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	Time is running out to act on Climate Change by Climate March, Agencies   Time is running out to act on Climate Change, by Thom Hartmann.   This week, government officials and climate scientists from all over the world are meeting in Berlin, Germany, to finalize a U.N. study on climate change and its solutions. While the study hasn’t been released yet, a draft of it has, and it’s pretty stunning. The draft report from the International Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, says that time is quickly running out for world powers to slash their use of fossil fuels and stay below the 2 degree Celsius limit on global warming that 200 nations agreed upon in 2010.   More importantly, the draft suggests that we only have 10-15 years to take the proper actions needed to safely reach that global warming limit. Not 100 years, not 50 years, but just 10 years. This meeting in Berlin comes just a week after the IPCC released another report in Japan, which highlighted the sudden, catastrophic, and devastating effects that climate change is already having across the globe. Meanwhile, as the world’s top climate scientists are meeting in Berlin, the president of the World Bank, Jim Yong Kim, is worrying about the effects that climate change is having on world-wide access to food and water.   In an interview ahead of next week’s meeting of the World Bank, Kim argued that battles over food and water will erupt across the globe within the next five to 10 years because of climate change. Kim said that, “The water issue is critically related to climate change. People say that carbon is the currency of climate change. Water is the teeth. Fights over water and food are going to be the most significant direct impacts of climate change in the next five to 10 years. There’s just no question about it.” And arguably, as we saw with the events of the Arab Spring, they’ve already started.   Kim said that he has urged climate change activists, government officials, and scientists across the globe to learn lessons from the way protestors and scientists came together and joined forces in the battle against HIV and AIDS. He also expressed concerns over the amount of research that’s being done on renewable energy and solutions to climate change, saying that, “Is there enough basic science research going into renewable energy? Not even close. Are there ways of taking discoveries made in universities and quickly moving them into industry? No. Are there ways of testing those innovations? Are there people thinking about scaling up those innovations?”   Unfortunately, here in America, things are stalled. Despite the mountains of proof and scientific evidence, Republicans in Washington, and across the country, are continuing to push climate change denial policies and legislation at the behest of their Big Oil, Coal, and Gas “donors.” Just last week, Republicans in the House tried to pass a bill introduced by climate-change denying Congressman Jim Bridenstine of Oklahoma, that would have forced NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, to quit studying climate change and its effects so much, and instead just study and discuss “weather.” This was, of course, to help “the economy” – Republican code for fossil fuel barons like ExxonMobil and the Koch Brothers.   Fortunately, much to the displeasure of climate-change deniers in Washington, Democrats amended the bill to clarify that it would only deal with NOAA’s weather prediction work, and not cut or stop its research into climate change. It’s time to put an end to all of the pseudoscience and climate-change denial talk.   Whether Republicans want to admit it or not, not only is climate change very real, but it’s also hitting us a lot harder, and a lot sooner, then we once thought. Just a few years ago, the world’s top climate scientists were saying that we had decades to address and solve the climate change crisis. But now, we have just a matter of years to convert our energy systems from fossils to sunlight.   We’ve waited long enough to address the climate change crisis, and in the process, we’re already creating havoc. From superstorms, droughts, and killer cold- and heat-waves to the crop failures in the Middle East that touched off the Arab Spring, climate change is here, now.   We need to mobilize our nation and jump headlong into the 21st century, thus solving the problem of the world’s largest polluter and providing an example for the rest of the world. And we need to start today. Time is running out.   Is Climate Change a Crime Against Humanity, asks Tom Engelhardt.   