Back in 2008, Google seemed to have set the standard for tech corporation tax dodging, using complex accounting and subsidiaries in Ireland and Bermuda to drives its tax rate all the way down to 2.4 percent. But if all goes according to plan, Facebook will be able to use its initial public offering — via the stock options it gives its employees — to not only avoid paying corporate income tax for years, but to receive a $500 million refund from the federal government, as Citizens for Tax Justice explained:

Tax law says that if a corporation issues options for employees to buy the company’s stock in the future for its price when the option issued, then if the stock has gone up in value when employees exercise the options, the company gets to deduct the difference between what the employee bought it for and its market price.

When, as Facebook expects, the 187 million stock options are cashed in this year, Facebook will get $7.5 billion in tax deductions (which will reduce the company’s federal and state taxes by $3 billion). According to Facebook, these tax deductions should exceed the company’s U.S. taxable 2012 income and result in a net operating loss (NOL) that can then be carried back to the preceding two years to offset its past taxes, resulting in a refund of up to $500 million.

Facebook’s filing papers with the Securities and Exchange Commission confirm as much:

Option exercise activity would generate a corporate income tax deduction [that] exceeds our other U.S. taxable income [and] will result in a net operating loss (NOL) that can be carried back to the preceding two years to offset our taxable income for U.S. federal income tax purposes, as well as in some states, which would allow us to receive a refund of some of the corporate income taxes we paid in those years. Based on the assumptions above, we anticipate that this refund could be up to $500 million.

“Due to the stock option loophole, Facebook may not pay any corporate income taxes on its profits for a generation,” said Sen. Carl Levin (D-MI). “It isn’t right, and we can’t afford it.” The Treasury Department estimates that it loses about $2 billion per year due to companies using this stock option loophole to avoid taxes.

Payday lending companies are combining their money in order to form a corporate front group to fight for the right to charge interest rates of 445 percent and more in the state of Missouri.

Payday loan interest rates in the Show Me State average nearly 60 percentage points higher than the rest of the nation, 445 percent to 391 percent. Fed up with the disastrous effect that such predatory lending is having on poorer Missourians, a group of citizens, religious groups and civic organizations are gathering signatures for a proposed November ballot initiative that would restrict payday lending interest rates in the state to 36 percent.

Payday lending companies, ruffled by the prospect of being able to charge a mere 36 percent interest rate, have teamed up to fight the initiative. Two weeks ago, a new group – Stand Up Missouri – emerged, purporting to represent “consumers, businesses, civic groups, and faith-based organizations.” However, a look at their finance records reveals that the group is funded – to the tune of $216,000 – by just seven payday lending corporations, including Tower Loan, Western Shamrock Corporation, and Brundage Management Company. The front group’s CEO and chairman, Tom Hudgins, is the vice president of Western Shamrock Corporation.

In its first two weeks of existence, Stand Up Missouri has already taken an Orwellian approach to the term “payday lending” – they prefer the phrase “traditional installment loan” – and invoked the Civil Rights Era to defend why payday lenders ought to be allowed to gouge consumers. An ad on their homepage currently explains to viewers how payday lenders are just like Dr. King and Civil Rights Era marchers:

AD: You had poor people who followed Dr. King and walked with him hundreds of miles because they believed in civil rights that much. In this day and time, when can we say we’ve seen something like that where people are willing to leave their job to support something that they believe in? We have that statement, “actions speak louder than words,” and that’s why I’m here. That’s why it was important for me to take time off to be here because I believe wholeheartedly in the company that believes in me.”

Stand Up Missouri joins another pro-payday lending group in the state called Missourians for Equal Credit Opportunity, which has used a loophole in campaign finance law to hide whoever or whatever corporation(s) gave $600,000 to combat the initiative.

It’s not difficult to see why payday lenders are fighting the consumer effort so vociferously. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch details just how ubiquitous payday lending has become in Missouri: “In 2010, there were about 1,040 payday loan stores in Missouri, according to the Missouri Division of Finance. Missouri is second only to Tennessee among its neighbors in the number of licensed payday lenders. Some 2.43 million payday loans were made in Missouri in 2010.”

The proposed 36 percent interest rate cap is also not without precedent. Until the mid-1990s, Missouri law restricted lenders to a 28 percent ceiling.

General Electric spent more lobbying the government than it did in federal income taxes between 2008 and 2010.

