molly

[sisyphusshrugged]

who I love

Jack A. Blum, a Washington lawyer and expert in money-laundering and other forms of tax evasion, wrote the following for an academic conference held earlier this year at the University of Texas at Austin:

"Corporate managers have spent the last century developing tools for avoiding regulation and taxation. They brag that acts of tax avoidance are part of corporate productivity. For them, each dollar of tax not paid because of their machinations is the added value they bring to a company. Tax avoidance is a profit center. Avoidance of regulation and supervision is an equally high priority. Corporate contributions and the personal contributions of senior corporate managers have funded anti-regulatory think tanks and anti-regulatory scholarship. Political contributions have turned theory into reality."

Blum points out that the tools used to avoid taxes and regulation -- shell subsidiaries, partnerships and joint ventures, foreign subsidiaries, special-purpose entities and sophisticated transfer pricing techniques -- have long been in use, but "the difference is that when they were first used, their purpose was to avoid state regulation and hide from state law enforcement."

Today, Blum says, "the techniques are being used to beat what is left of federal taxation and regulation. Corporations have turned international borders into barriers that block national level taxation and regulation. The international community has failed to produce effective machinery for cooperation in the areas of regulation and taxation, and as a consequence, the social control of corporate behavior stops at the border."

The social control of corporate behavior also stops with this administration...