Financial Transparency Coalition

The fallout from the scandal surrounding the discovery that Wal-Mart headquarters suppressed an internal investigation when it discovered its Mexican subsidiary had been systematically paying bribes has been swift and significant. According to an investigative piece in the New York Times, Wal-Mart used bribes not only to obtain permits for its stores, but to reduce the time required for those permits, from months to days or weeks. The public outcry to denounce the corporation has been loud. But not everyone has joined the opprobrium. Many have said, either implicitly or explicitly, that Wal-Mart was doing business the way business needs...

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a blog post criticizing the philosophies of Dan Mitchell, a libertarian scholar from the Cato Institute. I asked for a “thoughtful discussion” and I got it—both from the comments section of our blog and from Dan himself. On his own blog, Dan replied with a thought-provoking point-by-point critique of my piece. Dan made several interesting points in his rebuttal. As much as I’d like to take on the whole post right now, my reply would be far too long and I don’t think our readers would appreciate a blog post that resembles...

In many ways, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia contains one of the most unique styles of government and political culture in the world. The central institution of the government is the monarchy—headed by King Abdullah. The Holy Qur'an is the constitution of the country and the nation is governed on the basis of Islamic law or Shari’a. The reaches of the king’s power are essentially limited only by Saudi tradition, Shari’a, and consensus among the royal family and religious leaders. Saudi Arabia holds a tight grip on the nation's government, politics, and culture in large part because the country has...

Officially Dan Mitchell is a Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute, a conservative public policy research organization, and a researcher on tax reform. Unofficially, he has (perhaps ironically?) called himself the “world’s self-appointed defender of so-called tax havens.” Oddly enough, Mitchell and I agree on many of the facts about these havens. We both have observed, for example, that there are buildings in Delaware and the Cayman Islands that house thousands of corporations. Mitchell concludes there is nothing wrong with either; I conclude there is something wrong with both. Mitchell also agrees that the United States “could be considered the...