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Prime Minister Vladimir Putin on Monday criticized U.S. President Barack Obama's plan to raise taxes on U.S. companies' foreign operations, saying it would amount to double taxation that will hurt the global economy. "This is a serious decision for the world economy," Putin said at a meeting of the Presidium, the government said on its web site. "If taxes are imposed on all companies working abroad, then it will mean the total destruction of the system for avoiding double taxation." Putin instructed Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin to hold discussions on the plan with Obama's administration. Kudrin met with finance ministers...

The Justice Department is increasing its prosecutions of alleged acts of foreign bribery by U.S. corporations, forcing them to take costly steps to defend against scrutiny. The crackdown under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, or FCPA -- a post-Watergate law largely dormant for decades -- now extends across five continents and penetrates entire industries, including energy and medical devices. Among the companies currently under Justice Department review: Sun Microsystems Inc. and Royal Dutch Shell PLC, according to the companies' disclosures. At least 120 companies are under investigation, according to Mark Mendelsohn, a deputy chief in the Justice Department division overseeing...

Listen to President Obama, and the status quo seems a cesspool. Pervasive "loopholes" engineered by "well-connected lobbyists" allow U.S. multinationals to skirt American taxes and outsource jobs to low-tax countries. Myth: Aided by those overpaid lobbyists, American multinationals are taxed lightly -- less so than their foreign counterparts. Reality: Just the opposite. Most countries don't tax the foreign profits of their multinational firms at all. Myth: When U.S. multinationals invest abroad, they destroy American jobs. Reality: Not so. Myth: Plugging overseas corporate tax loopholes will dramatically improve the budget outlook as multinationals pay their "fair" share. Reality: Dream on.

In the name of tax reform, Pres. Barack Obama has announced $190 billion of tax hikes on many of the biggest U.S. employers. By reducing after-tax profits, these tax hikes could hammer stock prices that reflect investor expectations of future profits. Among the employers in Obama’s crosshairs: Aetna, Alcoa, Allstate, American Express, Berkshire Hathaway, Best Buy, Cisco Systems, Coca-Cola, Costco Wholesale, Dell, Dow Chemical, DuPont, Exxon Mobil, Ford, General Motors, GMAC, Hewlett-Packard, Honeywell, IBM, Intel, Johnson & Johnson, Kraft Foods, Kroger, McDonald’s, Merck, Microsoft, Motorola, News Corp., PepsiCo, Pfizer, Proctor & Gamble, Safeway, Sears, Sprint Nextel, Supervalu, Sysco, Target, Time...

President Obama revealed Monday that he's half a supply-sider. If only someone could explain to him the other half. We have a tax code, the President said, "that says you should pay lower taxes if you create a job in Bangalore, India, than if you create one in Buffalo, New York." That sounds like a great argument for lowering taxes on the guy creating jobs in Buffalo. Alas, that's not what he has in mind.

Obama to roll out international tax proposals Sun May 3, 2009 7:01pm EDT Email | Print | Share | Reprints | Single Page [-] Text [+] WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Barack Obama plans to roll out a set of proposals on international tax policies on Monday, in an announcement with potential implications for U.S. multinational firms. The White House said Obama will be joined by Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner for the 11:05 a.m. EDT (1505 GMT) event. Obama's budget outline released in February made reference to proposals to change the tax treatment of U.S. firms with overseas operations and measures...

There he goes again, bashing Bangalore. Not for the first time, US President Barack Obama invoked India’s much-celebrated economic hotspot, which has become an all-encompassing metaphor to describe everything from job loss to globalization, to rally Americans for a protectionist cause. At a White House event on Monday to unveil tax reforms aimed at forcing American multinationals to pay corporate taxes -- and keep jobs -- at home, Obama lashed out at the current US system, saying it encouraged paying ''lower taxes if you create a job in Bangalore, India, than if you create one in Buffalo, New York.'' The...

