Features

Janet Yellen Proposes to Revolutionize Corporate Taxation!

Published

5 years ago

2021/04/11

by Selvam Canagaratna

President Biden is proposing a substantial increase in the rate of corporate taxation as part of his infrastructure plan, bumping the headline rate up from 21 percent to 28 percent. This is actually below where it was before 2017, when the headline rate was 35 percent, but given the number of loopholes in the tax code, very few corporations actually paid full whack back then. If Biden’s idea is passed, the effective rate of US corporate tax will depend on what happens with those loopholes in Congress, which is not yet clear.

More importantly, writes Ryan Cooper, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen is leading an effort to implement a global minimum corporate tax. This would be one of the most revolutionary economic agreements in history — blowing up the model of tax havens around the world, and drastically shifting the balance of power between corporations and national governments (especially small ones).

The last several decades have seen a race to the bottom in corporate tax rates around the world, as economists Emanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman describe in their book Triumph of Injustice: How the Rich Dodge Taxes and How to Make Them Pay.

America, for example, used to have very steep taxes on the rich — a 53 percent tax on corporate profits, a 75 percent tax on the biggest inherited estates, and a 94 percent top marginal income tax rate.

Figures from economist Thomas Piketty show similar rates in France, Germany, and Britain in the period after the Second World War. But these have been gradually whittled away over the years through a combination of legal innovation from tax lawyers and accountants, and learned helplessness on the part of governments — especially after the neoliberal turn in the 1980s, when taxes came to be viewed as an economic drag if not legalized theft. In 1980 the average corporate tax rate in Europe was about 45 percent; in 2020 it was about 20 percent. “Looking at most of the great retreats of progressive taxation, we find the same pattern: first, an outburst of tax dodging; then, governments lamenting that taxing the rich has become impossible and slashing their rates,” they write.

Thanks to all the succeeding rounds of tax cuts, today ultra-billionaires pay less in tax than any other group in the US. According to data compiled by Saez and Zucman, people on the Forbes 400 list of the richest people in the country pay just 23 percent of their income in tax, as compared to about 40 percent for the upper-middle class or 28 percent for the very poorest:

It is of course wildly outrageous for the most well-off people to be contributing so little to support the country that makes their wealth possible, and the gigantic concentration of money in so few hands is manifestly corrupting politics around the world. Low corporate taxes are a big reason for this — as you can see with their handy tool, increasing the effective corporate rate to 40 percent would bump up the Forbes 400 tax rate by about 7 percentage points.

But perhaps more insidious still is the politics of tax havens created by all these cuts.

One of the key legal strategies that corporations use to avoid tax is by stashing their money overseas. Google, for instance, books much of its profit in Ireland, where the headline corporate tax rate is 12.5 percent (and in practice lower than that) and Bermuda, where the corporate tax is zero. As Saez and Zucman explain, companies do this basically through trickery. By selling assets that have no market price (above all intellectual property) to foreign subsidiaries for cheap, they can then book profits relating to those assets there and pay little in tax.

In an economic sense, this is tantamount to fraud. There is not anything like the level of business activity that would justify all those profits being “made” in Ireland or Bermuda. They are overwhelmingly profits made elsewhere that are sheltered from tax authorities through accounting gimmicks.

But the ability to book profits in tax havens provides corporations with a powerful weapon against national tax authorities. By moving profits overseas (or threatening to do so), they have induced nations to continually cut their domestic corporate tax rates, inaugurating a race to the bottom as countries struggle to undercut each other.

In 1980, the average corporate rate was 40.11 percent, but today it is just 23.85 percent. There have always been countries that charged little in corporate tax, but as Saez and Zucman demonstrate, before the 1970s they were not used to book fake profits, for fear of a crackdown from the IRS or other tax authorities. But once authorities in rich countries gave up trying to rein in tax cheats, evasive behaviour exploded: Between 1980 and today, the percentage of foreign profits booked by US-based multinational corporations in tax havens has tripled, from less than 20 percent to almost 60 percent. There is no sign of the trend stopping, either — in 2020 alone, nine countries cut their corporate rate.

Now, America is so big and powerful that it could probably destroy tax havens by itself. Biden’s tax plan would double the tax rate US companies pay on their foreign profits, which would strike a substantial blow by itself. But America could also legally forbid the use of tax shelter accounting strategies for American companies, and require that any international company doing business here do the same — forcing them to book British profits in Britain, German profits in Germany, and so on. Any serious multinational must have access to the vast American domestic market, and they would basically have no choice but to comply. In the extreme, the US could apply economic sanctions to tax havens or even threaten them with military force.