Thanks to a grim 2013 report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, we know that there is now a 95-100 percent likelihood that “human influence has been the dominant cause of the observed warming [of the planet] since the mid-20th century.” We know as well that the warming of the planet—thanks to the fossil fuel system we live by and the greenhouse gases it deposits in the atmosphere—is already doing real damage to our world and specifically to the United States, as a recent scientific report released by the White House made clear.   We also know, with grimly reasonable certainty, what kinds of damage those 95-100 percent odds are likely to translate into in the decades, and even centuries, to come if nothing changes radically: a temperature rise by century’s end that could exceed ten degrees Fahrenheit, cascading species extinctions, staggeringly severe droughts across larger parts of the planet (as in the present long-term drought in the American West and Southwest), far more severe rainfall across other areas, more intense storms causing far greater damage, devastating heat waves on a scale no one in human history has ever experienced, masses of refugees, rising global food prices, and among other catastrophes on the human agenda, rising sea levels that will drown coastal areas of the planet.   From two scientific studies just released, for example, comes the news that the West Antarctic ice sheet, one of the great ice accumulations on the planet, has now begun a process of melting and collapse that could, centuries from now, raise world sea levels by a nightmarish ten to thirteen feet. That mass of ice is, according to the lead authors of one of the studies, already in “irreversible retreat,” which means—no matter what acts are taken from now on—a future death sentence for some of the world"s great cities. (And that’s without even the melting of the Greenland ice shield, not to speak of the rest of the ice in Antarctica.)   All of this, of course, will happen mainly because we humans continue to burn fossil fuels at an unprecedented rate and so annually deposit carbon dioxide in the atmosphere at record levels. In other words, we’re talking about weapons of mass destruction of a new kind.   From oil wells to fracking structures, deep sea drilling rigs to platforms in the Gulf of Mexico, the machinery that produces this kind of WMD and ensures that it is continuously delivered to its planetary targets is in plain sight. Powerful as it may be, destructive as it will be, those who control it have faith that, being so long developing, it can remain in the open without panicking populations or calling any kind of destruction down on them.   The companies and energy states that produce such WMD remain remarkably open about what they’re doing.   Take ExxonMobil, one of the most profitable corporations in history. In early April, it released two reports that focused on how the company, as Bill McKibben has written, “planned to deal with the fact that it and other oil giants have many times more carbon in their collective reserves than scientists say we can safely burn." He went on:   The company said that government restrictions that would force it to keep its [fossil fuel] reserves in the ground were "highly unlikely", and that they would not only dig them all up and burn them, but would continue to search for more gas and oil—a search that currently consumes about $100 million of its investors’ money every single day. "Based on this analysis, we are confident that none of our hydrocarbon reserves are now or will become "stranded."   In other words, Exxon plans to exploit whatever fossil fuel reserves it possesses to their fullest extent. Government leaders involved in supporting the production of such weapons of mass destruction and their use are often similarly open about it, even while also discussing steps to mitigate their destructive effects. Take the White House, for instance. Here was a statement President Obama proudly made in Oklahoma in March 2012 on his energy policy:   Now, under my administration, America is producing more oil today than at any time in the last eight years. That"s important to know. Over the last three years, I’ve directed my administration to open up millions of acres for gas and oil exploration across twenty-three different states. We’re opening up more than 75 percent of our potential oil resources offshore. We’ve quadrupled the number of operating rigs to a record high. We’ve added enough new oil and gas pipeline to encircle the Earth and then some.   