Our guest blogger is Erica Sagrans, a writer who has spent the last six weeks in the UK. You can follow her on Twitter at @EricaS.

Following Saturday’s huge protests against government spending cuts in London, the mainstream media has latched on to a story of “anarchist rioters,” rather than place the emphasis on the large majority of overwhelmingly peaceful protesters. The demonstration attracted a diverse crowd of teachers, nurses, firefighters, parents with children, and students who marched, blew whistles, and gathered for speeches in London’s Hyde Park. But to read the next day’s papers, those in the streets were masked thugs hell-bent on violence.

While the US and international media largely ignored the demonstration, England’s right-wing newspapers had a field day. The Telegraph reported that “police fought mobs of masked thugs who pelted officers with ammonia and fireworks loaded with coins.” “RITZKRIEG,” screamed the front of the Daily Mail, with a cover article on how “extremists brought violent chaos to Central London,” the author sympathizing with Ritz Hotel visitors whose tea reservations were canceled when the hotel restaurant briefly closed during the protests.

Many British papers ran similar photos of police covered in paint, protesters smashing windows and wielding sticks, and London set ablaze with bonfires. Even the Observer reported that the “day was marred by a violent minority of anarchists who went on the rampage, smashing windows and attacking property around Oxford Street.”

While there were windows smashed and paint thrown — the result of an anarchist black bloc or those who just wanted in on the action — the largest occupation, led by UK Uncut, was carried out in the group’s typical peaceful and approachable fashion. Hundreds associated with the push took over high-end department store Fortnum and Mason, citing their owners’ evasion of £10 million pounds in taxes each year.

New Statesman columnist Laurie Penny and others made it clear the group was careful not to damage the store: “The posh sweets, however, remain untouched, as do all the other luxury goodies in the store, as protesters share prepacked crisps and squash (juice) and decide that it’d be rude to smoke indoors,” writes Penny. Watch the video of protesters in Fortnum and Mason here (UK Uncut occupation begins around 1:10):

Meanwhile, Britain’s mainstream news ran only passing coverage of police violence toward protesters in Trafalgar Square on Saturday evening after the demonstration, where some were blocked from leaving and hit with batons.

For more information, read today’s Progress Report, “London Calling.”

Gov. Pat Quinn (D-IL), unlike so many other governors across the country, decided to responsibly deal with his state’s budget gap by raising revenue to offset some of the impact of severe budget cuts. Amongst the tax increases Quinn and the Illinois legislature approved was an increase in the state corporate income tax rate from 4.8 percent to 7 percent.

In response to the tax change, the multinational corporation Caterpillar has threatened to move jobs out of Illinois. CEO Doug Oberhelman — who has hosted Republican fundraisers in his home that featured former First Lady Laura Bush — told Quinn in a letter that “the direction that this state is headed in is not favorable to business, and I’d like to work with you to change that.”

Sen. Mark Kirk (R-IL), rather than defending the choices made by the elected officials of his home state, then piled on, claiming that because of the tax increases, Illinois now has “the highest corporate taxes in the industrialized world“:

In comments before and within his address to a formal gathering of Tazewell County Republicans, however, U.S. Sen. Mark Kirk, R-Ill., blasted Gov. Patrick Quinn specifically for the increases.

Because of Quinn’s “grievous error,” Kirk said, Illinois now has “the highest corporate taxes in the industrialized world.”

Even with the increase, Illinois doesn’t have the highest corporate tax rate in the United States, much less the entire world. By increasing its corporate income tax rate to 7 percent (which is coupled with a 2.5 percent property tax), Illinois still has a lower rate than Iowa, Pennsylvania, the District of Columbia, and Minnesota, and has a rate roughly equal to that of Alaska.

But, more importantly, Illinois’ rate is only that high on paper. Much like the federal corporate income tax, Illinois’ corporate tax is riddled with loopholes and giveaways, which allow Caterpillar to drive its effective tax rate all the way down to just 1.4 percent.

Kirk has taken the side of corporations against the middle class before, but this is a particularly egregious case of going to bat for a corporation that’s holding people’s livelihoods hostage in order to preserve tax giveaways. During the 2010 campaign, Caterpillar gave Kirk $24,000 and the endorsement of its chairman, Jim Owens.

