but only if that cheater is a multi-national
corporation.
Successive Western governments (except Canada)
had slowly done away with any and all regulations
regarding business behaviour. When that wasn't
good enough, they just didn't enforce their own laws.
To wit: how many bankers from 2008 have gone to jail?
I rest my case.
Now businesses are using their best Cheshire cat
smiles to tell us that we don't need to police their
behaviour. we don't need badges, or police,
is what they say.
But, we do need badges to get control
over cheating corporations (cuz our
countries are going broke- DUH!)
and companies (and crooked countries)
will be saying we don't need badges,
cuz there's no cheating going on
Being that we are the rest of the planet,
we of the 99.9%, are suffering with our good future
speeding off into the sunset.
We now discover
that the European Commission and the OECD
have finally started to smell some of the millions of
tax rats in their, and our, vicinity.
Nice gatto.
you wan some leche?
unfortunately, we're dealing with big corps who
have thousands of lawyers and accountants, so they
function like Speedy Gonzalez.
They still need to be convinced that corporation
exist solely to hoover up money, so that cheating the
tax man and workers is all part of their game.
These big, uncontrollable institutions (e.g OECD)
could be, and usually are as crooked as the
corporations (e.g. banks) that seem to fund their
existence.
That incriminating evidence having been stated,
it's nice to see that, thanks to the Tax Justice
Network, and some brave whistleblowers who
have changed the course of history (by making it
very hard for governments to continue to ignore
corporate crime) some of this bullshit is at least
being labelled as "tax bullshit."
If you go to a pliable government like:
Jersey (as in the UK island)
Luxembourgh
Switzerland
Ireland
you can strike a deal with that government
for you specifically to benefit from a bespoke
arrangement that suits your business. That is
not to say that the Double Irish tax scam
which is a return ticket junket for your money to:
Ireland
Switzerland
Ireland
that helps your profits shed some "weight" so thatyou profits look slimmer than they are, is one of
those bespoke deals. The Double Irish is an
off-the-shelf tax scam.
No, these individual deals, done in secret until a
fellow named Antoine Deltour
who worked at Price Waterhouse Coopers
of Luxembourg
decided to make himself famous by
telling all of us what PWC was "doing"
as in breaking tax laws.
According to the TJN
the Euro Commission has decided that
these Comfort Letters are:
"unlawful state aid"
"harmful tax practice"
"against EU competition rules"
"undermines competition"
"a subsidy"
The TJN themselves described them as
distorting competition especially since
they're not available to smaller companies
that cannot settle such secret deals. That
also makes it detrimental to other EU states
that will lose tax money because of this
loophole.
What freaks me out is that if all companies
could cheat everybody's governments, equally,
the EU would be fine with that. It doesn't matter
that companies are bending the laws of
physics by saying "I'm not here for tax
purposes," that destroys social democratic
benefits that we expect like education
and healthcare and infrastructure.
The OECD also did some dangerous
truth-telling, but they've been lobbied
to death. The created the BEPS rule.
(Base Erosion and Profit Sharing). This
rule means that big companies need to report
their activity so that countries can share this
and tax companies MORE (lobbyists have pushed
this to include only HUGE corporations).
Even as a kid, I eventually saw behind the OECD's
nice graphs to see that they were a big-boy
club, promoting big cheating. Not so, apparently.
But they're not omnipotent. They cannot make
laws, but by promoting truth and labelling cheating,
they are finally joining the 99.9% in saying
"if workers get screwed, companies should not
screw countries as well," which is not quite a Utopian
argument.
There is no single country on their side
so they cannot start to squeeze tax
cheating. The problem according to
the TJN is that the OECD supports an
arms-length role of taxation. TJN thinks
that the OECD should push for a
Single-entity taxation that would not
allow Starbucks UK to buy coffee from
Starbucks Swisse in order save on UK
corp tax.
So, the companies would not be able to
hide itself in 200 pieces. This will nail
them eventually. If it's employed.
Companies will try to ply new tricks to
fool any such system. So, OECD has
basically done nothing other than warn
corporations where some countries might
go, law-wise.
Even countries have taken this BEPS and
made it into a pylon, to be worked around.
So, the UK has its so-called Google Tax
designed to make Google happy.
Not good enough for the "21st century",
according to the TJN.
It is weird that corporations are not just
acting like fascists and totally ignoring the
OECD altogether. We are making progress.
I still think , though, that polite society:
workers
savers
democratic voters
the environment
communities
are all being treated like Comfort Women.
Slaves to be Screwed at will