Similarly, on May 5, just before the White House was to reveal that grim report on climate change in America, and with a Congress incapable of passing even the most rudimentary climate legislation aimed at making the country modestly more energy efficient, senior Obama adviser John Podesta appeared in the White House briefing room to brag about the administration’s “green” energy policy. “The United States,” he said, “is now the largest producer of natural gas in the world and the largest producer of gas and oil in the world. It"s projected that the United States will continue to be the largest producer of natural gas through 2030. For six straight months now, we"ve produced more oil here at home than we"ve imported from overseas. So that"s all a good-news story.”   Good news indeed, and from Vladmir Putin’s Russia, which just expanded its vast oil and gas holdings by a Maine-sized chunk of the Black Sea off Crimea, to Chinese “carbon bombs,” to Saudi Arabian production guarantees, similar “good-news stories” are similarly promoted. In essence, the creation of ever more greenhouse gases—of, that is, the engine of our future destruction—remains a “good news” story for ruling elites on planet Earth.   Giant energy companies have funded so much climate-change denialism and false science over the years. For the Republican Party as a whole, climate-change denial is by now nothing less than a litmus test of loyalty.   These are no more weapons of mass destruction than are uranium-235 and plutonium-239. In this case, the weaponry is the production system that’s been set up to find, extract, sell at staggering profits, and burn those fossil fuels, and so create a greenhouse-gas planet. But with climate change, there is no simple weapon to focus on. But then there is deep-sea drilling, the pipelines, the gas stations, the coal-fueled power plants, the millions of cars filling global roads.   All of it—everything that brings endless fossil fuels to market, makes those fuels eminently burnable, and helps suppress the development of non-fossil fuel alternatives. The CEOs of the planet"s giant energy corporations are dangerous, the true fundamentalists, of planet Earth, since they are promoting a faith in fossil fuels which is guaranteed to lead us to some version of End Times.   Perhaps we need a new category of weapons with a new acronym to focus us on the nature of our present circumstances. Call them weapons of planetary destruction (WPD) or weapons of planetary harm (WPH).   The burning of fossil fuels may end in a series of “irreversible” disasters that could essentially burn us and much other life off the Earth. This system of destruction on a planetary scale, facilitated by most of the corporate elites on the planet, is becoming the ultimate “crime against humanity” and, in fact, against most living things. It is becoming a “terracide.”   http://www.thenation.com/article/179980/climate-change-crime-against-humanity http://www.thenation.com/article/181621/climate-change-peoples-shock http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2014/jul/10/climate-will-we-lose-endgame/ http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/apr/13/averting-climate-change-catastrophe-is-affordable-says-ipcc-report-un http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/aug/28/renewable-energy-capacity-grows-fastest-ever-pace http://www.huffingtonpost.com/news/climate-change/   http://www.dw.de/figueres-if-we-want-to-prevent-conflicts-we-have-to-address-climate-change-now/a-17928114 http://www.edf.org/climate/act-now-key-opportunity-support-carbon-limits1 http://www.nrdc.org/ http://peoplesclimate.org/global-media/ http://peoplesclimate.org/partners/ http://www.commondreams.org/more/4 http://350.org/ http://www.cbc.ca/news/business/rockefellers-to-sell-oil-assets-as-part-of-50b-global-warming-fight-1.2773771   http://ourfuture.org/20140928/why-an-unequal-planet-can-never-be-green http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/china-the-climate-and-the-fate-of-the-planet-20140915 http://www.ipsnews.net/2014/10/opinion-planet-racing-towards-catastrophe-and-politics-just-looking-on/ http://www.globalintegrity.org/posts/inaugural-environmental-democracy-index/   http://blogs.ei.columbia.edu/tag/climate-matters/ http://blogs.ei.columbia.edu/2014/04/09/earth-institute-scientists-speak-out-on-climate-change/ http://blogs.ei.columbia.edu/ http://www.worldwatch.org/bookstore/publication/state-world-2014-governing-sustainability http://iri.columbia.edu/news/8-ways-we-can-strengthen-development-and-increase-climate-resilience/ http://www.ipsnews.net/2014/12/opinion-climate-justice-is-the-only-way-to-solve-our-climate-crisis/ http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/01/29/us/global-warming-poll.html http://www.futureearth.org/ http://www.futureearth.org/blog/archive Visit the related web page
