Breaking Apart An iPhone’s Cost
It’s still shocking to see just how little of the profits from an item go towards those who made it. From a piece on the power of transnational corporations, via Reports from the Economic Front:
The production of the iPhone offers one of the best examples of the logic and operation of these transnational corporate controlled cross border production networks.
Not surprisingly, the division of profits, as shown below, reflects the overall hierarchy that structures this and other cross border production networks.
Wikileaks: U.S. Forced Haiti To Nix Raising Its Minimum Wage To 62 Cents
Wikileaks unveils an incredibly infuriating revelation, via the Nation. To sum up: desperately poor Haiti planned to raise its minimum wage from 24 cents per hour to 62 cents, angering the contractors for U.S. corporations such as Levis and Hanes, who pay slave wages to Haitians who sew our clothes. The Obama administration intervened on behalf of those companies, and bullied the Haitian government into setting the mark at 32 cents.
To put things in perspective, upping the hourly wage to 62 cents would have cost Hanes an additional $1.6 million each year. Hanesbrands turned $211 million in profit last year and CEO Richard Noll personally was paid $10 million.
How Multinational Companies Benefit From Offshore Tax Havens
NPR’s daily show, Fresh Air, Jesse Drucker from Bloomber News engaged in an interesting discussion yesterday about the multinational companies that save billions in taxes by using other countries with lower corporate income tax. What does this mean for the country’s economy, both that of the US and the offshore tax havens? From WHYY on NPR:
The top corporate income tax level in the United States is 35 percent. In the United Kingdom, it’s 28 percent. But in Ireland, it’s only 12.5 percent, and in Bermuda there’s no corporate income tax at all. That means multinational companies that shift their earnings through Ireland or Bermuda can save billions of dollars in taxes each year.
On today’s Fresh Air, Bloomberg News reporter Jesse Drucker, who has written extensively about corporate tax-dodging, explains how companies like Google, Pfizer, Lilly, Oracle, Facebook and Microsoft have managed to reduce their tax rates by hundreds of millions — and…
