U.S. Government is and has been Accomplice, Pimping the Genetically Modified Organism (GMO) Seeds, produced by the Nation-less Corporations, Throughout the World, Including Monsanto, Report Reveals

- By MARK KARLIN, EDITOR OF BUZZ FLASH AT TRUTH OUT

It is official, the amber waves of grain in "America, The Beautiful" are now unofficially owned, in growing acreage, by Monsanto and the other giant seed companies.  Not only that, the US State Department and executive branch have been acting as marketing agents for the companies who are patenting the most basic seeds necessary for human survival – and doing it throughout the world.

The non-profit organization Food and Water Watch just released a report in which it concludes:

In the past decade, the United States has aggressively pursued foreign policies in food and agriculture that benefit the largest seed companies. The U.S. State Department has launched a concerted strategy to promote agricultural biotechnology, often over the opposition of the public and governments, to the near exclusion of other more sustainable, more appropriate agricultural policy alternatives.

Russian Television (RT) provided more insight into the basis for the Food and Water Watch findings:

After US diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks showed that the State Department was lobbying worldwide for Monsanto and other similar corporations, a new report based on the cables shows Washington's shilling for the biotech industry in distinct detail.The August 2011 WikiLeaks revelations showed that American diplomats had requested funding to send lobbyists for the biotech industry to hold talks with politicians and agricultural officials in "target countries" in areas like Africa and Latin America, where genetically-modified crops were not yet a mainstay, as well as some European countries that have resisted the controversial agricultural practice.

The title of the white paper is "Biotech Ambassadors: How the U.S. State Department Promotes the Seed Industry's Global Agenda"

Although the WikiLeaks cables covered 2005 – 2009, the Obama administration has continued to cozy up to Monsanto, including the appointment of former Monsanto-associated individuals to government positions.  Furthermore, as RT reported, just a short time ago "the president signed into law an agricultural spending bill that included a provision that provides biotech companies with liability from future lawsuits filed over possible health hazards brought on by unregulated and untested GMO products."

One possible change in long-term US policy supporting the privatization of GMO seeds for the most basic staples of food around the world (in conjunction with the sale of companion mega-pesticides) occurred the other day.  RT again was on top of the story:

Biotech giant Monsanto faced a surprising setback after federal authorities refused to approve a new generation of genetically-engineered crops that could survive an unprecedented use of herbicides.

Monsanto was awarded a big win on Monday by the United States Supreme Court, but another federal ruling made only days earlier brought some comparatively bad news to the biotech giant.

The US Department of Agriculture announced Friday that they’ve ordered additional environmental impact statements (EIS) for herbicide-resistant crops that have been waiting for federal approval. Now Monsanto and the chemical company Dow will have to sit anxiously and await the results of those assessments before they are given the go-ahead to sell genetically-engineer plants that have raised serious environmental issues.

At stake is the future for a variety of corn, soybean and cotton crops that have been genetically-engineered to resist two heavy-duty pesticides, namely 2,4-D and dicamba. Both Monsanto and Dow have been hoping to get the go-ahead to sell these crops, but ordering further testing will set the release date back to perhaps 2015.

But don't celebrate just yet.  The Obama administration has let Monsanto and the other genetically engineered giants pretty much write their own ticket when it comes to owning and controlling "the staff of life."  Just as with the Keystone Pipeline, which is going to be operational shortly -- it's just a question of whether or not a more profitable new route gets built to replace the current northern section that is up in the air – more than likely the Obama administration is just acting is if it is taking environmental concerns seriously, with the intention of approving the Monsanto and Dow hyper-herbicide genetically engineered seeds at a later date (probably in a press release at 5 pm on a Friday afternoon sometime).

Meanwhile, Monsanto is launching another counter-offensive to critics who believe seeds should not be patented and owned by a few global corporations.

A Bloomberg News headline from May 15 reads, "Monsanto Sees ‘Elitism’ in Social Media-Fanned Opposition": "Monsanto Co. (MON) opponents who want to block genetically modified foods are guilty of 'elitism' that is fanned by social media and fail to consider the needs of the rest of the world, Chief Executive Officer Hugh Grant said."

As Monsanto and its cohorts in patenting the seeds of life receive US government support to own the amber waves of grain, the Monsanto CEO would have you believe that the company is acting out of benevolence.  Those inhabitants of earth who think that seeds needed for human survival belong to the human race-- not private companies with patented profits -- are just greedy individuals, right?

Learn From The Criminal Nation-less Corporations, How To Avoid Paying Taxes

Even Before Apple Tax Breaks, Ireland’s Policy Had Its Critics

- By LANDON THOMAS Jr. and ERIC PFANNER - May 21, 2013 - The New York Times

DUBLIN — The secrets of how Apple avoided billions of dollars in taxes lie in a low-slung building of glass and brick in the hills of County Cork.

