News Release Archive | corporations | Accuracy.Org

$21 Trillion the Wealthy are Hiding: The Shocking Facts — and the Great Opportunity

July 25, 2012

ABC News is reporting: “The super-rich are hiding at least $21 trillion in accounts outside their home countries, according to a report by an activist group called the Tax Justice Network. The wealth hidden in these tax shelters is the equivalent of the United States and Japanese economies combined, according to the report, ‘The Price of Offshore Revisited.’” PDF summary of report can be read here.

JAMES S. HENRY, jamesshelburnehenry at mac.com
Henry, lead researcher for the report and former chief economist at the international consultancy firm McKinsey & Co., said today: “First, this hidden offshore sector is large enough to make a significant difference to all of our conventional measures of inequality. Since most of missing financial wealth belongs to a tiny elite, the impact is staggering. For most countries, global financial inequality is not only much greater than we suspected, but it has been growing much faster.

“Second, the lost tax revenue implied by our estimates is huge. It is large enough to make a significant difference to the finances of many countries, especially developing countries that are now struggling to replace lost aid dollars and pay for climate change. Indeed, once we take these hidden offshore assets and the earnings they produce into account, many erstwhile ‘debtor countries’ are in fact revealed to be wealthy. But the problem is, their wealth is now offshore, in the hands of their own elites and their private bankers. Indeed, the developing world as a whole has been a significant CREDITOR of the developed world for more than a decade. That means this is really a tax justice problem, not simply a ‘debt’ problem.

“Third, it turns out that this offshore sector — which specializes in tax dodging — is basically designed and operated, not by shady no-name banks located in sultry islands, but by the world’s largest private banks, law firms, and accounting firms, headquartered in First World capitals like London, New York, and Geneva. Our detailed analysis of these banks shows that the leaders are the very same ones that have figured so prominently in government bailouts and other recent financial chicanery.

“Fourth, given all this, it is scandalous that official institutions like the Bank for International Settlements, the IMF, the World Bank, the OECD, and the G20, as well as leading central banks, have devoted so little research to this sector. This scandal is made worse by the fact that they already have much of the data needed to estimate this sector more carefully. For reasons of their own, they have tolerated the growth of the offshore sector for far too long, out of sight. It is time for them to live up to their promises, and work with us on concrete policies to get it under control.”

He adds however: “From another angle, this study is really good news. The world has just located a huge pile of financial wealth that might be called upon to contribute to the solution of our most pressing global problems. We have an opportunity to think not only about how to prevent some of the abuses that have led to it, but also to think about how best to make use of the untaxed earnings that it generates.”

NICOLE TICHON, nicole at tjn-usa.org
Tichon is executive director of the Tax Justice Network-USA. See the full report, “The Price of Offshore Revisited” and an accompanying study, “Inequality: You Don’t Know the Half of it,” which demonstrates that “all studies of economic inequality to date have failed to account properly for this missing wealth. It concludes that inequality is far worse than we think.” Both are available here.

Tagged With: corporations, economy, inequality, James S. Henry, Nicole Tichon,

Laid Off Steelworker in Anti-Romney Ad Doesn’t Want Obama Either

July 17, 2012

Donnie Box was featured in a Priorities USA Action ad outside a shutdown plant: “Romney and Bain Capital shut this place down. They shut down entire livelihoods. They promised us a health care package, they promised to maintain our retirement program, and those are the first two things to disappear. This was a booming place, and (On screen: Mitt Romney and Bain Capital made MILLIONS on the deal. Reuters, 1/6/12) Mitt Romney and Bain Capital turned it into a junkyard, just making money and leaving. They don’t live in this neighborhood. They don’t live in this part of the world.” See:

MIKE ELK, mike at inthesetimes.com, @mikeelk
A reporter for In These Times magazine, Elk just wrote the piece “Laid Off Steelworker in Anti-Romney Ad Says He Is Not Voting for Obama,” which states: “For nearly the past year, the United Steelworkers has been attacking Romney’s record at Bain Capital, citing the experience of their former members who were negatively affected during Romney’s tenure there. The sympathy these laid off Steelworkers generated in the media eventually led to Democrats such as President Barack Obama picking up the attacks, despite the misgiving of major party figures like Bill Clinton.

