Free Republic

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...

"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...