President Barack Obama promised sternly on Monday to crack down on companies ''that ship jobs overseas'' and duck U.S. taxes with offshore havens. It won't be easy. Democrats have been fighting -- and losing -- this battle since John F. Kennedy made a similar proposal in 1961. Obama's proposal to close tax loopholes was a reliable applause line during the presidential campaign, but it got a lukewarm response Monday from Capitol Hill. Sen. Max Baucus of Montana, the Democratic chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, said the plan needed further study, even though similar ideas have been around for years....

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Barack Obama on Monday will propose changing provisions in the tax code that he says encourage U.S. companies to move jobs overseas, as part of a broader package aimed at saving $210 billion over 10 years. Obama will seek to follow through on a campaign promise to change the tax treatment of American firms with overseas operations. That portion of his plan -- opposed by such firms as Pfizer Inc and Oracle Corp -- would raise more than $100 billion in revenue over the next decade. Obama vowed in a February address to the U.S. Congress...

The Obama administration will roll out details Monday of what aides are calling a far-reaching crackdown on offshore tax avoidance, targeting many U.S.-based multinational corporations and wealthy individuals. President Barack Obama will flesh out a proposal included in his February budget blueprint seeking to curb the practice of parking foreign earnings in offshore tax havens indefinitely. By some estimates, $700 billion or more in U.S. corporate earnings have accumulated in overseas accounts in recent years. The plan to be announced Monday will go further. It aims to change the legal treatment of offshore subsidiaries and structures that companies have used...

Opening this industry reduced revenues: Alvarez Herrera A legal fiction permits transnationals to take out the risk of Venezuelan petroleum; Chavez recovers crude with a strategic reserve; it is not a prime matter, says The debate about the participation of private capital in a national oil industry is simply "of political economy," posed Bernardo Alvarez Herrera, ambassador of Venezuela to the United States. With a high professional trajectory in the energy sector in his country, the diplomat considers that the point of definition has been in the debit managing the risk the comes from exploiting hydrocarbons: to benefit one group...

The debate in Texas over a proposed 4,000-mile network of toll roads that will parallel the state's existing highway system is heating up More than 10,000 people have attended public hearings across Texas to discuss the proposed Trans-Texas Corridor, which has also been dubbed the "NAFTA superhighway." It is a project that is expected to cost an estimated $183 billion over 50 years. (hear audio report) Terry Hall with the group Texans Uniting for Reform and Freedom warns the project will create widespread eminent domain abuse and involve foreign control of public infrastructure. "They're taking huge swaths of land, up...

NACOGDOCHES — The rows of extra chairs brought into the The Fredonia's biggest meeting room Thursday night were not enough to accommodate more than 750 people who attended an open house and public hearing on the proposed TTC-69 highway. Texas Department of Transportation officials heard hours of public testimony that continued late into the night overwhelmingly opposed to the construction of new roadways through East Texas. Applause throughout the hours-long meeting never swelled as loudly as it did when the first speaker of the night, state Rep. Wayne Christian, told TxDOT representatives emphatically that "our answer is 'no' on the...

Critics have long believed environmentalists were planning global domination. The problem with making a credible case against such an ambitious plan was simple: no environmental leader had published one. Yet conflicts over global warming, world trade, multinational corporations, population control, sustainable futures, and transnational government left little doubt that environmentalists in fact shared the unspoken aim of wielding supreme power over a green future. But there was no proof. For years, critics, lacking hard evidence, were reduced to piecing together a jigsaw puzzle of suspicious environmentalist actions - funding from huge charitable trusts, ties to the broader "progressive" community, and...

Bank of America has begun quietly offering credit cards to customers in the Los Angeles are who don't have a Social Security number, The Wall Street Journal reports. Such persons are usually undocumented immigrants. The newspaper said that Bank of America, the country's second-largest bank, is offering credit cards to consumers who have had an account at the bank for three months or more, even if they do not have a credit history or Social Security number. It's the latest indication that American financial institutions are serious about doing business with the millions of undocumented immigrants who until recently have...