But Yellen is pushing a different argument. The corporate tax race to the bottom is a poisonous zero-sum game — the benefits to Ireland or Bermuda must come at the expense of other countries, and erode the global rate of corporate tax over the long term. It follows that it is in the interest of all nations to set up a universal minimum standard so that nobody is tempted to go for beggar-thy-neighbour development strategies. That holds even for Ireland, where the flood of corporate money has badly corrupted national politics, and the average Irish person barely sees any of those fake profits anyway.

“This is not sustainable, either politically or economically,” Zucman told The Week. “A high global minimum tax would address the issue — and ultimately allow the world to reconcile globalization with tax justice.” The rate of the minimum tax is still being discussed, but if set at a reasonable level, it would be a huge blow against corporate power. In effect, nations would regain a great deal of economic sovereignty — allowing them to choose corporate policies based on what they think is best, rather than being forced to follow the herd and prostrate themselves before the corporate elite.

It is an interesting question as to why Democratic establishment types like Biden and Yellen are pushing this kind of fairly aggressive policy. The complete failure of the Trump corporate tax cuts to perform as promised probably has something to do with it. According to neoliberal economic theory, such cuts should spark investment because companies will get to keep a greater share of the revenues resulting from that investment. That did not happen because of inequality — the mass of American consumers did not have the money to buy the products that new investment would have produced and corporations were already sitting on record hoards of cash. Corporate investment is only surging now thanks to all the money put into ordinary people’s pockets through the various pandemic rescue packages, which has spiked demand for all sorts of things.

At any rate, it remains to be seen whether Biden’s tax plan can get through Congress. But Yellen could still accomplish a great deal without that happening. If a critical mass of countries can agree to stand together against big corporations, politics around the world would take a sharp turn for the better. Ultimately, corporations depend utterly on state laws and structures to exist at all. It’s only fair to make them pay their fair share.

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Features

Proactive peacemaking becomes a paramount need

Published

20 hours ago

2026/06/4

Sahan Weerasooriya

Wasting wars: Some war-displaced people in Lebanon. BBC

It may be some time before the full impact of food inflation is felt in the West. Until such time the world would continue to keep itself in suspense over whether the Trump administration is in earnest when it seeks to convey the impression that it is backing a negotiated solution in West Asia.

As is usually the case, consumer stress would be one of the final determinants of political change. To the degree to which the average US consumer somehow ‘muddles through’ and puts the food on the table, to the same extent would the Republican sections of the US public in particular be tolerant of the Trump administration’s inconsistent handling of the West Asian war and the main issues stemming from it. That is, there would be no grave popular disaffection and a demand for political change in the short term.

However, the indications are that the Trump administration’s support base is suffering some erosion in the wake of the current economic crisis. While reports indicate that Democratic sections are firming-up their opposition to the political centre, Republican support for Trump is also showing signs of waning, we are given to understand.

The above developments are probably why Trump is on record as having given Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a ‘dressing down’ recently on his seeming intransigence on the question of giving negotiations a chance in West Asia. The show of displeasure could be really aimed by Trump at containing the impatience of the American public.

However, the current ground situation in the Middle East, particularly the uncontained bloodshed, is likely to impress on the thinking sections of the world that more than temporary political change is needed in West Asia and the US.

A well thought out political solution that addresses all the contentious issues at the heart of the Middle East conflict is what enlightened opinion would demand, and very rightly. Right now, the ‘peace efforts’ initiated by the Trump administration give the impression of being piecemeal solutions at best.

There have been, of course, numerous initiatives in the past aimed at bringing permanent peace to the Middle East. These failed mainly because they did not address in full the root causes of the conflict.

At bottom the Middle East conflict is mainly about race and religious hate bred by socio-economic and material inequalities. For instance, if the Palestinian people were not displaced and deprived of land occupied by them at the time of the founding of the Israeli state, ethnic enmities would not have grown to the current unmanageable proportions.

When addressing the above questions, though, it must be remembered that the Israelis too were a displaced people who were entitled to land and a state of their own in the Middle East. Basically, out of these seemingly irreconcilable and conflicting demands have grown the Middle East imbroglio.

Middle East peace is considerably about reconciling these demands and arriving at a solution that would ensure the creation of two states that would opt for peaceful co-existence thereafter.

