USA: How Corporate Lobbyists Conquered American Democracy - by Lee Drutman

One has to go back to the Gilded Age to find business in such a dominant political position in American politics. While it is true that even in the more pluralist 1950s and 1960s, political representation tilted towards the well-off, lobbying was almost balanced by today's standards. Labor unions were much more important, and the public-interest groups of the 1960s were much more significant actors. And very few companies had their own Washington lobbyists prior to the 1970s. To the extent that businesses did lobby in the 1950s and 1960s (typically through associations), they were clumsy and ineffective. “When we look at the typical lobby,” concluded three leading political scientists in their 1963 study, American Business and Public Policy, “we find its opportunities to maneuver are sharply limited, its staff mediocre, and its typical problem not the influencing of Congressional votes but finding the clients and contributors to enable it to survive at all.”

Read more at: How Corporate Lobbyists Conquered American Democracy - The Atlantic

The long and winding road to global corporate tax justice – Alex Cobham

More than 130 countries and jurisdictions have now signed up in principle to outline proposals to reform international corporate tax rules. These proposals—and in particular, the global minimum corporate-tax rate envisaged—would represent the biggest change for a century. But the reforms, now driven by the United States under Joe Biden, are also proving highly divisive, globally and within the European Union. That has potentially important implications for the tax rules and EU-US relations.


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The Netherlands: More than 100 North and South American Companies go Dutch in 2020

In 2020, 305 foreign companies chose to establish or expand operations in the Netherlands, according to the annual results of Invest in Holland and the Netherlands Foreign Investment Agency (NFIA) released today. These companies from around the globe expect to create more than 8,600 direct jobs in the first three years and invest 1.9 billion euros in their projects. Although the coronavirus is causing the Netherlands to attract fewer foreign companies, there is a constant flow of new companies as a result of Brexit.

U.S. and Canadian companies like Beyond Meat, Crocs, MSD, Inshur and McCain Foods tallied 100 direct investment projects in the Netherlands in 2020, accounting for nearly one-third of the foreign investment projects that NFIA and its partners were directly involved in worldwide.

Companies from North and South America are expected to invest close to 1.1 billion euros and generate 3,971 new jobs in the Netherlands by 2023. Expansion and relocation projects involved marketing and sales offices, distribution centers, European headquarters, manufacturing facilities and R&D in a range of industries from information technology and agrifood to life sciences & health.

Read more at: More than 100 North and South American Companies go Dutch in 2020

USA: President Biden Faces Multiple Crises, Needs Radical Agenda Despite Corporate Opposition - by Inderjeet Parmar

The multiple crises that President Joe Biden faces are too many and too deep and systemic to be tackled in the old way or papered over – they require massive state intervention comparable in scale and character to Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s ‘New Deal’ of the 1930s, and embedding in a new global grand bargain acknowledging multipolarity and the effective twilight of the US’s global preponderance. Just like white Americans must accommodate the fact of their ‘majority-minority’ status in 20 years – they will be the largest single racial group but no longer a majority of the population – so must the foreign policy establishment accommodate to the US as the strongest, but no longer totally preponderant, world power.

The American crisis is stark. Look at the US federal capital – with over 20,000 national guard erecting a ring of steel around the inaugural platform. The US Capitol building in Washington, DC, looks increasingly like Baghdad’s Green Zone – with more US troops deployed for a ‘peaceful transfer of power’ than are based in Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria. The FBI is vetting national guardsmen for extreme right-wing links in case an attack should be launched from within the ‘security’ services. It is a state in the centre of a perfect but terrible storm, reaping the whirlwind sown by the hyper-authoritarian, fascistic, Trump regime, but which is also rooted in a range of crises going back several decades.

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Canada: Maple Leaf Foods boss attack on Trump pits ethics against shareholder value by Don Pittis

In blaming "the narcissist in Washington" for the death of Canadian airline passengers, should the Maple Leaf Foods boss have risked shareholder value for mere ethics?

Read more at:
https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/ethics-business-trump-1.5424829