what you get here

This is not a blog which opines on current events. It rather uses incidents, books (old and new), links and papers to muse about our social endeavours.
So old posts are as good as new! And lots of useful links!

The Bucegi mountains - the range I see from the front balcony of my mountain house - are almost 120 kms from Bucharest and cannot normally be seen from the capital but some extraordinary weather conditions allowed this pic to be taken from the top of the Intercontinental Hotel in late Feb 2020

Thursday, April 5, 2012

More tax evasion

I wrote a few days back about the impact of Nicholas Shaxson’s book Treasure Islands - and the revelations it contains about unregulated financial institutions and tax havens being much more extensive than we realised. Today there is a story about how Amazon UK changed its ownership a few years back (now owned by a Luxemburg company) and has paid no Corporation tax on its 7.5 billion euros annual sales

Ironic (to put it mildly!) that I bought Shaxson’s book from Amazon UK; that Shaxson is apparently domiciled in Switzerland; and that his book was published by Bodley Head – once a proud and independent company but now part of the multinational Random House which itself engages in the tax gymnastics the book attacks.
Actually it's not ironic! It is a powerful demonstration of how extensive the coils of the octopus of the new gene of capitalism has become!
For new readers, these are not the rantings of a leftist -  but of someone who in the 1980s strongly fought the hard left (and would still justify my role) but from whose eyes the scales have now fallen about the parasitical greed of the commercial elite.

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