Home
W21st NYC's Library tagged → View Popular
17 Oct 09
If ever there was a time for an emergency super-tax, it's now | Polly Toynbee | Comment is free | The Guardian
-
Nothing has changed. Obscene pay is back. Ahead lie years of hard labour to repay debts while Krug flows in the City. No regret, no shame, no punctured hubris. Banks seem beyond the control of mere government. Instruments exist to rein them in – taxation, regulation, law – but their threats to abscond make them virtually untouchable. History may mark this as the moment when financiers passed beyond democracy, thumbing their nose while rubbing our nose in it. How puny the G20 deal looks, delaying bonuses for three years when everyone wanted them banned.
-
Inside Revenue & Customs there is growing concern at the billions that could be lost from banks avoiding taxes for decades to come. Tax gatherers are eager for the Treasury to take urgent action in November's pre-budget report on two vital issues. As banks move into profit, you might expect them to pay tax. You'd be wrong. They can spread their colossal losses forward forever, offsetting them against tax they owe. All the banks have billions to offset, including those we own. Merrill Lynch put £16bn of its sub-prime losses through Britain, so it may pay no corporation tax in the UK for 60 years. No wonder Revenue & Customs is fuming.
- 2 more annotations...
Taxpayers saved our banks; now it's time for MPs to save our democracy | From the Guardian | The Guardian
-
Taxpayers have spent billions to save the banking system; surely MPs can fork out a few grand to save our democracy.
01 Oct 09
FT.com / Companies / Aerospace & Defence - SFO seeks go-ahead for BAE charges
-
Thursday’s announcement by the SFO that it had decided to seek the consent of Baroness Scotland, the attorney-general, to prosecute the company over alleged backhand payments to middlemen sent shares in BAE lower. They closed down more than 4 per cent.
07 Jul 09
Books of The Times - ‘Packing the Court’ by James MacGregor Burns - Appointees Who Really Govern America - Review - NYTimes.com
-
Lincoln declared in his first Inaugural Address that “if the policy of the government, upon vital questions, affecting the whole people, is to be irrevocably fixed by decisions of the Supreme Court, the instant they are made” then “the people will have ceased, to be their own rulers, having, to that extent, practically resigned their government, into the hands of that eminent tribunal.”
-
In his provocative and timely new book, the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian James MacGregor Burns observes that during one 18-month period in Franklin D. Roosevelt’s presidency, the court (which was then a bastion of the old economic order) struck down more than a dozen federal and state laws, threatening the implementation of the New Deal and causing Roosevelt to lament in June 1936 that conservatives had created a “ ‘no-man’s land’ where no government — state or federal — can function.”
Selected Tags
Related Tags
Sponsored Links
Ads by Google
Top Contributors
Groups interested in Politics
Diigo is about better ways to research, share and collaborate on information. Learn more »
Join Diigo