Edwardsville Intelligencer - Durbin Speaks to MSCC Crowd

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By Steve Horrell

On Friday morning, the Main Street Community Center played host to a U.S. Senator.

It was a lively question-and-answer session that began at 11:15 a.m. and ended promptly at noon.

After brief introductory remarks by Edwardsville Township Trustee Kenny Krumeich ("It's a great privilege to introduce my good friend of two decades, the Assistant Majority Leader of the United States, Richard J. Durbin . . . "), the senator assured a couple of dozen seniors who showed up that his talk wouldn't be excessively long winded.

"They told me to talk as long as I want but to stop when bingo time starts," Durbin said.

The questions covered a range of topics.

One was posed by Sylvia Frank. She praised Durbin for pressuring Walgreen Co. into reconsidering moving its headquarters to Switzerland to lower its U.S. tax bill. That drew cheers from the audience.

"I think that's really important and I wonder what else can be done?" Frank asked. "Some of these companies use our infrastructure, our roads, they use the post offices to deliver their ads. Our police and military protects them and allows them to do business, and then they pull out and go somewhere else so they don't have to pay taxes here."

Durbin called Walgreen "a great company, a home-grown company" with 600 stores in Illinois and 8,000 nation-wide.

Walgreen CEO Greg Wasson, he said, called several weeks ago to say they were getting ready to move their headquarters overseas.

"I said, "What are you thinking? You're like America's pharmacy. You make your money off of people who are loyal to you. How could you ever explain that Walgreens is going to give up on Americans?"

Wasson, Durbin said, responded that he had been urged by "people on Wall Street" who told him it was absolutely important that they cut their corporate income tax as a way of increasing the company's stock price.

"I said, "I think it's a short term strategy. I think long term people are not going to like it. They're going to remember it,'" Durbin said. "And he called me back two weeks ago and said they changed had their mind, they were staying."

Durbin has been one of the more outspoken critics of inversion and he has come under fire from people calling it insufficiently pro business, especially his Republican opponent in the November election.

"The Walgreen's saga symbolizes Dick Durbin's 32-year career in Washington," Jim Oberweis wrote in a news release. "His bullying of Walgreen was a political stunt designed to help only one person: Dick Durbin. "It didn't create any jobs. It didn't reform our job-killing tax code. . . "

But on Friday Durbin pointed to a poll taken recently that found that 80 percent of Illinois residents had heard of the Walgreen situation.

Taking a stand was necessary since many more pharmaceutical companies have been purchasing European rivals as a way to save millions a year in taxes.

A few weeks ago, Durbin sent a letter to Chicago-based AbbVie, opposing its purchase of an Ireland-based company. The company made millions by developing a drug for rheumatoid arthritis. "You you say to yourself, how would a pharmaceutical company develop a blockbuster drug?" Durbin asked. "Well, the first thing they do is go to the National Institutes of Health for the research. Then they would take their drug to the Food and Drug Administration -- taxpayer supported -- which would decide if the drug is safe and effective. Then they would take the patent for the drug to the U.S. Patent Office -- supported by American taxpayers -- then they would sell it and make a lot of money. And now what they're saying is that "We want to continue to do that. We just don't want to pay taxes to support those agencies.' And I think that's horrible."

Durbin said he has proposed legislation that would prevent companies using inversion from bidding on federal contracts. "You don't want to pay in America then why in the world would you dirty your hands with federal contracts?" Durbin said.

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