Top multinationals caught up in Chinese graft probe (AP/chinadaily.com.cn) Updated: 2007-01-20 14:14 Shanghai authorities have detained 22 company executives, some working for major multinationals such as McDonald's and Whirlpool, in connection with a bribery investigation, local reports said Friday, citing a police notice. The probe comes amid a wider crackdown on economic crimes and a citywide probe into corruption allegations against top city leaders that resulted in the ouster of Shanghai's Communist Party secretary, Chen Liangyu. Foreign companies are facing increased scrutiny over compliance with government regulations, with powerhouses like Wal-Mart Stores Inc., for example, installing labor unions. The police...

www.motorola.com and www.nokia.com are going head-to-head in the southern city of Madras, India. But, Nokia is throwing the bigger punches. Nokia announced plans to build a $150-million plant near Madras. Motorola countered with a plan to invest $100 million in a plant of its own. Where do these companies get all of this money? $150 mill, $100 mil, and yesterday Yahoo put up $60 mil to invest in South Korea. Could someone please drop a million near me, or invest in me? India is one of the fastest growing handset markets. Gee, I wonder what country is number one. Nokia...

Forget Dubai-based DP World poised to run commercial operations in six leading American ports, it’s the players in the chess game called Port Security that Congress members should be losing the most sleep over. While it’s true that port security falls under the jurisdiction of Coast Guard and U.S. customs officials, agents of both entities will need a program just to recognize all the players. Port Security International (PSI) is an international partner’s network composed of an array of financial, strategic, technological and in-country port industry related companies. PSI has an alliance with the China-based Nuctech, a company that "possesses...

WILLIAMSBURG, Va. - Advertising executive Keith Reinhard has a message for U.S. companies: America's tarnished image may soon hurt your bottom lines. "Sooner or later, anti-Americanism has got to be bad for business," said Reinhard, president of Business for Diplomatic Action and chairman of the New York ad agency DDB Worldwide. "In marketing, we know that changes in behavior inevitably follow changes in attitude." Speaking Thursday at the Virginia Conference on World Trade, Reinhard encouraged businesses to practice diplomacy overseas and to take other actions, such as recruiting more foreign interns, to help change the way people view Americans. Reinhard...

Venezuela's tax authority on Thursday ordered the temporary closure of the local offices of IBM and Microsoft for alleged tax irregularities. Nokia, Ericsson and Siemens, as well as car part maker Bosch Rexroth and assembler Honda Motor, were also told to close for 24 to 48 hours. The targeting of top western multinationals as part of a “zero tax evasion” policy is a further sign of an increasingly assertive behaviour by President Hugo Chávez, as bountiful oil revenues strengthen his leftwing government. Seniat, Venezuela's tax collection agency, said the companies would be fined several hundred dollars for alleged irregularities in...

"Gay Rights" and Multinational Business: A New "Marriage of Convenience"? In a striking business development, actions by major "multinational" corporations to include "domestic partners" of gays and lesbians in employee benefits schemes have become increasingly common in recent years. Even formerly conservative Walt Disney Enterprises has now "restructured" benefits in this way. One sees few non-multinational corporations and almost no small businesses taking such steps, however, from which one may conclude either that (1) multi-national corporations posess size and strength non-multinationals and small businesses simply do not, which enable these "megabusinesses" to absorb the increased overhead of including gay and...

NEW DELHI: Chinese Premier Wen Jiabo will go straight to Bangalore on April 9, 2005 and spend the weekend before he arrives in New Delhi in what is being seen as a landmark visit and later what would transpire in the Capital bound to bring bonhomie in the Sino-India relations. Unlike other state guests, Wen will not visit the Infosys campus in Bangalore. Instead he will visit Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), one of the world's largest software and services consulting organisations and India's first global billion-dollar IT company. The Premier will visit another equally prestigious institution, the Indian Institute of...