“The United Steelworkers’ initial accusations regarding the GS Technologies plant closing have proven explosive enough to potentially derail Romney’s presidential bid. Their effectiveness also suggests labor’s new strategy of doing its own political actions separate from the Democratic Party is starting to pay off. …

“Despite appearing in an ad for the pro-Obama Super PAC Priorities USA, denouncing Romney’s role in the GS Technologies plant closing, Box, a lifelong Democrat, says he won’t be voting for the first time since 1971 because he has lost faith in politicians.

“‘I could really care less about Obama,’ says Box. ‘I think Obama is a jerk, a pantywaist, a lightweight, a blowhard. He hasn’t done a goddamn thing that he said he would do. When he had a Democratic Senate and Democratic Congress, he didn’t do a damn thing. He doesn’t have the guts to say what’s on his mind.’

“Box’s refusal to vote for Obama shows the challenges that organized labor faces in convincing its members to vote for Democrats. Many union members like Box feel the party hasn’t pushed hard enough for jobs bills or labor law reform while making sure to pass trade pacts, like the South Korea Free Trade Agreement, which the AFL-CIO and the United Steelworkers opposed.”

Filed Under: Electoral Issues Tagged With: Bain Capital, corporations, elections, Mike Elk, Mitt Romney,

As Disclose Act Fails in Senate, FEC Quietly Removes Files on Big Ticket Donors

July 17, 2012

The Washington Post reports today: “The Senate failed Monday to advance legislation that would require independent groups to disclose the names of contributors who give more than $10,000 to independent groups for use in political campaigns.”

The just-published piece “Revealed: Key Files on Big Ticket Political Donations Vanish at the Federal Election Commission” by Thomas Ferguson, Paul Jorgensen, and Jie Chen states: “We have discovered that sometime after January of this year, the FEC deleted a whole set of contributions totaling millions of dollars made during the 2007-2008 election cycle. The most important of these files concern what is now called ‘dark money’ — funds donated to ostensible charities or public interest groups rather than parties. These non-profit groups — which Washington insiders often refer to generically as ’501(c)s,’ after the section of the federal tax code regulating them — use the money to pay for allegedly educational ‘independent’ ads that run outside conventional campaign channels. Such funding has now developed into a gigantic channel for evading disclosure of the donors’ identities and is acutely controversial. In 2008, however, a substantial number of contributions to such 501(c)s made it into the FEC database. For the agency quietly to remove them almost four years later with no public comment is scandalous. It flouts the agency’s legal mandate to track political money and mocks the whole spirit of what the FEC was set up to do. …

“We are on the outside looking in. We cannot say for sure who decided to make the deletions or why. But one fact is telling: the missing files include essentially all those of one type in particular — donors to the so-called ’501(c) 4′ ‘charitable’ organizations now in the eye of the storm over dark money.”

Ferguson said today that “It’s ironic that this article came out on the day that an effort to force disclosure of secret funds failed in the Senate.” Jorgensen observed that “campaign finance regulation is weak as it is; it’s vital that the FEC rapidly take steps to fix the situation we discovered.”

PAUL JORGENSEN, pjorgensen at ethics.harvard.edu
Jorgensen is a Fellow at the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University.