(HT: ThinkProgress reader Mitch)

Our guest blogger is Mike Elk, a freelance labor journalist and third generation union organizer based in Washington, D.C. You can follow him for more updates on Wisconsin on twitter at @MikeElk.

Last week, the New York Times reported that, despite making $14.2 billion in profits, General Electric, the largest corporation in the United States, paid zero U.S. taxes in 2010 and actually received tax credits of $3.2 billion dollars. The article noted that GE’s tax avoidance team is comprised of “former officials not just from the Treasury, but also from the I.R.S. and virtually all the tax-writing committees in Congress.”

After not paying any taxes and making huge profits, ThinkProgress has learned that General Electric is expected to ask its nearly 15,000 unionized employees in the United States to make major concessions.

This year, 14 unions representing more than 15,000 workers will negotiate a new master contract with General Electric. Among the major concessions GE has signaled that it will ask of union workers is the elimination of a defined contribution benefit pension for new employees, a move the company has already implemented for its non-union salaried employees. Likewise, GE is signaling to the union that it will ask for the elimination of current health insurance plans in favor of lower quality health saving accounts, a move the company has already implemented for non-union salaried employees as well.

In addition, General Electric may ask some workers for a wage freeze. Since the recession began in 2007, GE threatened to close plants in Schenectady, NY and Louisville, KY unless workers took wage concessions and adopted two-tier wage structure. In an interview with ThinkProgress, Mark Haller, a machinist at General Electric locomotive factory in Erie, PA, said:

The company I work for paid no federal taxes last year, but we all get these mass emails from GE asking us to call our Congressman to fund the useless, alternative GE engine for the F-35. As taxpayers, we are subsidizing the profits of this company to a huge extent and now after making the company even more profitable, they are asking us to make concessions on pensions, benefits, and perhaps even wages. You wonder why there is a jobs crisis in this country with a guy like G.E. CEO Jeff Immelt heading the President’s Jobs Commission.

In 2003, union workers at 16 different General Electric factories engaged in a strike when G.E. proposed to cut their health care. Workers are mobilizing again this year. They have planned a rally that is expected to attract 10,000 workers from all over the country at the General Electric Locomotive Factory in Erie, PA on June 4th.

While many Americans are still feeling the pain of the Great Recession in the form of unacceptably high unemployment and mounting foreclosures, corporate America has come roaring back in 2010. According to results released Friday by the Bureau of Economic Analysis, “corporate profits grew 36.8 percent in 2010, the biggest gain since 1950.”

But these numbers hide the fact that not all industries are doing well. In fact, the recent growth in corporate profits was driven almost entirely by the financial industry:

Domestic profits of financial corporations increased $57.7 billion in the fourth quarter, compared with an increase of $34.6 billion in the third. Domestic profits of nonfinancial corporations decreased $10.1 billion in the fourth quarter, in contrast to an increase of $0.3 billion in the third. In the fourth quarter, real gross value added of nonfinancial corporations increased, and profits per unit of real gross value added decreased.

The financial industry now accounts for about 30 percent of corporate operating profits. As the Wall Street Journal’s Kathleen Madigan wrote, “that’s an amazing share given that the sector accounts for less than 10% of the value added in the economy.” Before the Great Recession, the financial industry accounted for about 23 percent of corporate profits.

At the same time that it’s reaping an ever-larger share of corporate profits, the financial industry is lobbying hard against new rules in Congress that would restrict some of its activities. For instance, the banks are trying to delay (and ultimately repeal) a new rule limiting how much they can charge merchants for the use of debit cards. They have all but ended the push the enact a bank tax on the largest financial institutions, and they are fighting tooth and nail against a settlement regarding the foreclosure fraud scandal that would involve them modifying $20 billion worth of mortgages.

Several of these banks have also paid nothing in corporate income taxes in recent years, taking advantage of the byzantine corporate tax code to hide profits offshore. So, as Madigan noted, “given the latest profit numbers, it is hard for banks to cry poverty” regarding new regulations that are coming online or for having to pay homeowners to rectify past abuses.

All around the country, right-wing legislators are asking Main Street Americans to pay for budget deficits resulting mainly from a recession caused by Wall Street by attacking collective bargaining, and cutting necessary services and investments like college tuition aid and health care for the poor.

