The power of Transnational Corporations and the quest for tax justice!

On Monday, 16 March Naomi Fowler from the Tax Justice Network gave a presentation at Nottingham University as part of the Centre for the Study of Social and Global Justice’s (CSSGJ) seminar series. Formed in 2003, the Tax Justice Network includes many former employees in the financial industry amongst its activists and the monthly Taxcast is one of the key ways of influencing political debate.

Corruption in the banking industry – the problem of a few ‘bad apples’?

The working practices of banks have come under close scrutiny recently. After Barclays' involvement in the LIBOR-rigging scandal (BBC, 17 July 2012), news broke on 17 July that HSBC, another prominent player in the global financial markets, provided ‘a conduit for "drug kingpins and rogue nations", according to a US Senate committee investigating money laundering claims at the bank’ (BBC News, 17 July 2012). This adds further to the general pressure on banks widely regarded as responsible for the global financial market crisis. In response, calls are issued to tighten the regulation of financial markets. In this post, I argue that scandals of this type are not the occasional result of criminal or reckless behaviour by individuals. Rather, they are a logical consequence of the systemic pressures within the capitalist mode of production, in which companies constantly have to achieve larger profits than their competitors in order to stay in business.