	Housing is a right, tax-dodging is wrong by London Review of Books, Tax Justice Network London Review of Books United Kingdom   June 2014   "Vodahome", by Anna Aslanyan.   ‘Housing is a right, tax-dodging is wrong,’ read a banner outside the Oxford Street branch of Vodafone on Saturday. UK Uncut had organised a day of action in cities around the UK. Vodafone recently reported a post-tax profit of £59.4 billion for the year to March. For the third year in a row the company has paid no corporation tax; in 2010 HMRC wrote off a £6 billion tax bill. Meanwhile, the government says it can’t afford not to make cuts to social housing.   The protest took the form of a housewarming party. There were balloons, music and fizzy drinks outside the shop; inside, a few people behind a half-lowered shutter. Three women, a toddler and a man in a wheelchair had managed to get in there early. The protesters at the door had a minor scrap with the staff, then chatted to the police. An activist in a Gary Barlow mask explained the amount allegedly owed by Vodafone. One of the officers asked him: ‘Yeah, but have you done your own investigation?’   The investigation that started the first wave of protests in 2010 uncovered a ‘sweetheart deal’ between Vodafone and HMRC. The then chief tax collector Dave Hartnett was criticised by the Public Accounts Committee for letting the company off with paying only £1.25 billion after litigation that lasted nearly a decade. A report by the National Audit Office concluded that the deal was ‘reasonable’, if not fully in line with HMRC’s policies. All parties agreed that the issue was highly complicated – a point Vodafone insists on.   The latest figures need some unpicking too. One reason for the apparent disparity between profits made and taxes paid is a tax break peculiar to Luxembourg which, according to Reuters, ‘lets companies cut their income taxes using costs that they haven’t actually borne’. Another is that Vodafone’s sale of its stake in the US operator Verizon Wireless, which brought it £84 billion last year, was not liable for UK capital gains tax. Even if it had been, the deal would qualify for the substantial shareholdings exemption introduced in the 2002 Finance Act to encourage capital investment in the UK. Vodafone talks about its ‘huge investments’ here and says its profits are a ‘small fraction’ of the revenue. UK Uncut is planning a series of further demonstrations on the question of corporate social responsibility in the run-up to Vodafone’s AGM next month.   ‘If you want to use our police pay your tax,’ the crowd in Oxford Street chanted, telling everyone around that Vodafone owed the British public a lot of money. ‘I don’t understand how that’s possible,’ a passer-by said. ‘Me neither,’ replied a man with ‘I pay more tax than Vodafone’ written on his back. Other posters mentioned the 1.6 million households on waiting lists for social housing, and the 30,000 people forced out of their homes because of the government’s cuts. Eventually the group inside the shop joined everyone on the pavement. The women were from Focus E15 Mothers, social housing campaigners from East London. They are organising a march for ‘Our Right to Decent Housing’ on 5 July.   When the staff closed the shutter, one of the women complained about ‘the heavies’ pushing her. ‘For the first time in my life,’ she said, ‘I want to say thank you to the police.’ The same officer tried to persuade the protesters to move on, but got nowhere. The man in the Gary Barlow mask expounded further on Vodafone’s liabilities. ‘Yeah, but is it your personal opinion,’ the policeman interjected, ‘or is it like a fact?’   http://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2014/06/16/anna-aslanyan/vodahome/ http://www.taxjustice.net/ http://taxjustice.blogspot.com.au/   June 11, 2014   Congress to hand hundreds of billions more in Tax Breaks To Big Corporations, by Dave Johnson.   This one is simply outrageous. Corporations currently owe up to $700 billion in unpaid, “deferred” taxes. The country needs the money – partly because these companies owe so much in taxes. Which of the following choices should the country make?   1. Tell the companies to pay up what they owe, bringing us hundreds of billions to use now and tens of billions a year more from now on.   2. Let them off the hook from ever paying most what they owe, if only they please would let us have a little bit of it now.   Who Is The Boss Of Whom?   The choice depends on who you think is supposed to be the boss of whom. If you believe that We the People are in charge of this country, then obviously you’d say these corporations should just pay the taxes they owe. But if the corporations are in charge of us they’ll tell us they aren’t going to pay these taxes unless we give them something.   Not surprisingly, Congress appears to be working toward option ’2.’ It’s called a “repatriation tax holiday.” They are proposing to tell the companies that moved jobs, factories and profit centers out of the country that it was the right thing to do. Unfortunately that will tell companies that didn’t do these things that they were chumps.   