There, in the Hollyhill Industrial Estate and elsewhere in Ireland, Apple employs a mere 4 percent of its global work force. But there, too, Apple recorded a staggering 65 percent of its worldwide income — $26 billion last year — enabling the company, according to Senate investigators, to markedly reduce its tax bill in the United States and the rest of the world.

Such arrangements are not uncommon in Ireland, where for years authorities have not only tolerated but encouraged multinational companies like Google, Facebook, Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson and Citigroup to set up shop and provide good jobs, in return for helping those companies pay less tax around the world.

But on Tuesday, as Timothy D. Cook, Apple’s chief executive, found himself on Capitol Hill being questioned about Apple’s tax practices, Ireland came under sharp criticism for its attractiveness as a pied-à-terre for American companies doing business in Europe. At the eye of that storm: a special corporate tax rate of only 2 percent that Senate investigators say Apple worked out with Irish tax authorities.

Carl Levin, the Michigan senator who heads the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, said Apple was “exploiting an absurdity” by using three Irish subsidiaries to legally avoid taxes.

The United States Senate is hardly Ireland’s only critic on tax matters. Britain, France and other European Union countries have long been annoyed by Irish policies. During hearings in the British Parliament last week, Margaret Hodge, a member of the opposition Labour Party and chairwoman of the Public Accounts Committee, which oversees taxation, upbraided Matt Brittin, Google’s vice president for North and Central Europe, that the company’s tax practices were “devious, calculated and, in my view, unethical.”

Even before the Senate subcommittee invited Mr. Cook to testify, the British prime minister, David Cameron, declared that the topic would be a focus of the meeting of the Group of 8 richest countries he plans to convene next month at Lough Erne in Northern Ireland.

“We need a truly global solution,” Mr. Cameron wrote in a letter to Herman Van Rompuy, president of the European Council, in April. “As I am sure you will agree, the path to reform starts with the basic recognition that current global tax rules do not reflect the modern and globalized economy that our citizens live and trade in.”

Ireland, with an economy that ranks 47th in the world, is not a member of the Group of 8.

Ireland’s deputy prime minister, Eamon Gilmore, on Tuesday disputed the Senate report’s contention that Apple paid a special rate, saying “Ireland doesn’t negotiate special tax rate deals with any companies.” He said that if Apple was not paying its fair share elsewhere in Europe, the fault lay in “loopholes” in other European countries that make it too easy for companies to avoid taxation.

“That’s an issue that has to be addressed first of all in those jurisdictions,” Mr. Gilmore told reporters in Brussels.

The charge by the Senate subcommittee that Apple avoided paying $44 billion in taxes in the United States by keeping the bulk of its $102 billion cash hoard offshore has struck a nerve here in a recession-racked country where unemployment is 15 percent and the government is looking for ways to repay an 80 billion euro bailout, now equivalent to $103 billion, that it received from the European Union and the International Monetary Fund in 2010.

“There is something wrong with this picture — the revenues of these companies keep increasing while our workers are getting crushed,” said Peter Mathews, a chartered accountant who is also a member of the Irish Parliament for the governing Fine Gael party. “Apple’s cash pile is about the size of our national income. Why not have them pay a 4 percent levy to contribute to our national recovery?”

Apple, which set up its first overseas headquarters in 1980 in Cork to assemble Macintosh computers, has a long history with the Irish. Its 4,000 workers — the largest Apple labor force in Europe — is significant in a country of only 4.6 million people. Apple’s employees assemble iMacs and Mac Pros and are also engaged in research, customer service and other support functions. “Our tax system may be lax, but in exchange we get jobs and more foreign investment,” said Stephen Kinsella, an economist at the University of Limerick who contributes to the influential Irish Economy blog. “No doubt about it, the benefits outweigh the costs.”

Irish politicians through the years have stood behind the country’s official 12.5 percent corporate tax rate, so much so that three years ago when the previous government negotiated the international bailout, it refused to budge when European negotiators wanted to make a higher tax rate a condition for a deal.

Government figures show that in 2010 the effective rate on the gross income of companies here was only 6 percent, and economists say that in some cases — as with Apple — it can go lower than that. That stands in contrast to the effective corporate tax rate in other countries: 29 percent in the United States, 22 percent in Britain, 27 percent for France and 24 percent for Germany.

More than 600 American companies have set up in Ireland, employing 100,000 Irish workers and enjoying the advantages of an English-speaking work force and low taxes.

Representatives of several American companies, including Amazon and Starbucks, have, like Google and Apple, insisted that they comply with the law.