NEW YORK, Mar 28 (Reuters) - Economists surprised by the failure of the dollar's three-year slide to narrow the U.S. trade deficit are increasingly focusing on the growing presence of multinationals in global commerce. With globalization spurring trade between multinational firms and their foreign-owned affiliates or subsidiaries in recent years, the traditional relationship between trade flows and the dollar may be eroding, some analysts say. A depreciating currency usually takes about 18 months to start to impact the trade deficit, an economic theory known as the "J-curve", but the dollar has been weakening for about three years now with little...

The smart IBM boys want to dump their troubles on to, and make better use of, the Chinese, but their bright strategies seem very strange to some politicians in Washington. Now, these politicians raise the big weapon: the national interest.

China's sudden emergence onto the global stage is causing much debate. To some people, its development will mean Chinese domination of the 21st century. Historians claim that a new world power will alter the world balance, and could lead to new conflicts. But is a prosperous China good news or a disaster in the making? The truth is that a rising China will benefit the entire world, not just China. China's expanding economy is creating a new global engine of growth. Today, China has become the biggest frontier market as well as global manufacturing centre, which has numerous direct benefits...

Feb 12, 2005 SPEAKING FREELY Betting on the next Lenovo By George Zhibin Gu Speaking Freely is an Asia Times Online feature that allows guest writers to have their say. Please click here if you are interested in contributing. December 2004 will be remembered as a time when a faceless Chinese company, Lenovo, suddenly took the global stage. The bluest of blue-chip multinationals, IBM, got out of its personal computer business by selling out to Lenovo, making the faceless company the third-biggest global PC player. So are there other Chinese brands that could take the world by storm? A rising...

A survey conducted after the presidential election by Seattle-based Global Market Insite Inc. found negative feelings about Americans to be stronger than any time since the Vietnam War, with about 20 percent of Europeans saying they would boycott such American icons as Marlboro, American Express and General Motors to express displeasure. The backlash even has engendered a new phenomenon -- anti-American brands such as Mecca-Cola. Introduced in heavily Muslim areas of France in 2002, the Coke/Pepsi clone now is marketed in 50 countries under the slogan: "No more drinking stupid, drink with commitment." The issue is important to American workers....

CAIRO, September 26 (IslamOnline.net) – A respected global peace movement has urged peoples in the four corners of the world to organize a symbolic ballot the same day of the US November 2 presidential election as a chorus of opposition to George W. Bush’s policies in Iraq and other parts of the world. “This is a call for you to organize an alternative polling station for the upcoming US presidential elections on Tuesday 2nd November 2004 in your city/country,” Mother Earth said in a statement sent to IslamOnline.net. It suggested an alternative election with a table, ballot boxes, where people...

The Manchurian Mistake by Rev. Gerald Zandstra, Programs Director The cover of Richard Condon’s 1959 novel on which the movie was based doesn’t fit the “evil empire” portrayed in the 2004 remake. In a rare instance of solidarity, Hollywood and religious leaders have identified the next major threat to the world’s welfare: the multinational corporation. In this year’s remake of the 1962 classic “The Manchurian Candidate,” audiences are being subjected to more than two hours of ideological demagoguery and grandiose conspiracy theory. Moviegoers familiar with the original will be surprised to learn that gone are the Chinese Communists seeking...

<p>NEW YORK (CNN/Money) - Even some economists friendly to Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry say his proposal to end tax breaks on multinational corporations' overseas' profits won't necessarily stop the flow of jobs overseas.</p> <p>But even some more politically conservative economists applauded a proposal to cut corporate income taxes that is part of Kerry's newly unveiled jobs creation plan.</p>

A coalition of 26 U.S. multinational companies plans to release a new study Friday that will show that U.S. multinationals create more jobs here than they do overseas. The companies, which include Hewlett-Packard, Dow Chemical and Electronic Data Systems, are seeking to refute recent claims that multinationals outsource jobs offshore, leaving Americans unemployed. The study, though commissioned several weeks ago, comes at a pivotal time for the multinational coalition as it battles to preserve provisions in the House?s corporate tax bill that relate to income generated overseas. Although not yet released, the study is expected to show that from 1991...

