This Month at Cato Unbound
This month at Cato Unbound we’re debating campaign finance regulation, with a panel of notable contributors and a big, new idea.
That idea is semi-disclosure, in which information about campaign funding is collected and disseminated, but, much like the census, personal names and addresses aren’t attached. Political scientist Bruce Cain suggests semi-disclosure might break the impasse between privacy and the right to know. Others? Well… you’ll just have to wait and see. Joining us will be Nikki Willoughby of Common Cause, election law scholar Richard Hasen of Loyola Law School, and the Cato Institute’s own John Samples. Discussion will run through the rest of the month on this vital issue to our nation’s democracy.
Great mix Edward !
In the Natives are Restless department, I wanted to post a follow-on to yesterday’s comments on the f-u Deficit Commission piece.
[snipped from:http://www.democracynow.org/2010/11/11/over_50_000_students_protest_in0
JUAN GONZALEZ: Now, you wrote recently in the Huffington Post that protest works and that this is having an effect on the government. Could you explain?
JOHANN HARI: Well, one of the things that’s really inspiring about this is how big and how inventive the protest and fightback movement is. And I think this is really helpful for American viewers, where the only fightback that we’re seeing over here from you guys seems to be from this massive exercise in false consciousness, the Tea Party, where people claim to be standing up frontally and they’re in fact installed in office later, stooges for Wall Street and other vested interests. Here, there’s been a much more interesting fightback.
I’ll give you a good example. One of the biggest corporations in Britain is called Vodafone, a cell phone company. And for over six years now, they have been basically refusing to pay taxes on a massive part of their business. They’ve been claiming that it’s routed through Luxembourg, where they pay almost no tax. But it isn’t. And Private Eye, the investigative magazine, calculated they had racked up a bill of six billion pounds to the equivalent of the IRS here. That would be enough to cancel all the cuts in housing benefit that are going to force 200,000 people out of London alone this year. And there was, when this came—but what happened is when the Conservatives came to office, George Osborne, David Cameron’s finance minister, effectively canceled their outstanding tax bill. He reduced it to a sixth of what was legally due. So, it’s a really striking illustration of the priorities: you know, give a massive tax cut to an exceptionally rich corporation and crack down on the poor. Now, when this was revealed by Private Eye and my column and a few other places, including the Financial Times, there was a spontaneous mass movement of real anger among young people. They organized on Twitter, and they did something really inventive: they went to the Vodafone stores all across Britain on a specified day and shut them down. They said, “If you want to operate on our streets, in our country, you pay our taxes.”
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alpine payment systems scam
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