay off thousands of workers. Pfizer, for example, repatriated $37 billion in 2004 and laid off 10,000 employees in 2005-2006.

If we can’t trust corporations to be honest about outsourcing statistics, we shouldn’t trust them with a massive tax giveaway predicated on their unverifiable promise to create jobs at home.

 [Photo credit: Dan Brady, Creative Commons.]

Historian Rick Perlstein debunks a central myth of American politics; namely, that a vigorous defense of our social safety net is too “divisive” to be politically palatable.

Perlstein argues that U.S. presidential elections are usually decided on one of two basic sets of issues: culture war anxiety or middle class economic insecurity. Historically, Republicans are more likely to win culture war slugfests and Democrats are more likely to win elections where economic issues are front-and-center, provided they define themselves as protectors of the middle class against the vaguaries of the market and the apathy of Republicans.

President Obama is reportedly reading Perlstein’s book “Nixonland.” Perlstein offers the president a cautionary fable. George McGovern lost in 49 states because he assumed that the middle class was prosperous enough to take care of itself and that labor unions were no longer relevant. 

Here’s what LBJ knew that ­McGovern didn’t: There are few or no historical instances in which saying clearly what you are for and what you are against makes Americans less divided. But there is plenty of evidence that attacking the wealthy has not made them more divided. After all, the man who said of his own day’s plutocrats, “I welcome their hatred,” also assembled the most enduring political coalition in U.S. history.

The Republicans will call it “class warfare.” Let them. Done right, economic populism cools the political climate. Just knowing that the people in power are willing to lie down on the tracks for them can make the middle much less frantic. Which makes America a better place. And incidentally makes Democrats win. [TIME]

This is Perlstein’s first contribution to TIME and I hope it will be the first of many.

[Photo credit: “ILGWU workers meet Lyndon B. Johnson,” Kheel Center, Cornell University, Creative Commons.]

Last week, the Wall Street Journal reported a shocking statistic about scientific research. The number of published studies is up 44% since 2001, but the rate of retractions increased fifteen-fold during the same period.

Reporter Gautam Naik writes:

Just 22 retraction notices appeared in 2001, but 139 in 2006 and 339 last year. Through seven months of this year, there have been 210, according to Thomson Reuters Web of Science, an index of 11,600 peer-reviewed journals world-wide.

In a sign of the times, a blog called “Retraction Watch” has popped up to monitor the flow.

Science is based on trust, and most researchers accept findings published in peer-reviewed journals. The studies spur others to embark on related avenues of research, so if one paper is later found to be tainted, an entire edifice of work comes into doubt. Millions of dollars’ worth of private and government funding may go to waste, and, in the case of medical science, patients can be put at risk.

A seemingly impressive study can influence how doctors treat their patients, where investors put their money, and what scientists decide to study next. Naik shows how a shoddy or fradulent study can have consequences that reverberate far beyond the ivory tower.

Democratic hopes of retaking the Wisconsin State Senate were dashed in Tuesday’s recall election. The Democrats, backed by organized labor, successfully recalled two Republican senators but failed to unseat four others. In order to retake the Senate, Democrats would have had to win three recalls yesterday and save two Democratic senators from recall next week.

Historically speaking, two recalls in one day is unprecedented. Only 13 U.S. state legislators have ever been recalled and voters have never recalled more than two representatives in a single year. On Tuesday, Wisconsin voters recalled as many legislators in one day as they’d recalled in last 80 years.

Most recall races are strictly local affairs, but the recall fight in Wisconsin was a counterattack against a state-level agenda, an agenda that other governors and state legislators are trying to replicate across the country.

Scott Walker did not campaign on a promise to eliminate collective bargaining for public sector workers, but that’s what he did. Republicans control both the State Assembly and the State Senate, so, once elected, Walker had broad power to enact his previously unspoken agenda.

Yesterday’s attempt to recall Walker’s allies en masse was the latest in a series of bold and creative assaults on the Walker agenda. In February, the Democratic state senators fled the state to stop Walker from passing his anti-collective bargaining bill by denying a quorum in the Senate.

While the senators were in exile in Illinois, tens of thousands of anti-Walker, pro-union protesters converged on the state capital. One day in early March, 150,000 braved freezing temperatures to hold one of the largest pro-labor demonstrations in American history. Greg Sargent of the Washington Post won a Sidney Award for his coverage of these protests.

After a three-week standoff, Walker and his allies used procedural tricks to pass the bill without the absent senators, but the fight continued in the courts. Walker’s opponents scored some early victories in the lower court and the implementation of the law was delayed. Hoping to tip the balance of power on the State Supreme Court, which would ultimately hear challenges to Walker’s law, progressives backed challenger JoAnn Kloppenburg against incumbent David Prosser. Kloppenburg lost. In June, the deeply divided court reinstated Walker’s law.

Sargent summed up yesterday’s results as follows:

Yesterday unions and Democrats fell just short of victory in Wisconsin, winning two of six races to recall GOP state senators, in a battle that had unexpectedly emerged as ground zero in a national class war, partly over the fate of organized labor. There’s no way to sugar-coat it: Unions and Dems failed in their objective as they defined it, which was to take back the state senate, put the brakes on Scott Walker’s agenda, and let the nation know that elected officials daring to roll back public employee bargaining rights would face dire electoral consequences.

But nonetheless, what they failed to accomplish does not diminish what they did successfully accomplish. The fact that all these recall elections happened at all was itself a genuine achievement.

The struggle in Wisconsin is often portrayed as a clash of well-matched opponents–Democrats vs. Republicans or Big Labor vs. Big Business. In fact, the Democrats and their allies have been waging an irregular war against a much more powerful opponent. The Republicans control every branch of state government.

In each skirmish, the Democrats and their allies have faced long odds and achieved far more than anyone in the political establishment would have predicted. The anti-Walker forces have proven implacable, even in defeat. Their resiliance proves that public sector workers are not the easy targets that Republicans assumed they would be.

Insurgents can’t expect to rout their enemy in any single decisive battle. If they win, they win by wearing down their opponents over time. 

[Photo credit: Sue Peacock, Creative Commons. Madison, WI, March, 2011.]