A galactic mystery hovers over the World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, Switzerland: How many of the 2,280 global leaders, including 31 heads of state, gathered in this Alpine resort conduct business with extraterrestrials? This is no whimsy for Davosians. It's on the agenda of the annual powwow of the influential and affluent who will ask forum participants such as Vice President Dick Cheney, Coca-Cola Chairman Douglas Daft and De La Rue Chief Executive Ian Much if the aliens have landed and are collaborating with them to concoct government policy, brew soda pop and mint Iraq's new bank notes. "The...

<p>Of the 100 largest "economies" in the world, only 47 are nation states. The other 53 are multinational corporations. Exxon Mobil Corp., the world's largest company in terms of sales, has annual revenues that exceed the gross domestic product (GDP) of all but 20 of the world's 220 nations.</p>

What is American Corporatism? By Robert Locke FrontPageMagazine.com | September 13, 2002 We are probably heading into some economic heavy weather which will spur needed debate on what's right and wrong with our economy. This will require our being clear about what kind of economy we really have. I have mentioned before that we increasingly live not in a capitalist society but in a corporatist one, and I would like to flesh out this notion. What is corporatism? In a (somewhat inaccurate) phrase, socialism for the bourgeois. It has the outward form of capitalism in that it preserves private ownership...

David Korten is founder and president of The People-Centered Development Forum, a global alliance dedicated to the creation of just, inclusive and sustainable societies through voluntary citizen action. A former faculty member at the Harvard Business School, he served for more than a decade as a Ford Foundation project specialist in Manila and worked for nearly a decade with the U.S. Agency for International Development -- before breaking with the official foreign aid system. He is author of the recently published When Corporations Rule the World, as well as numerous other books.---snip----------------MM: How do you propose redistributing income and wealth?Korten:...

UN aims to scrutinise multinationals International companies could find their activities subject to investigation and censure by United Nations human rights officials under principles expected to be adopted on Wednesday in Geneva. The UN's draft Norms on the Responsibilities of Transnational Corporations asserts that companies should be subject to the kind of enforcement procedures at the UN Commission for Human Rights previously applied only to nation states. UN ethics guidelines may alarm multinationals Click here The move to adopt the norms marks a first step by the UN towards the regulation of multinationals. It is likely to spark a long...

<p>The Federal Reserve will announce today whether it will cut interest rates once again. In an effort to stave off deflation and boost the economy the Fed has already cut rates 12 times since January 2001, pushing the funds rate down to 1.25%. These measures, combined with the passing of President Bush's growth and jobs package, have had a stimulative effect. As Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan recently noted, the financial markets are already signaling a revival of U.S. growth. Indeed, the stock market is up more than 20% since March.</p>

<p>Like every politician in California, Gary Podesto knows water is a hot- button issue. So, as mayor of Stockton, he wants to make one thing very clear: He is not privatizing the city's water supply. Sure, the 60-year-old Republican believes in private enterprise; before entering politics six years ago, he grew rich operating a chain of discount grocery stores. But he also knows how amoral the marketplace can be.</p>

For years, the multinational companies supporting fast track trade negotiating authority have pointed to Latin America as one of the big prizes at stake. Free the president's hand to seek new international trade agreements, they claimed, and the White House could conclude a Free Trade Agreement of the Americas that would finally open the entire Western Hemisphere to American workers, companies, and farmers. Earlier this month, these arguments (plus gobs of corporate money) carried the day in Congress. Yet the multinationals lately have been releasing reams of evidence showing that their portrait of Latin America as an exciting new market...

Now that the boilerplate and grandiose promises of last week?s global poverty summit are history, the governments involved should remember the Hippocratic Oath?s advice for physicians: First, do no harm. For even if foreign aid bureaucrats knew how to cure poverty (which they don?t) and ostensibly undercut terrorism?s appeal, their efforts would be nullified by the breakneck trade and investment expansion that their governments keep pushing. The dangers created by these policies are aptly described by the phrase ?the race to the bottom.? Today?s version of globalization is portrayed as the ultimate anti-poverty weapon because it promises to raise worldwide...