A group called US Uncut has claimed responsibility for a fake GE press release that said the company would pay back its $3.2 billion federal tax refund out of a commitment to "social responsibility." GE has been under the gun since a March New York Times story revealed that the company, one of the nation's largest, employs an in-house team of accountants and lobbyists to avoid paying federal taxes. At least one major media outlet fell for the hoax — the Associated Press briefly ran it as a story before yanking it. (GE's stock, meanwhile, fell by 0.6 percent before righting itself when the truth came out Wednesday.) Did this stunt really achieve anything?
It was a glimpse of an ideal world: "This action showed another way the world could work," says US Uncut spokesperson Carl Gibson. People were able to believe, if only briefly, that the nation's "biggest corporate tax dodger had a change of heart and actually did the right thing." Maybe now more Americans will recognize that we need to "change the laws that allow corporate tax avoidance in the first place."
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