Filed Under: Electoral Issues Tagged With: corporations, Paul Jorgensen, Thomas Ferguson,

LIBOR Scandal: The Conundrum of Bank Regulators

July 10, 2012

STEPHANY GRIFFITH JONES, sgj2108 at columbia.edu,
Stephany Griffith Jones is Financial Markets Program Director at the Initiative for Policy Dialogue at Columbia University. With José Antonio Ocampo and Joseph E. Stiglitz she co-edited Time for a Visible Hand: Lessons from the 2008 World Financial Crisis. She was recently featured on the IPA news release “Barclays Scandal Highlights Need to ‘Clean the Cesspit.’” She said today: “An important reason why this potential rigging of LIBOR is so significant is because over $500 trillion of transactions worldwide — of interest rate derivatives, but also of mortgages, credit card debt and student loans of millions of people — are influenced by LIBOR. It is not morally acceptable that such a crucial variable for so many could be lied about so as to benefit a few traders and bankers.”

RICHARD WOLFF, rdwolff at att.net
Wolff is author of the book Occupy the Economy: Challenging Capitalism. He said today on the LIBOR scandal: “The long-standing, mutual assistance relationship between global bankers and regulators has been exposed for serving their interests at the expense of the world economy. Such exposures happen when extreme economic crises such as today’s provoke searches for scapegoats. Punishing big banks and regulators leaves intact the basic economic system that created the incentives and provided the rewards for what they did. The real issue is the need for system change.

On the European economic crisis, Wolff said: “Global capitalism is a system in deep crisis. Beginning in the U.S., it was worse there in 2008 and 2009 than it was in Europe. Then, partly because U.S. policies failed to end the crisis, global markets spread it to Europe and beyond in 2010 and 2011. ‘Austerity’ policies in Europe worsened its crisis that now, via global markets, returns to further depress the weakened U.S. economy. Global capitalism, a broken, dysfunctional system, persists because ideological blinders refuse to question let alone change it.”

He is a Professor of Economics Emeritus, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and currently a visiting professor in the Graduate Program for International Affairs at the New School University in New York City. Video of his talk “Capitalism Hits the Fan” is available here.

Tagged With: corporations, economy, LIBOR scandal, Richard Wolff, Stephany Griffith Jones,

“Is Union Busting to Blame for Power Outages?”

July 9, 2012

MIKE ELK, mike at inthesetimes.com, @mikeelk
A reporter for In These Times magazine, Elk recently wrote the piece, “Is Union Busting to Blame for Power Outages in D.C.?,” which states: “International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) Local 1900 members claim the failure to restore power outages is due to chronic understaffing and Pepco’s shift from hiring union utility workers to non-union temporary contractors.

“‘We have half the linemen we had 15 years ago,’ says IBEW Local 1900 Business Agent Jim Griffin, whose union represents 1,150 Pepco workers. ‘We have been complaining for a very long time. They have relied for a long time on contractors. They are transients, they don’t know our system, and we typically have to go behind them to fix their mistakes. It’s very frustrating. We take ownership in our work, we make careers out of this.’ …

“Starting 15 years ago, Pepco stopped hiring workers to replace retiring electrical workers and offered incentive-laden buyout deals to get electricians to retire. In order to address understaffing problems, Pepco has at times hired non-union temporary contractors, instead of hiring new workers. Griffin estimates that Pepco currently employs 1,150 union workers and approximately 400 non-union contractors. The understaffing has led to problems that the IBEW warned about years ago. …

“Pepco’s profit-maximizing behavior has led not only to diminishing quality of service for its customers, but also a diminishing quality of life for its employees. Unionized Pepco workers had their contract expire on May 31 and are currently working on their second contract extension as the union refuses to agree to concessions. In ongoing negotiations with the union, Pepco has demanded the unilateral power to make changes to the health and benefit packages of union workers mid-contract. (The union suspended its contract negotiations so that members of the bargaining committee could go into the field to help restore power to D.C. residents).”