“Apple does not use tax gimmicks,” Mr. Cook told the Senate subcommittee Tuesday.

Under European Union law, companies based in one European country are permitted to do business across the 27-nation bloc, and Internet companies, in particular, use that rule to book their European revenue in the country offering the greatest tax benefits. For many, that is Ireland.

But if Ireland were to change its approach to taxation, other low-tax European countries like Luxembourg and Slovakia would simply take its place.

“Back in the 1970s and ‘80s, when Ireland was a poor state desperately trying to attract investment, tax was a weapon that others weren’t using,” said Richard Murphy, founder of the Tax Justice Network, a group in London that campaigns against tax havens. “So Ireland developed a twofold strategy: low rates and not too many questions. It became the conduit state of choice.”

Landon Thomas Jr. reported from Dublin and Eric Pfanner from Serraval, France.

Learn From The Criminal Nation-less Corporations, How To Avoid Paying Taxes

For Many of the U.S. Nation-less Corporation's Money ‘Offshore’ Means: New York, Manhattan

- By DAVID KOCIENIEWSKI - May 21, 2013 - The New York Times

Like some of the nation’s prominent chief executives, Apple’s Timothy D. Cook has a simple proposal to help spur the economy and encourage corporate tax compliance: give American companies a tax break to bring to the United States untaxed profits parked overseas.

But much of that money is already home.

Nation-less Corporations based in the United States now hold more than $1.6 trillion in cash classified as “permanently invested overseas.” These funds will face the 35 percent federal corporate tax only if it is returned to the country.

In the convoluted world of corporate tax accounting however, simple concepts like “overseas” and “returned to the country” are not as simple as they appear.

Apple’s $102 billion in offshore profits is actually managed by one of its wholly owned subsidiaries in Reno, Nev., according to the Senate report on the company’s tax avoidance. The money is tracked by Apple company bookkeepers in Austin, Tex. What’s more, the funds are held in bank accounts in New York.

Because the $102 billion is technically assigned to two Irish subsidiaries, however, the United States tax code considers the money to be under foreign control, and Apple is legally entitled to avoid paying taxes on it.

Tax experts say that such an arrangement is not uncommon among American multinationals. During the last several years, major companies like Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard, Google and Abbott Labs have lowered their tax bills by arranging for their billions in profits to flow to subsidiaries that are technically offshore — even though some of the money is placed in United States Treasury bonds and other government securities.

Because the money is nominally held by the offshore companies, the tax code deems the money nontaxable, even if the funds are physically held in the United States. The savings to American companies is huge: the Congressional Joint Committee on Taxation estimated that if foreign profits of United States corporations were fully taxed it would generate an additional $42 billion this year for the government — about half the amount of the automatic spending cuts enacted as part of the so-called sequester.

The companies say that they need to shield their money overseas, however, because the official corporate rate of 35 percent is the highest in the world and puts them at a competitive disadvantage. And while the offshore money may be in American banks and controlled from home, executives say it would be irresponsible to return the money to their shareholders or invest it in the United States because of the high tax rate.

Just last month, Apple announced it would pay for its dividends to shareholders by taking on $17 billion in debt rather than tap into the untaxed foreign profits. Mr. Cook said it would have been a disservice to shareholders to use the “offshore” earnings and pay the 35 percent federal income tax.

But Senator Carl Levin, the Michigan Democrat who heads the committee, brushed aside those claims. “You can bring the money home,” he said. “You’d just have to pay your taxes on it.”

Apple is one of about 20 major corporations that have been pushing for a fresh tax break, known as a “repatriation holiday,” which would allow them to bring the money to the United States at a drastically reduced rate. John T. Chambers, chief executive of Cisco, has led a sustained lobbying effort for such a policy, promising that it would act as a stimulus to encourage investment and increase jobs in the United States.

A similar policy was enacted in 2004, which prompted American companies to return more than $300 billion in foreign earnings at the reduced rate of 5.25 percent. But it led to no discernible increase in American investment or hiring. On the contrary, some of the companies that brought back the most money laid off thousands of workers, and a study by the National Bureau of Economic Research later concluded that 92 cents on every dollar was used for dividends, stock buybacks or executive bonuses. A study by the Congressional Joint Committee on Taxation estimated that a similar program would result in $79 billion in forgone tax revenue over a decade.

Opponents of the repatriation tax break say that Apple’s accounting maneuvers show how easily major companies can shield their profits from the government, even putting companies without aggressive tax departments at a competitive disadvantage.

“The offshore companies are a fiction and the statement that the money is offshore is a fiction,” said Edward D. Kleinbard, former staff director for the Congressional Joint Committee on Taxation. “What they are asking for is a reward for having gamed the system.”