Critical Takes on Corporate Power

@criticaltakes.bsky.social

What should we do about the power of multinationals? Fresh analysis, comment and reflection from across civil society. Non-profit. https://criticaltakes.org To get the latest in a short monthly email: https://criticaltakes.org/newsletters/

A clear account of how unitary taxation of multinational profits might work. With a simple answer to the problem of source countries' profits from resource extraction - remove them from apportionment. (Profits from mineral processing in the country of extraction might also need to be removed).

Tax Justice Network@taxjustice.net · yesterday

Unitary taxation would end the fiction that a multinational is a collection of unrelated entities & tax it as what it is: a single business. Alison Schultz breaks down technical choices, from resource rights to where sales are measured, that shape who benefits from global tax reform. bit.ly/4wbE1s7

The UK was bullied into doing a terrible deal with the US which requires our public health service to pay higher prices for drugs to pharmaceutical companies. No-one benefits except Big Pharma. Including British Big Pharma, parts of which already get big public subsidies through our tax system.

@chakrabortty.bsky.social · last mo.

Keir Starmer has done a trade deal with Donald Trump that could end up costing our NHS £45 billion - and, experts say, cause more Britons to die than Covid. So why is hardly anyone talking about it? My column www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

What do you do when you want less public engagement & more chats with corporations, but your own rules say you can’t? If you're the EU, you just change the rules! We've joined 59 orgs to reject #CorporateCapture & call on the European Commission to reconsider its Better Regulations plans.

A slide away from better regulation, not progress towards it | Corporate Europe Observatory

59 civil society organisations and trade union organisations speak out against the Commission’s plans to change its approach to law-making. They denounce four elements, in particular: bypassing of imp...

corporateeurope.org

This story is ridiculous & a perfect illustration of the flaws of the EU's tech sovereignty approach. The EU Commission is implementing a US model running on Amazon cloud to rank job candidates. Ignoring potential algorithmic biases, black box decision-making, privacy risks and more dependency.

EU turns to US-powered AI to rank job candidates | Euractiv

With its ever-growing list of candidates, the European Commission is preparing to deploy an AI tool powered by Anthropic's model to shortlist them

euractiv.com

Euractiv@euractiv.com · 2mo ago

EU turns to US-powered AI to rank job candidates

In a well-functioning democratic system, there would be no need for campaigning NGOs to exist because the system itself would note and respond to those concerns without needing to be lobbied. Instead, that role gets outsourced to a handful of activist legislators and their underfunded NGO allies.

Sam Jeffers@worklesshard.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Meta spends €10m/year on Brussels lobbying. You could fund a small advocacy and research NGO for 50 years with that. www.euractiv.com/news/metas-l...

True everywhere. The interests of private capital are becoming entirely disconnected from material reality. One might like to think that the managers of capital can't *all* be that stupid or cowardly, but the evidence of the US stock market currently suggests otherwise.

Nick Dearden@nickdearden.bsky.social · 3mo ago

“Those promoting the rush for hyperscale AI datacentres seem to be living in a parallel reality where the last 50 years of climate science hasn’t happened, and where we aren’t already experiencing the signs of climate breakdown.” www.theguardian.com/business/202...