What Is A Tax Holiday?   Here is what’s going on. Giant, multinational U.S. corporations owe our government up to $700 billion in taxes on about $2 trillion in profits they have made (or made it look like they made) outside of the country. But there is a loophole that lets them hold off on paying those taxes owed until they “bring the money home.” So of course, many corporations have been engaged in all kinds of schemes to make it look like they make their money elsewhere – and/or move jobs, factories and profit centers out of the country.   Why is this important right now? In a New York Times “politics” story Tuesday, “Plan to Refill Highway Fund Stokes Conflict in Congress,” this nugget:   [Sen. Harry] Reid and [Sen. Ron] Paul are quietly pressing for a one-time tax “holiday” — a special and lucrative tax deduction — to lure multinational corporations to bring profits home from overseas, producing a sudden windfall.   Instead of telling these corporations that it’s time to pay up, it looks like Congress is preparing to just let them keep much (85 percent) of the money. It’s called a “tax holiday.”   What is the “conflict” the headline talks about? It isn’t a conflict between those who want to hand corporations hundreds of billions of dollars and those who do not want to. The conflict is over how to hand them the money!   Senator Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon, the Finance Committee chairman, and Senator Orrin G. Hatch of Utah, the ranking Republican, want that money to help smooth passage of a broad rewrite of the tax code.   So if Senator Reid is on board for a tax holiday and Senator Wyden is on board for a tax holiday, it looks like the idea of giving this huge amount of cash to these corporations is baked in to the thinking in the Senate. And we’re talking about Democrats here. One side wants (Reid) to give them a tax holiday and get a little bit to use to pay for infrastructure, the other side (Wyden) wants to use it as a bribe to get these giant corporations to let the U.S. government “reform” the tax laws. Both sides are conceding that they’ll accept a tax holiday.   But no one in this discussion is just saying, “Hey, we’d get up to $700 billion and tens of billions every year from now on if we just told these companies to pay the taxes they owe.”   The idea is to give these companies an 85 percent deduction – the “tax holiday” – on their foreign profits and only taxing 15 percent of the profits. In other words, instead of taxing $2 trillion of profits being held out of the country they’ll only tax $300 billion. If these corporations “bring the money home.”   Bloomberg News looks at the cost of this, in “Repatriation Tax Holiday Would Cost U.S. $95.8 Billion.” The “holiday” would bring in a quick $19.6 billion, but would cost $95.8 billion of tax revenue that would come in anyway over the next decade with no changes – not even making these companies just pay up. (Note: This calculation assumes Congress won’t just tell these companies to just pay their taxes. That would bring in up to $700 billion at the top tax rate of 35 percent and tens of billions a year from now on. Companies can deduct any taxes already paid elsewhere, so “up to” means $700 billion minus taxes paid elsewhere.)   That’s right, after all these years of propaganda about budget deficits and the hostage-taking and the “fiscal cliff” and the “debt ceiling” and the sequester and all the resulting budget cuts in essential services and “austerity” and how this has held back the recovery … it looks like Congress is going to just let companies off from paying hundreds of billions of taxes they already owe. This is not about passing another tax break/subsidy, etc. These are taxes that are due and payable on profits that have already been made but that these companies are keeping outside of the country (and away from their shareholders).   Why would Congress even consider letting these corporations off from paying the taxes they owe? Because of rules about not increasing the deficit Congress “needs” the money. This is a “realpolitik” deal, recognizing that the companies have enough power to keep Congress from just making them pay up what they owe. The thinking is they can appease the corporations with an 85 percent tax holiday to get them to pay at least 15 percent of that they owe.   This is another engineered “crisis” where the country is made to believe that deficits are keeping us from doing things we need to do. We need to fund transportation infrastructure, we can’t borrow the money to invest in things like this that make our economy more efficient, hence the need to “incentivize” the corporations to please bring home some of the money they owe us.   