As long as the US does not see the need for a non-partisan solution that addresses the needs of both ethnicities and religions and goes all-out, as it were, to have it implemented, the Middle East would continue to bleed.

However, staunching the blood flow through the creation of two states would be only half the job done, though a very important part of it. More pernicious, pervasive and difficult to remedy are the inter-ethnic and inter-religious hatreds that have been unleashed over the decades.

However, if substantial, long-lasting peace is to be fostered in the region the latter ‘demons’ would need to be exorcised from the hearts and minds of the communities concerned. No doubt an uphill task but one that must be undertaken by those who wish the region well.

The UN would need to put its ‘best foot forward’ in such undertakings but it is time that it dawned on the international community and other caring quarters that Middle East peace, and all other such uphill challenges, require proactive peacemaking on the part of all civilized sections for their effective management. That is, public involvement in peacemaking too is a must.

Since hatreds are harboured in the human consciousness the enmities embedded in the latter need to be managed and defused judiciously alongside other undertakings in a peace process. In the case of West Asia, such enmities could be even spread globe-wide besides being multi-dimensional. For instance, it ought to be thought-provoking that Iran is insistent on a peace initiative that would also include Lebanon.

Besides security considerations it is also ethnic and religious affiliations that account for Iran making this demand. For instance, the Shias are a numerically important religious community in Lebanon and they provide a significant number of Hizbollah fighters, who are in a vital sense carrying out a ‘proxy war’ for Iran. It also needs to be factored in that Iran is a Shia-majority country.

Thus trans-border religious affiliations could add to the complexities and enormity of ethno-religious conflicts. However, the task of managing centuries-long enmities needs to be launched and prodded on with by peacemakers since a downing of arms alone would not guarantee substantive peace.

It is not realized sufficiently that the process of ending hatreds begins with mutual apologies by antagonists to a conflict for the harm inflicted on each other. This would be anathema in some ears but there is no getting away from the requirement. It is the vital first step to permanent peace anywhere.

In fact there could be no reconciliation worth speaking of without such mutual apologies. It is a point worth re-iterating in these times when even the government of Sri Lanka is voicing the need for national reconciliation. Well, without the words, ‘I am sorry’, there could be no permanent end to enmities – they would do well to remember.

The above requirements may not go down very well with governments, but they resonate in the hearts and minds of most people, since they are inheritors of religious traditions of some kind.

This is a principal reason why peacemaking works well when publics too are involved in them. The effectiveness of such campaigns increases several fold when they have a Mahatma Gandhi or a Jawaharlal Nehru at their helm. A strong proactive involvement by the public in peace could lead to the emergence of such leaders at some point in these campaigns.

Features

Dialog Brings Sri Lanka’s Largest Digital Vesak Experience to Matara

Published

20 hours ago

2026/06/4

Sahan Weerasooriya

From left to right: Hon. Saroja Savithri Paulraj, Hon. Sunil Handunnetti, and Lasantha Theverapperuma experience the Dialog 5G Ultra-powered VR tours.

Official Digital Partner of the 2026 ‘Dakshina Prabha’ National Vesak Zone

Dialog Axiata PLC, Sri Lanka’s #1 connectivity provider, collaborated with the Ministry of Buddha Sasana, Religious and Cultural Affairs to bring one of Sri Lanka’s largest and most technologically advanced Vesak experiences to the ‘Dakshina Prabha’ National Vesak Zone. The three-day celebration, in Matara attracted more than hundred thousand visitors, who engaged with a series of innovative digital activities powered by Dialog 5G Ultra, including Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Virtual Reality (VR) experiences, digital pandols and a Data Dansala. The opening ceremony was attended by Hon. Sunil Handunnetti, Minister of Industry and Entrepreneurship Development and Hon. Saroja Savithri Paulraj, Minister of Women and Child Affairs, along with distinguished guests and Dialog’s senior management.

One of the key attractions at the venue was the Dialog 5G Ultra-powered Virtual Reality (VR) experience, which attracted more than 35,000 participants. The activation enabled devotees to virtually visit and pay homage to sacred Buddhist sites, including the Jaya Sri Maha Bodhi in India and the Atamasthana in Anuradhapura, directly from the Vesak zone in Matara.

Visitors receive complimentary mobile data through Dialog’s QR-powered Data Dansala.

