Motley Moose – Archive

Found on the Internets …

The president held a news conference yesterday as part of the U.S. Africa Leaders Summit. One of the topics was executive actions on inversions.

Q: Along the lines of executive authority, Treasury Secretary Jack Lew has previously said that the executive branch of government doesn’t have the authority to slow or stop corporate inversions, the practice that you have called distasteful, unpatriotic, et cetera.  But now he is reviewing options to do so.  And this is an issue that a lot of business, probably including some of the ones who were paying a lot of attention to this summit, are interested in.  So what I wanted to ask you was, what prompted this apparent reversal?  What actions are now under consideration?  Will you consider an executive order that would limit or ban such companies from getting federal contracts?  And how soon would you like to see Treasury act, given Congress’s schedule?

PRESIDENT OBAMA:  Just to review why we’re concerned here. You have accountants going to some big corporations — multinational corporations but that are clearly U.S.-based and have the bulk of their operations in the United States — and these accountants are saying, you know what, we found a great loophole — if you just flip your citizenship to another country, even though it’s just a paper transaction, we think we can get you out of paying a whole bunch of taxes.

Well, it’s not fair.  It’s not right.  The lost revenue to Treasury means it’s got to be made up somewhere, and that typically is going to be a bunch of hardworking Americans who either pay through higher taxes themselves or through reduced services. And in the meantime, the company is still using all the services and all the benefits of effectively being a U.S. corporation; they just decided that they’d go through this paper exercise.

Walgreens Drops Plan To Move Headquarters – And Profits – Overseas

Walgreens Co. will complete its merger with Alliance Boots, a British pharmacy, but it will not move its headquarters overseas to reduce its U.S. tax bill.Walgreens had flirted with the idea of moving its headquarters from Chicago to the United Kingdom to avoid paying corporate taxes in the U.S.

That drew the attention of those who are concerned about profits made in America being taxed overseas, if at all.

“The company concluded it was not in the best, long-term interest of our shareholders to attempt to re-domicile outside the U.S.,” Walgreens CEO Greg Wasson said in a statement.

Yeah. The shareholders who saw images like this, perhaps?



Maybe a pharmaceutical company like Abbott Laboratories can get away with this but companies that deal directly with consumers and which has competition probably should at least pretend to be a good corporate citizen.

More …

On Saturday morning, I read a sobering first person account at Think Progress about “The Bone-Chilling, Heart-Wrenching Process Of Counting The Nation’s Homeless”:

It was 1 a.m., three hours since I’d last felt my toes, and the four of us stood over a man who may have been dead.

“Are you okay under there?” Catherine asked the pile of blankets tucked away in a building alcove on the corner of 23rd and I St. NW in Washington, D.C. It was the type of spot where most pedestrians wouldn’t even know a homeless person was there.

He didn’t move. She asked again. No answer. She repeated a third time. Nothing.

The three of us held our breath, looking to her for some simple explanation why this wasn’t what it seemed. Maybe he was ignoring us. After all, we were uninvited guests to his makeshift home in the middle of the night.

Maybe he had some secret way of handling five-degree temperatures, even when others might freeze to death.

I wondered, along with the author, about what kind of nation we were that 610,042 people are homeless on any given night in America, some in the worst possible physical conditions.

But nothing prepared me for my reaction to an Op-Ed piece in the Miami Herald by Leonard Pitts, the reminder of those who have, perhaps, too many homes.

Grab a tissue …