In 2004 corporations ran the same scam on Congress, except that time they promised to use the money they brought back to “create jobs.” So what happened?   In 2011 the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) looked at the results of the 2004 tax holiday and found that “their holiday didn’t just fail to create the promised jobs. Their holiday enriched corporations that actually destroyed jobs in the months right after they received their tax windfall.” IPS found that 58 multinationals who used the “American Job Creation Act of 2004"; tax holiday not only immediately laid off tens of thousands, they continued laying off, and laid off close to 600,000 workers between 2004 and now. From the IPS summary of the study,   One government study looking at the first two years after the repatriation windfall found that 12 of the top recipients laid off more than 67,000 American workers. These firms collectively brought back home more than $100 billion …   According to IPS, the companies that gained the most from the tax holiday actually cut jobs, on top of that they used the tax gift money to buy back their own stock, increasing its value, and pay out dividends, both thereby enriching executives and shareholders.   (This is from 2011. Another half a trillion of profits have been shifted offshore since then.)   From the Times story,   In 2004, when Congress approved a similar holiday, lawmakers vowed never to do it again. If it became a habit, they reasoned, companies would keep their profits overseas waiting for the next tax holiday. That, the bipartisan Joint Committee on Taxation explained, is the idea’s “moral hazard problem.”   The 2004 tax holiday only made things worse because companies realized they could get out of paying taxes entirely if they moved profits offshore and held out until the next holiday season. If we do it again, every company will be compelled to move jobs, factories and profit centers out of the country to stay competitive.   They are going to try to sneak this through under the radar. Maybe We the People can stop it if we make enough noise.   http://ourfuture.org/20140611/will-we-let-congress-hand-billion-more-to-big-corporations http://talkpoverty.org/ http://ourfuture.org/20141001/why-you-shouldnt-be-optimistic-about-corporate-tax-reform   Corporate tax breaks cost poor nations $138 billion a year. (ActionAid)   Developing countries could send every child to school, meet all the health-related Millennium Development Goals and have money left over if they cancelled tax incentives for big multinational corporations, according to a report by campaign group ActionAid.   The report entitled “Give us a break: How big companies are getting tax-free deals,” estimates that developing countries lose more than $138 billion a year of government revenue through corporate tax exemptions alone.   “Big companies are doing deals to avoid paying tax on their massive profits. They’re playing developing countries off against each other to get good tax deals for them, but bad deals for the world’s poor,” ActionAid’s advocacy manager Soren Ambrose said.   The report cited the World Bank’s Investor Motivation Survey for the East African Community, in which 93 percent of investors said they would have invested anyway, even if tax incentives had not been on offer.   In a ranking of investor motivations, tax incentives came 17th, behind factors including exchange rates, labour costs and transport infrastructure, the World Bank survey said.   “Governments aren’t collecting the tax which is rightfully theirs. They’re openly letting big companies pay less tax,” Ambrose said. “Some countries are even offering completely tax-free deals – a lose-lose for all involved, especially poor people in urgent need of services like schools and hospitals.”   “In the long run, governments and companies are sabotaging the development of the skilled and healthy workforces that could lift their countries out of poverty,” he said.   Developing countries in East Asia and the Pacific region lost more revenue because of corporate tax exemptions than any other region, an estimated annual loss of $55.1 billion, ActionAid’s report said. Latin America and the Caribbean missed out on an estimated $33.2 billion a year while sub-Saharan Africa lost an estimated $7.6 billion a year, the report added.   http://www.trust.org/item/20130704171338-lvmdw/?source=quickview http://www.trust.org/item/20140226151645-jbwui/?source=quickview http://www.taxjustice.net/ http://www.oxfam.org/en/dc/pressroom/reactions/imfs-new-report-global-corporate-taxation-wake-up-call http://blogs.oxfam.org/en/blogs/14-03-20-tax-inequality-heart-european-public-discontent Visit the related web page
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