Tagged With: corporations, Mike Elk, Union Busting, unions, worker's rights,

How to Get Better Jobs Numbers

July 6, 2012

NOEL ORTEGA, noel at ips-dc.org
Coordinator of the New Economy Working Group, Ortega is a contributor to the report “JOBS: A Main Street Fix for Wall Street’s Failure,” which states: “The current U.S. jobs debate is largely limited to arguing the relative merits of stimulating the economy by increasing government spending or by granting more deregulation and tax breaks to the rich and to Wall Street corporations. The need for action to correct the institutional failure that caused the jobs crisis is largely ignored.” The report lists concrete actions:

1. “Redefine our economic priorities by replacing financial indicators with real-wealth indicators as the basis for evaluating economic performance.

2. “Restructure the money system to root the power to create and allocate money in Main Street financial institutions that support Main Street job creation.

3. “Restore the middle class by restoring progressive tax policies and a strong and secure social safety net.

4. “Create a framework of economic incentives that favor human-scale enterprises that are locally owned by people who have a natural interest in the health and well-being of their community and its natural environment.

5. “Protect markets and democracy from corruption by concentrations of unaccountable corporate power.

6. “Organize the global economy into substantially self-reliant regional economies that align and partner with the structure and dynamics of Earth’s biosphere.

7. “Put in place global rules and institutions that secure the universal rights of people and support democratic self-governance and economic self-reliance at all system levels.”

Yesterday, the United Nations released a report titled “World Economic and Social Survey 2012: In Search of New Development Finance” which proposes raising $400 billion by mechanisms such as a 1 percent wealth tax on billionaires.

Filed Under: The U.S. Economy Tagged With: corporations, economy, jobs, Noel Ortega,

Barclays Scandal Highlights Need to “Clean the Cesspit”

July 2, 2012

STEPHANY GRIFFITH JONES, sgj2108 at columbia.edu
Stephany Griffith Jones is Financial Markets Program Director at the Initiative for Policy Dialogue at Columbia University. With José Antonio Ocampo, and Joseph E. Stiglitz she co-edited Time for a Visible Hand: Lessons from the 2008 World Financial Crisis. Available for a limited number of interviews, she said today: “This is just the latest in a series of scandals. Barclays was simply lying about how much it was costing them to borrow money. They did this partly to appear to be in a better position than they in fact were, but mostly to make more money.

“British banks were also improperly selling derivatives to small and medium enterprises. There was also the recent Royal Bank of Scotland problem for transferring money to their account holders. These financial institutions are not competent, nor efficient. They are also in many cases corrupt.

“There’s been criticism from many quarters, including conservative quarters and calls by the Labour leader Ed Miliband for a broad inquiry. At present the government says it cannot prosecute Barclays, as the LIBOR [The London InterBank Offered Rate] misdemeanors are not covered by law. Also, some are saying: Be careful, you don’t want to undermine a strong local industry, and they have influence over the politicians.

“This shows again that we have an appalling financial system that doesn’t support the real economy, but often hurts it. And for that, there’s a growing outrage, a need to ‘clean the cesspit’ as one politician, Vince Cable — the UK Business Secretary — put it.

“Even the IMF has been saying that a smaller financial system might be better for the rest of the economy. Up until now, many have insisted that a large financial system was better for the economy, but it’s clear that with speculative parts of banking running amok, that is not the case.”

Tagged With: corporations, economy, Europe, Great Britain, Stephany Griffith Jones,

Earth Summit: Questioning the “Green Economy”

June 21, 2012

The Miami Herald reports: “More than 50,000 people and representatives of more than 120 countries gather in Rio de Janeiro for the opening of the Rio+20 conference on sustainable development. Topics include the destruction of the rain forest, vanishing coral reefs, land grabs, the need for food security, clean water, the role of women in food production, safe drinking water, energy access, clogged transit systems, jobs and sustainable development as a way of fighting poverty. The conference marks the 20th anniversary of the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio.”