Yet at the same time, some of the country’s biggest corporations are getting away without being asked to pay anything at all. In 2009, mega corporations like Boeing and General Electric managed to avoid paying a penny in federal taxes — while also netting enormous benefits in tax benefits and subsidies.

Now, with many companies releasing their financial reports for 2010, it appears that Bank of America — the nation’s largest bank — has gone a second year in a row paying absolutely no federal corporate income taxes. In fact, not only did the company use its losses to avoid paying taxes last year, but it actually reported a tax benefit of almost a billion dollars:

After another money-losing year, Bank of America Corp. got the upper hand with Uncle Sam in 2010.

The Charlotte-based bank had no federal income tax expense for a second straight year and actually reported a tax “benefit” of nearly $1 billion. Also, the bank’s billions in accumulated losses could reduce its taxes in future years, a tax expert said.

“Bank of America takes its role as a corporate citizen very seriously, and pays taxes in accordance with all applicable laws and regulations,” bank spokesman Jerry Dubrowski said.

“If you go out and try to make money and you don’t do it, why should the government pay you for your losses?” asked Bob McIntyre of Citizens for Tax Justice when Bank of America used a similar provision in the tax code to dodge taxes in 2009. Additionally, in one state alone, Connecticut, Bank of America’s state income tax tax dodging cost the state a whopping $500 million.

Over the weekend, the UK-inspired movement US Uncut held demonstrations at Bank of America branches all over the country to protest the bank’s egregious tax dodging. In Washington, D.C., US Uncut protests shut down a major Bank of America branch in the Columbia Heights neighborhood. Watch it:

In a press release from last week, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) laid out ten corporate tax dodgers who aren’t paying their fair share and called for shared sacrifice. “We have a deficit problem. It has to be addressed,” said Sanders in a press release addressing tax fairness. “But it cannot be addressed on the backs of the sick, the elderly, the poor, young people, the most vulnerable in this country. The wealthiest people and the largest corporations in this country have got to contribute. We’ve got to talk about shared sacrifice.”

Our guest blogger is Will Straw, founder of Think Progress’ sister UK blog, LeftFootForward.org, and Associate Director for Strategic Development at the Institute for Public Policy Research.

The hundreds of thousands of teachers, nurses, firemen, students, families, environmentalists, and political activists who took to the streets of London on Saturday did so to express their support for an alternative to the failing economic policies of the Conservative-Liberal Democrat (“Con Dem”) Government.

Last year, Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne announced an £83 billion programme of public spending cuts – effectively speeding up the process of deficit reduction announced by the previous (Labour) Chancellor Alistair Darling.

Since then, the British economy has begun contracting again, unemployment has grown, and the credit ratings agencies have warned that slow growth could undermine Britain’s triple-A credit rating. To compound this, new research shows that rising inflation combined with losses to tax credits and universal entitlements mean that middle income families are set to lose 5 to 7 per cent of their disposable income next year.

But Osborne’s second Budget last week did nothing to moderate the pace of deficit reduction. Instead, he adopted the failed Reaganomics policies of the past including tax cuts for big business, cuts to employment protections, and — at odds with their claim to be the “greenest government ever” — a reduction in fuel duty. Despite dubbing his Budget a ‘Plan for Growth,’ the independent Office for Budget Responsibility judged that growth would be slower in 2011 and 2012 and that unemployment would be 200,000 higher than under previous estimates.

The cuts are rapidly losing public support with the polling agency YouGov finding that, “The proportion who feel it is good for the economy has fallen from 53% to 39% … Similarly those who feel it is being done fairly has fallen from 45% to 31%.” So what is the alternative? Labour’s shadow Chancellor, Ed Balls, writes for today’s Daily Mail:

There is a better way. We would be halving the deficit steadily over four years and putting jobs and growth first because getting the economy moving again and more people into work is the best way to get the deficit down.

Given the low cost of debt in the UK, key to this alternative is a properly funded National Investment Bank of the kind proposed by respected economists including Robert Skidelsky, Martin Wolf, and Gerald Holtham. And as well as slowing the pace of public spending cuts, the bankers that caused the crisis should make a greater contribution. The IMF has called for a trebling of the Government’s bank levy while an extension of the one-off bankers’ bonus tax would be a fair outcome.