The Walmart Web: How the World’s Biggest Corporation Secretly Uses Tax Havens to Dodge Taxes

Americans for Tax Fairness Americans for Tax Fairness
Most people know that Walmart is the world’s biggest corporation. Virtually no one knows that Walmart has an extensive and secretive web of subsidiaries located in countries widely known as tax havens. Typically, the primary purpose for a corporation to set up subsidiaries in tax havens where it has little to no business operations and few, if any, employees is to pay little, if any, taxes and to maintain financial secrecy.

Argentine Women Call Out Machismo

UKI GOÑI The New York Times
The term “femicidio,” which encompasses the murder of women by domestic violence, in honor killings and in other categories of hate crime, has now entered our everyday language in Argentina. “The cause is our country’s macho culture,” said Fabiana Tuñez, executive director of Casa del Encuentro, a women’s shelter. Women’s rights advocates like her see a continuum between the deadly violence and supposedly harmless everyday sexism.

New NASA data show how the world is running out of water

Todd C. Frankel The Washington Post
Scientists had long suspected that humans were taxing the world’s underground water supply, but the NASA data was the first detailed assessment to demonstrate that major aquifers were indeed struggling to keep pace with demands from agriculture, growing populations, and industries such as mining.

Black Like Her

Jelani Cobb The New Yorker
Dolezal’s primary offense lies not in the silly proffering of a false biography but in knowing this ugly history and taking advantage of the reasons that she would, at least among black people, be taken at her word regarding her identity.

Ornette Coleman's Revolution

John Pietaro CounterPunch
There was no one like Ornette, this brilliant musical philosopher and singular voice who forged a path of revolt in a time when racism and inequity coursed through the nation unashamed. His musical journey inspired new generations of free improvisers and experimental composers and demonstrated that undeterred vision can conquer the status quo.

The Bloody Origins of the Dominican Republic’s Ethnic ‘Cleansing’ of Haitians

Abby Phillip The Washington Post
Today, things are as tense on the island as they have been in years. Within days, the Dominican government is expected to round up Haitians — or, really, anyone black enough to be Haitian — and ship them to the border, where they will likely be expelled. The government has described it, in terms chillingly reminiscent of the Holocaust, as a "cleansing" of the country's immigration rolls.

What’s the Matter With Indiana?

Steve Early CounterPunch
Amid all that’s clearly wrong with Indiana’s current direction under right wing Republican rule, Quigley ( If We Can Win Here: The New Front Lines of the Labor Movement, Cornell University Press, 2015) finds cause for optimism. “Despite a state political climate that proved inhospitable to labor in the right-to-work debate, private sector workers are launching union organizing campaigns across the state’s capital,” and in smaller towns as well.

What is Reform? The Strange Case of Greece and Europe

James Galbraith The American Prospect
The specific reforms demanded by Greece's creditors today are a peculiar blend. They aim to reduce the state; in this sense they are “market-oriented”. Yet they are the furthest thing from promoting decentralization and diversity. On the contrary they work to destroy local institutions and to impose a single policy model across Europe, with Greece not at the trailing edge but actually in the vanguard. In this other sense the proposals are totalitarian . . .