Many environmental and indigenous groups and social movements attending the conference and the adjacent “People’s Summit” are questioning and criticizing the “green economy” approach as offering “false solutions.” — also see: Rio 20, Gears of Change

WINNIE OVERBEEK, winnie at wrm.org.uy
Overbeek is the executive secretary of World Rainforest Movement (Brazil/Uruguay). She wrote the piece “The Great Lie: Monoculture Trees as Forests,” which states: “Tree plantation companies were ‘pioneers’ in the green economy when, in the early 1990s, they started to influence public opinion with claims about the ‘sustainable production cycle’, promoting the positive idea that they were planting carbon-absorbing ‘forests’. However, the negative impacts of large-scale monoculture plantations on local communities and increasing unsustainable paper consumption, especially in the North, were left unmentioned.

“Monoculture oil palm, eucalyptus, rubber and jatropha plantations are also expanding, validated by their alleged ‘green’ benefits such as agrofuel production and carbon sequestration. Locating such plantations in the South allows polluting projects in the North to continue business as usual, due to the idea of the carbon tradeoff.

“Under the United Nations collaborative program on Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (known as REDD), carbon — not wood or pulp — has become the ‘product’ that offers the best market value and profits from trees. Those who pollute most can continue to evade their responsibility to reduce carbon emission levels by opting for the often cheaper alternative of ‘compensating’ their emissions by buying credits from carbon stored in forests. ‘REDD+’ goes further, including conservation, sustainable management of forests and enhancement of forest carbon stocks.

“By commodifying forests, initiatives like REDD and REDD+ may weaken the struggles of forest peoples to guarantee rights to their historic lands and livelihoods. Carbon trading is likely to be distant from local communities’ needs and can impact severely on the lives and opportunities of local people.”

PATRICK BOND, pbond at mail.ngo.za
Professor at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa, Bond is author and editor of the recently-released books Politics of Climate Justice and Durban’s Climate Gamble. He wrote the piece “The Green Economy is the Environmentalism of the Rich,” which states: “Perhaps a few environmentally decent projects may get needed subsidies as a result of the G20 and Rio talkshops, and we’ll hear of ‘sustainable development goals’ to replace the fatuous UN Millennium Development Goals in 2015. But the overarching danger is renewed official faith in market mechanisms. No surprise, following the logic of two South African precedents: the 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg (Rio+10) and last December’s Durban COP17 climate summit. There, the chance to begin urgent environmental planning to reverse ecosystem destruction was lost, sabotaged by big- and medium-governments’ negotiators acting on behalf of their countries’ polluting and privatizing corporations.”
Bond also recently wrote “Inclusive Green Growth or Extractive Greenwashed Decay?”

PABLO SALON, solon at focusweb.org
Salon is the executive director of Focus on the Global South (Bolivia) and was the former ambassador from Bolivia to the United Nations. In his recent piece “At the Crossroads Between Green Economy and Rights of Nature,” he stated: “Nature cannot be submitted to the wills of markets or a laboratory. The answer for the future lies not in scientific inventions that try to cheat nature but in our capacity to listen to nature. Science and technology are capable of everything including destroying the world itself. It is time to stop geo-engineering and all artificial manipulation of the climate, biodiversity and seeds. Humans are not gods.”

LUCIA ORTIZ, lucia at natbrasil.org.br
Ortiz is a coordinator for Friends of the Earth, Brazil. She stated: “World leaders meeting at the Rio+20 Summit should listen to the demands of the alternative Peoples’ Summit in Rio to prove that the UN’s decision-making process and our governments take into account the greater public interest before profit. … The Rio+20 Summit should not promote the ‘green economy’ agenda, which is selling out nature and people, and greenwashing an unjust and unsustainable economic system.”

