Wild-Eyed Commies Jon Stewart And Stephen Colbert Being Un-American Again

Here's a rare two-fer: Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert both did segments Wednesday on the phenomenon of corporate "inversion" to escape U.S. taxes -- the scheme whereby a U.S. company buys a smaller foreign company, then re-invents itself on paper as if its U.S. operations were merely a subsidiary of that foreign company. As Great American Patriot Allen West points out, it's corporations' patriotic duty to make as much money as they can while avoiding taxes, and to try to stop it would be socialism, and maybe a little perverted. 

Stewart notes that "inversion" sounds a little like gender reassignment -- "it's a liberating procedure for companies that have been raised American, but know in their hearts they're really Irish." Stewart brings us one of his trademark info-cational segments, a little comedy teach-in that informs viewers of a problem they'd never heard of, while along the way pointing out that these poor over-taxed companies have also benefited from huge tax incentives to locate in the U.S. in the first place. Hey, they're makers, so they're allowed to be takers.

</p><p>Colbert, on the other hand, goes with a bit less detail on the corporate detail side of things, and goes for the plain ol' silly. Noting that American banana mogul Chiquita has declared itself to be a subsidiary of Fyffes, a "much smaller fruit distributor from well-known banana-producer Ireland," Colbert explains that this just makes sense: "That’s why bananas start out green: they are leprechaun penises.” </p><p>Both segments have fun with Fox News, noting that their attitude toward inversions is that if it's legal, corporations are obliged to do it, which is why Stephen Colbert is going to Japan on his next vacation to hunt dolphins. </p><p><iframe frameborder="0" height="311" src="http://media.mtvnservices.com/embed/mgid:arc:video:colbertnation.com:3581e92d-b793-4f0e-ae3c-29c2209bf53a" width="555"/> </p><p>Finally, Colbert talks with <em>Fortune </em>editor Allan Sloan, author of a cover editorial decrying inversion as <a href="http://fortune.com/2014/07/07/taxes-offshore-dodge/" target="_blank">"Positively un-American."</a> So count <em>Fortune</em> among the socialists, we guess. </p><p><iframe frameborder="0" height="311" src="http://media.mtvnservices.com/embed/mgid:arc:video:colbertnation.com:feba9f98-3195-4d43-9a1b-1fb767535412" width="555"/></p>