U.S. Trade Agreements Offshore Outsources Jobs so Congress Passes More of Them

[hvactec]

Fri, 10/07/2011 - 02:35

We know bad trade deals have cost millions of American jobs. We have a jobs crisis with no growth in site. So, why in God's name would Congress pass more of the same? The South Korean trade deal has been analyzed to lose 159,000 jobs. The Panama trade agreement creates corporate tax havens that will be completely out of reach by the United States. Add in the Columbia trade deal and we've lost 214,000 jobs.

The U.S. Congress Joint Economic Committee held a hearing, aptly titled, Manufacturing in the USA: How U.S. Trade Policy Offshores Jobs. The title says it all, eh? Unfortunately the actual hearing didn't have the right economists who would show amply with statistics and facts, the overall hearing title is oh so true.

Contained within is the obligatory other side of multinational corporations, and the real agenda of this hearing is some token retraining for U.S. workers who will lose their jobs as a result of these bad trade deals.

Workers are not alone in wondering why our government sells us once again down the river on jobs. Small businesses, especially small U.S. manufacturers are asking the same question.

read more U.S. Trade Agreements Offshore Outsources Jobs so Congress Passes More of Them | The Economic Populist

 

[waltky]

Tax havens comin' under fire...

Tax havens: Is the tide turning?
11 October 2011 - The Cayman Islands offer a wide range of financial services

Around the world, grassroots opposition to tax avoidance is on the rise. But a survey shows that all but two of the UK's biggest 100 companies have subsidiaries in tax havens, from the Cayman Islands to Singapore. So is big business out of step with public opinion? Occupy Wall Street protesters demand corporations "pay their fair share" of tax. U2 comes under fire from protesters at the Glastonbury festival who accuse the band of taking advantage of low tax rates in the Netherlands. A global day of action against tax secrecy is marked in dozens of countries from Ghana to Brazil.

Protesters stage sit-ins in shops and banks around the UK in the hope of getting tax avoidance by massive corporations on to the political agenda. In recent months, a loose coalition on "tax fairness" has emerged, uniting angry taxpayers, business ethics pressure groups and development NGOs. The focus is now on tax avoidance - legal arrangements to pay less tax, sometimes using complicated financial structures - rather than just illegal tax evasion.

One of the campaigning groups, charity ActionAid, has just released data that shows, it says, the "addiction" of the FTSE 100 - the UK's most valuable companies - to tax havens. The data should have been publicly available, ActionAid says, but in many cases wasn't - the charity obtained it by filing complaints to Companies House. Then it counted how many subsidiaries each of the 100 companies has, and the proportion of them that are located in a tax haven.

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[editec]

Workers are not alone in wondering why our government sells us once again down the river on jobs. Small businesses, especially small U.S. manufacturers are asking the same question.

Because such deals now make BIG CAPITAL even richer, that's why.