Tagged With: corporations, economy, environment, Lucia Ortiz, Pablo Salon, Patrick Bond, Rio 20, Winnie Overbeek,

Protests at G20 Summit

June 18, 2012

LACY MacAULEY, lacymacauley at gmail.com, @lacymacauley
MacAuley is an Occupy D.C. activist currently at the People’s Summit in La Paz, Mexico. She said today: “La Paz is the closest that activists can get to the G20 Summit. The town of Cabo San Lucas is under heavy security. No one can travel to or from Cabo unless they are a documented Cabo resident. They have even closed the schools and hospitals. I’ve heard a story from a woman whose pregnant family member in Cabo was told that the hospital would not even be open if she were to give birth during the summit. They were lucky: The baby was born last week. This is just another example of how the G20 acts with total disregard for everyday people — they make decisions behind closed doors that impact all of us, decisions that serve the corporate elite of the world, and leave the rest of us out. We need to build our own solutions to the crises of the world, and move beyond big institutions like the G20.”

JUAN JOSE GOMEZ BERISTAIN, sme.jjgoberis at gmail.com
Beristain is a member of the Mexican Electricians Union (Sindicato Mexicano de Electristas) who is at the People’s Summit in La Paz, Mexico, near Cabo.

He said today: “As a Mexican worker, fired two and a half years ago because of the neoliberal government of Mexico, I’m against the G20 because the G20, a strictly economic organization, have no moral or political responsibility for the people and are the real rulers of the political and economic policies in our countries. We haven’t elected any of them. … Yet they have more power over us than the governments of our countries. And now we’re tired of them. We won’t take another year paying the debt they invented for us, suffering the crisis they built. Now is our time to fight back with unity, unity in action, organized action, informed action.”

HECTOR DE LA CUEVA, correohdc at yahoo.com.mx
De la Cueva is a member of the Mexican Action Network Against Free Trade (RMALC) who is also at the People’s Summit in La Paz. He said today: “We are here because the G20 represents the governments of the main powers of the world. … We are here to make sure that the people’s voices are expressed for the rest of the world. … The People’s Summit represents the people’s interest. It represents the working people. So there’s two sides to the story. We are here to make sure that our story, the 99 percent story, is heard.”

Tagged With: corporations, economy, G20, Hector de la Cueva, Juan Jose Gomez Beristain, Lacy MacAuley, Mexico,

Will JPMorgan’s Dimon Get Serious Questions Today From Senate Banking Committee?

June 13, 2012

Los Angeles Times reports: “The ‘King of Wall Street’ returns to Capitol Hill today, this time to explain how JPMorgan Chase & Co. sustained a $2-billion hole in its ‘fortress balance sheet.’”

THOMAS FERGUSON, thomas.ferguson at umb.edu
Ferguson is professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, senior fellow of the Roosevelt Institute, and contributing editor at AlterNet. AlterNet has just published his “How Wall Street Hustles America’s Cities and States Out of Billions.”

He also recently wrote “Senate Banking Chair Calls Jamie Dimon to Testify: But JPMorgan Chase is His Biggest Contributor!”

Ferguson said today: “We obviously need clear answers about what went wrong with risk management at JPMorgan Chase. We have been told repeatedly that America’s banks were well hedged against disaster in Europe. But who now would put much stock in those assurances as investors run on Spain and Italy and we approach the fateful Greek election? But the Senators can’t stop there. They also need to ask some hard questions about the banks’ unwillingness to let our cities and states out of disastrous swap contracts they sold them. These have cost taxpayers billions of dollars. American bankers have benefited from from vast amounts of taxpayer assistance. Not just TARP, but super cheap Federal Reserve financing, Fed, Freddie, and Fannie purchases of mortgage-backed securities, and deposit guarantees as well as tax concessions granted by the Treasury in the wake of the 2008 disaster. For the banks to keep mulcting the people who bailed them out is unconscionable. [Senate Banking Chair Tim] Johnson (D-SD) in particular needs to stand up and represent, not his contributors, but his constituents and start asking the hard questions.”

Also see Ferguson’s piece on Congress and money in the Financial Times.

Filed Under: The U.S. Economy Tagged With: corporations, economy, Jamie Dimon, JP Morgan, JP Morgan Trading Loss, Thomas Ferguson,

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