Tuesday, February 26, 2008

MULTINATIONALS DON'T PAY TAXES NRC: "An increasing number of multinational companies in the Netherlands don't pay taxes at all or very little." We know that for some decades now, but the problem seems to be increasing. So we are fooled again. Most multinationals are not a boon to any national economy at all. If they make profits they disappear with them to other locations. AlterNet: "When drug companies dupe the IRS by shifting their profits to low-tax countries, the rest of us have to pay billions of dollars in unnecessary taxes to make up for the shortfall. The biggest tax scam on earth has a very innocent sounding name. It is called 'transfer prices'. That almost sounds boring. It is, however, anything but boring. Abuse of transfer prices is a key tool multinational corporations use to fool the U.S. and other jurisdictions to think that they have virtually no profit; hence, they shouldn't pay any taxes. Corporations involved in this scam are 'model corporate citizens', or so they would like us to believe. The truth is that they rob us all blind. The money we lose can be estimated in the tens of billions, or possibly hundreds of billions of dollars every year. We all end up paying higher taxes because rich corporations make sure they don't. For companies in certain businesses, such as pharmaceuticals, it is very easy to simply 'invent' the price a company charges their U.S.business for buying the company's product which they manufacture in another country. And if they charge enough, poof; all the profit vanishes from the US, or Canada, or any other regular jurisdiction and end up in a corporate tax-haven. And that means American and Canadian tax payers don't get their fair share." CommonDreams: "Global banana companies supplying the UK are using tax havens to avoid paying tax on their profits here and in developing countries, the Guardian has found. The investigation reveals that large corporations are creating elaborate structures to move profits through subsidiaries to offshore centres such as the Cayman Islands, Bermuda and the British Virgin Islands, to avoid handing money over to tax collectors in the countries where their goods are produced, and in those where they are consumed. Governments at both ends of the chain are increasingly being deprived of the ability to raise tax for development or services." 2:20:42 PM

BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU The internet speed here in the Netherlands is very slow today. It seems to be a national problem judging by the group discussions. I wouldn't be surprised if the Echelon servers are doing overtime and are having difficulties coping with the volume of traffic. CorCom: Echelon is the codename of a secret spying network set up by the United States and Britain. Its initial aim of spying on the military communications of the 'enemy' was soon broadened to the systematic tapping of all European phone, fax, internet and e-mail traffic. Echelon is said to have 55,000 employees and is using more than 120 satellites. Each tapping station is able to tap two million messages per hour. The Dutch AIVD (oops, there goes Echelon again - hi boys, busy today?) is working on a huge tapping station near Zoutkamp, which would make the Netherlands next to Britain the largest dish network. The British dishes are pointed towards Europe, which means they are tapping all European communications. The captured information will certainly be used in industrial espionage. As far as the US is concerned every nation (included Britain) is their enemy. One only hopes that Echelon will also be used to track the murderers of future American presidents, if they are not too busy spying on you and me. AlterNet: "With the selection of Barack Obama as the first black Democratic nominee for president seeming more possible by the day, racists and white supremacists are posting increasingly ugly and even threatening remarks on the Internet. 'OBAMA WILL DIE, KKK FOREVER,' concludes a Feb. 15 post by 'Rodney' to a blog run by a person identified only as Strider333. Above that signoff, Rodney wrote: 'The KKK or someone WILL assassinate Obama! If we get a NIGGER President all you NIGGER's [sic] will think you've won and that the WHITE people will have to bow to you[.] FUCK THAT.'" 2:08:56 PM

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