Class Struggle

Cleaners at Topshop are sub-contracted to a company, Britannia Services Group, that made £1.34m profit after tax. Philip Green, worth nearly £5bn, runs the Arcadia Group that owns Topshop. Arcadia made more than £250m profit last year, but it is registered to Philip Green’s wife, who lives in the Monaco tax haven. Mr. Green recently bought a £100m yacht. The […]
The post Topshop protests over Living Wage and suspensions appeared first on BSNEWS.

WASHINGTON, D.C—The sustained, daily civil disobedience at the Capitol by demonstrators denouncing the capture of our political system by corporate money is part of one of the largest and most important movements for social justice since the Occupy uprising. Join it. Six hundred of the protesters have been arrested, and I was among 100 arrested Friday. The protesters, organized by […]
The post Revolution Is in the Air appeared first on BSNEWS.

What lies ahead is not pretty. There is an element of The Sleepwalkers – Christopher Clark’s masterful account of how Europe marched to war in 1914. But mostly, a low-budget American show gave away the game. This is Walking Dead Europe.
The post Welcome to ‘Walking Dead Europe’ appeared first on BSNEWS.

Emergency meetings, banker summits, crashing European banks, and the worst bank reports since the Great Recession.
Just about every major banker and finance minister in the world is meeting in Washington, DC, this week, following two rushed, secretive meetings of the Federal Reserve and another instantaneous and rare meeting between the Fed Chair and the president of the United States. These and other emergency bank meetings around the world cause one to wonder what is going down.

If the auspiciously named ICIJ and their partner journalists were actually interested in excising this offshore cancer for want of a better world, they would be demanding that all corporations and officials in positions of significant influence publish their tax affairs for ICIJ or public examination. It would be releasing all the Panama Papers: at the very least to independent journalists for them to report on or at best in a public database.

It is true that Venezuela faces many problems, not least in terms of its economic difficulties. These are being exacerbated both by a conscious economic war — with echoes of the situation in Chile prior to the 1973 coup that brought General Pinochet to power — and the plunge in world oil prices.
But the right’s programme of vicious neoliberalism — illustrated by its proposals for the mass sell-off of housing — will only make these worse, while reversing the gains in reduced poverty and inequality, plus increased labour rights, in recent years.

The idea was to transform Haiti into a Taiwan of the Caribbean, with maquiladoras, an apparel industry, tourism, and call centers. These would be the niche sectors that would guide the new cooperation framework.
In this plan, the particularities of Haiti itself didn’t matter much.
The post Hillary Clinton and Haiti appeared first on BSNEWS.

The Vikings revenge. Iceland is taking the money back from the clutches of the private fractional reserve lending cartel. It’s happened before in history, and with great success, but it has also prompted a violent backlash from the elites… Back in 1914, the Bradbury Pound was introduced by the UK government as an ’emergency measure’ to bolster a failing economy. […]

Even without a smoking gun, a case can be made this alleged most massive leak ever was obtained by -- what else -- U.S. intel. This is the kind of stuff the NSA excels at. The NSA is able to break into virtually any database and/or archives anywhere; they steal "secrets"; and then selectively destroy/blackmail/protect assets and "enemies," according to USG interests.
The post Dance to the Panama Papers ‘Limited Hangout’ Leak appeared first on BSNEWS.

I stress, I am suggesting nothing illegal happened. But to say that Ian Cameron did not gain from tax avoidance when running such a structure is absurd and Robert Peston has a duty to do better than that if he is to be taken seriously.
The post Fisking Robert Peston on tax avoidance appeared first on BSNEWS.