Dialog also conducted an AI Digital Vesak Greeting Card Competition from 21 May to 01 June 2026, attracting numerous entries from across the country. The shortlisted designs were showcased across 20 large LED screens throughout the venue and across Matara City, and were also made available for download via mobile devices. Further, through the use of AI, traditional Jathaka Katha were reimagined in a digital format, demonstrating how technology can be used to preserve and enhance cultural and religious heritage. Together, these initiatives blended traditional Vesak celebrations with emerging technologies, offering visitors a unique and immersive way to engage with Vesak traditions.

Extending the spirit of Vesak through connectivity, Dialog conducted a special Data Dansala powered by its QR Reload platform, enabling visitors to receive complimentary mobile data by scanning QR codes placed across the venue. In addition to the Matara National Vesak Zone, similar Data Dansala activations were also conducted at the Gangaramaya and Bauddhaloka Vesak zones in Colombo.Visitors also had the opportunity to create personalised Vesak-themed digital photos through an AI Photo Booth, generating AI-enhanced portraits using their own photographs and adding a contemporary digital element to the Vesak celebrations.

Visitors watch AI-generated Jathaka Katha

Commenting on the initiative, Hon. Sunil Handunnetti, Minister of Industry and Entrepreneurship Development, said, “The 2026 Dakshina Prabha Vesak Festival marked the first time AI-powered digital innovations were incorporated into a National Vesak Festival in Sri Lanka. Presenting Buddhist stories and teachings through technology created a new and engaging way for visitors to connect with these traditions. We thank Dialog for supporting this initiative and for working closely with us to bring our vision to life. Their contribution played an important role in making this first-of-its-kind event a reality.”

Lasantha Theverapperuma, Group Chief Marketing Officer of Dialog Axiata PLC said, “We thank the Government of Sri Lanka for the opportunity to support the 2026 Dakshina Prabha National Vesak Festival and for embracing technology as part of this year’s celebrations. As the Official Digital Partner, we were privileged to contribute through our Dialog 5G Ultra and AI capabilities, creating new ways for visitors to engage with Vesak traditions while preserving their cultural significance for future generations.”

Beyond supporting the National Vesak Zone in Matara, Dialog also enhanced the Gangaramaya and Bauddhaloka Vesak zones through a range of digital activations during the Vesak season. The company additionally continued its sustainability initiatives, including the Thirasara Aloka Poojawa, which illuminated rural places of worship through solar-powered lighting solutions.

Features

Beauty, elegance and talent…for women

Published

20 hours ago

2026/06/4

Sahan Weerasooriya

Universal Woman is an international pageant focused on “beauty, elegance, and talent” for women, positioning itself as a platform to shape global ambassadors. The 2026 edition will be held in Cambodia, and Sri Lanka will be there, as well.

According to reports coming my way, contestants, at the international event, will work with industry trailblazers, under international standards.

Sri Lankan supermodel, runway and pageant trainer Chulpadmendra Kumarapathirana, is the National Director for Universal Woman Sri Lanka 2026.

With over two decades in the industry, Chula was crowned Miss Sri Lanka 2006, and has since shaped the next generation of titleholders through her Colombo-based Chulpadmendra Catwalk Studio, widely regarded as one of the country’s leading modelling academies.

The team behind Universal Woman Sri Lanka 2026

A former host of Derana Miss Sri Lanka for Miss World 2008 and a judge for Miss Universe Sri Lanka 2025, Chula now serves as National Director for Universal Woman Sri Lanka 2026, leading the franchise’s search for Sri Lanka’s delegate to the international final in Cambodia.

Applications for Universal Woman Sri Lanka 2026 are being taken, via WhatsApp: 077 659 4994, says Chula.

The judging panel for Universal Woman Sri Lanka 2026 includes Senaka De Silva, Pageant Aesthetic Advisor & Chairperson of the Judging Panel, Angela Seneviratne, Caroline Jurie, Rozelle Plunkett, and Suraj Mapa.

Universal Woman Sri Lanka 2026 officially began its journey with a first round of auditions, held in Colombo, marking the start of an exciting new chapter in Sri Lanka’s pageant industry.

Launching the first round of auditions

The platform aims to empower women while selecting an intelligent, confident, and inspiring representative to compete at the Universal Woman International Pageant 2026 in Cambodia, this September.

Universal Woman Sri Lanka now moves forward with the vision of creating one of the country’s most prestigious and empowering pageants while preparing to crown a queen who will proudly represent Sri Lanka on the international stage.