Dictionary Definition of a Parasite – An organism that feeds on another organism while contributing nothing to benefit it.
We need to ask if global companies like Amazon, Apple, Google, Starbucks and Vodafone have become the biggest parasites in society. They avoid paying corporate tax as if it were the plague. They siphon money to tax havens, move money around the globe as part of globalisation for tax avoidance purposes.
They don’t seem to care a damn about the plight of those suffering hardships in society. These companies ignore the fact the bosses and the employees use the infrastructure of the country, the public services, transport, education, hospitals, police, schools, universities while being utterly unwilling to contribute to pay through taxation for such services. Surely this is the behaviour of parasites on a massive scale.
Amazon, Apple, Google, Starbucks, Vodafone and others have no sense of accountability to the public through their legal use of every tax loophole they can find; they have no sense whatsoever of civic duty through their unwillingness to pay taxes.
Multi-nationals have two obsessions.
• To make money without contributing to the public purse
• To buy up or put out of business all competitors from small bookshops, small computer networks, small independent coffee shops or smaller telephone companies.
These companies employ an army of lawyers to ensure they pay minimum or no tax whatsoever despite massive profit margins. They can get away with it because it is legal. They siphon massive sums of money from countries such as the UK to countries with lower taxation countries like Bermuda. Ireland, Luxemburg and offshore havens.
Google’s slogan “Avoid Evil” sounds like sick humour when we consider the profits they make in the UK and the amount of tax they pay. Meanwhile politicians launch their scathing attacks on so-called benefit scroungers, namely that tiny number among the poor who live on state benefits rather than job hunt. What we lose to benefit fraud is peanuts compared to the tens of billions lost through corporate tax avoidance.
How much money did Amazon, Google, Starbucks and Vodafone
take from customers in the UK and what did they give back?
• Amazon had sales in the UK of £3.35bn in 2011. US filings revealed that Amazon.co.uk Limited had total sales were worth £4.2 billion last year. They reported a “tax expense” of £1.8m. By basing its EU operation in Luxembourg, the company avoids having to pay tax on its UK sales. It received more in government grants last year than it paid in UK corporation tax. The figures reveal that Amazon paid £2.4m in corporation tax, out of a total 2012 tax bill of £3.2m, but also received £2.5m in government loans last year.
• Google generated £12 billion revenue from the UK between 2006 and 2011, a period when the company paid the equivalent of £10m of UK corporation taxes. An influential parliamentary committee has called on HM Revenue & Customs (UK tax department) to “fully investigate” Google after finding that the internet giant uses “highly contrived” tax arrangements to avoid corporation tax in the UK.
• Starbucks had sales of £400m in the UK last year, but paid no corporation tax. Accounts filed by its UK subsidiary show that since it opened in the UK in 1998 the company made over £3 billion ($4.8 billion) in coffee sales, and opened 735 outlets but paid in taxes only £8.6 million. Over the past three years, Starbucks has reported no profit, and paid no income tax, on sales of £1.2 billion in the UK. Zionist, Howard Schultz, founder/chairman of Starbucks, opened a Starbucks for the military officers/ guards/interrogators/or is that torturers at Guantanamo Bay when it opened.
• Vodafone, the world’s second largest mobile phone company, paid no UK corporation tax for the second year in a row. The company had sales of £5 billion in Britain in the year to March, 2013. Vodafone cut its corporation tax bill to zero because it legally claimed allowances for investment in infrastructure. With revenues of nearly £45bn last year, Vodafone reported underlying earnings of £13bn, and a global profit of more than £3bn.
US Senators claim Apple, the world’s second largest computer technology company, avoids paying billions of$$$ in US tax by creating offshore entities. The company is worth around $145 billion. It is estimate that Apple should pay around $35 billion in taxes to the USA. That money could be employed to support US families enduring terrible hardships due to the mediaeval level of redistribution of wealth through taxation in the USA.
I looked on the UK Government tax website to see what the corporate rates are. The main rate of corporate tax was 26% in 2011 but the UK government is reducing the corporate tax rate year by year down to 20% by 2015 to please its corporate masters.
This will make the small profits rate, such as what the self-employed pay, the same as corporate rates. The website said: “The small profits rate will be unified with the main rate, so from 1 April 2015 there will be only one Corporation Tax rate for non-ring fence profits – set at 20 per cent.
The Solution
Our government keep fobbing us off with notions that it requires international co-operation to stop these parasitical multi-nationals. Rubbish.
The solution to this massive tax avoidance is amazingly simple. Multi nationals must pay corporate tax on their revenue from customers not on profits – the same approach as for ordinary tax payers.
It simply requires an Act of Parliament. You don’t need to be a rocket scientist to work out 23% corporate taxation on annual revenue such as 23% of £4.2 billion from Amazon for 2012.
Meanwhile, let us all make full use of social media and other resources to keep our protest alive about the face of the Corporate world as the largest global parasite.
Tax avoidance multi nationals might work within the system but that does not show morality, ethics or any semblance of virtue since they squeeze the system to their advantage to the absolute maximum.
The CEO’s the boards of directors and the shareholders are the real benefit scroungers living off state benefits without making a genuine contribution to the State.
MAY ALL LIVE WITH WISDOM AND COMPASSION