Financial Transparency Coalition

This entire blog post is devoted to three sentences that came out of Senator John McCain’s mouth on Tuesday. "A whole blog post for three sentences?" You might ask. Well, yes. Those sentences were just that shocking. But before I get down to exactly what Mr. McCain said here’s a little background. In 2004 Congress passed the Homeland Investment Act, which provided a one-time tax holiday for the U.S. multinationals to repatriate foreign earnings. Normally, when companies bring back profits that are earned abroad, they are taxed at the standard 35% corporate tax rate. The Act allowed those companies to...

About two weeks ago, I wrote about the “upward trajectory” of India’s stance on black money and transparency in international finance. I predicted that the country (eventually) would become a leader in this arena. In case you’ve missed India’s catapult into this discussion, here’s the background. In April of 2009, after becoming very upset by the evidence there are rivers of ‘black money’ flowing out of India, the president of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), Rajnath Singh, told voters that if they elected his party into office he would, within 100 days, “bring back all the black money stashed in foreign...

Yesterday Heather Hobson, the jury forewoman in the trial of Viktor Bout, looked the infamous illegal arms dealer in the eyes and announced the jury’s final finding of guilt. Bout, a former Soviet air force pilot, has been nicknamed the “Merchant of Death” for his role in funneling weapons to terrorists, including the Taliban and Al Qaeda; trans-national criminals; and armed combatants locked in some of the world’s bloodiest conflicts. Though Bout has claimed on a Russian radio program that he has “never gotten into the arms trade,” according to European intelligence sources and documents from an African country uncovered...

Mountaintops provide a convenient symbol for anything from achievement to power. So it doesn’t come as a surprise that the meeting of the world’s twenty most powerful leaders is called the G20 “summit.” Actually, the copycat nomenclature runs far deeper. For instance: the diplomats who lay the groundwork for the G20 leaders’ trip to the summit? They’re dubbed “Sherpa,” with a dash of self-aware irony, after the Nepalese guides who help mountaineers scale peaks inNepal. And with what may be a move to thrash the symbol to death, the G20 Sherpa’s aides are called “yaks.” It...