Today, thousands of 99 Percenters will march on K Street in Washington, D.C. as a part of an action called “Take Back The Capitol,” taking aim at the lobbying firms that corporate interests use to influence the federal government.

A report released this month by Public Campaign demonstrates just how important it is for Americans to battle corporate special interests and reclaim our democracy. The group’s research finds that thirty big corporations actually spent more money lobbying the federal government between 2008 and 2010 than they spent in taxes. For example, General Electric — one of the top 10 most profitable companies in the world — got a net tax rebate of $4.7 billion during this period. Meanwhile, it spent $84 million lobbying the federal government.

Here’s the full list of the 30 corporations identified and what they paid in federal taxes as opposed to lobbying:

To follow today’s actions, check out Take Back The Capitol’s website, and find instant updates about the protest through the hashtag #99indc. ThinkProgress will be covering today’s events at our 99 Percent Movement special topics page.

American Airlines CEO Arpey decided to retire and skip the golden parachute.

This week, American Airlines, the world’s fourth largest airline, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. This is a step that former CEO Gerard Arpey, who just resigned, did not want to take.

For years, major airlines have “slashed wages and pensions after similarly declaring bankruptcy,” using the financial process to avoid obligations to their workers. For example, when United Airlines declared bankruptcy, its employees faced the “single largest pension default in U.S. history.” Some pilots at Aloha Airlines lost 90 percent of their retirement benefits after that business declared bankruptcy.

So instead of leading the company through bankruptcy, Arpey decided to retire after 30 years with the company, denying him any severance pay.

D. Michael Lindsay, the president of Gordon College, interviewed Arpey for a New York Times op-ed about his choice. Arpey told Lindsay that he wanted his company to honor its commitments to its workers:

When we discussed the prospect of bankruptcy at American he spoke with an almost defiant tone of the company’s commitment to its employees and holders of its stock and debt. “I believe it’s important to the character of the company and its ultimate long-term success to do your very best to honor those commitments,” he said. “It is not good thinking — either at the corporate level or at the personal level — to believe you can simply walk away from your circumstances.”

“This country would be so much better off if we had more people who had Gerard Arpey’s sense of responsibility and character as well as ability,” said David Boren, the president of the University of Oklahoma and a former governor and U.S. senator.

Arpey distinguishes himself from his predecessor, Donald Carty. Carty resigned “after it was disclosed that…executives’ pensions were protected in a separate trust, at a time when union members were being asked to approve deep concessions for their members.”

One of the most pernicious practices in which the nation’ biggest banks engaged during the lead up to the financial crisis was pushing minority borrowers into subprime loans, even when many of them qualified for prime loans. Wells Fargo had perhaps the most horrifying practices in this department, calling the subprime loans that they pushed in poor, black neighborhoods “ghetto loans.”

This rampant predatory lending helped inflate the housing bubble; a Center for American Progress investigation actually found huge racial disparities in lending at the big banks that wound up getting bailed out, with minority borrowers far more likely to receive high-priced loans.

One former banker for Chase — James Theckston — told the New York Times’ Nick Kristof that not only did his bank push minority borrowers into higher-priced loans, but senior executives then tried to cover up the racial disparity in their banks’ lending:

One memory particularly troubles Theckston. He says that some account executives earned a commission seven times higher from subprime loans, rather than prime mortgages. So they looked for less savvy borrowers — those with less education, without previous mortgage experience, or without fluent English — and nudged them toward subprime loans.

These less savvy borrowers were disproportionately blacks and Latinos, he said, and they ended up paying a higher rate so that they were more likely to lose their homes. Senior executives seemed aware of this racial mismatch, he recalled, and frantically tried to cover it up.

“The bigwigs of the corporations knew this, but they figured we’re going to make billions out of it, so who cares? The government is going to bail us out. And the problem loans will be out of here, maybe even overseas,” Theckston explained.

In 2006, Chase made high-price loans to 16.4 percent of white borrowers, while nearly half of black borrowers and more than one-third of Hispanic borrowers received high-price loans. These disparities help explain why, according to a new report from the Center on Responsible Lending, Latinos and blacks are twice as likely to have been impacted by the housing crisis as whites. In fact, “approximately one quarter of all Latino and African-American borrowers have lost their home to foreclosure or are seriously delinquent, compared to just under 12 percent for white borrowers.”