Arron Banks ..
Mr. Banks plowed $11 million of his personal fortune into UKIP and the unofficial Leave.EU campaign and raised an additional $5 million. Though a small figure by American standards, it made him the single biggest political donor in British history.
.. The Brexit win thrilled Donald J. Trump, who saw in that blow to elite complacency and hierarchy a model for his presidential campaign. And it was Mr. Banks who exchanged ideas on tactics with Mr. Trump’s team throughout their campaigns, making visits with Mr. Farage to Trump rallies.
.. “Never apologize,” he said he had told Mr. Trump. “Facts are white noise,” and “emotions rule.”
.. “We realized we were up against the same kind of enemy and we had to play dirty, and we did,” he said in the interview at Old Down Manor, a Gloucestershire estate hotel he owns.
.. Like Mr. Trump, Mr. Banks sees himself as an outsider tearing up what he said was a cozy conspiracy between career politicians and big corporations.
.. Mr. Banks is considering starting and funding a new citizens’ movement, tentatively called Patriotic Alliance, based on the model of Italy’s Five Star Movement
.. Mounting frustration against the Tory government and a Labour Party in disarray has created an opportunity for a political movement that, “like Trump, isn’t left or right but that is radical,” Mr. Banks said.
.. Mr. Banks has always fancied himself something of an outsider, having spent much of his childhood in England but frequently visiting his father, who managed sugar estates in Africa.
.. He was expelled from a second school and never went on to college, instead selling everything from vacuum cleaners to houses. He then got into insurance, where he made his fortune ..
.. . Banks now has business interests based in the tax havens of the Isle of Man and the British Virgin Islands.
.. “When it comes down to it, Brexit and Trump were about identity. Who do you identify with?” he asked, before answering his own question: “I don’t want to be part of some French-German coalition.”
.. It was, however, only after paying for a private poll of 50,000 Britons ahead of the referendum that he and his team realized that immigration, not sovereignty, was the defining issue that would push people to vote to leave.
.. Mr. Banks, like Mr. Trump, is married to a Slav — in his case, Ekaterina Paderina, a Russian, whom the tabloids like to consider a spy
.. “It’s not complicated,” he said emphatically. “You don’t need a business plan. This is where you’re wrong. I’ve operated now 25 years without any business plan, and I’ve done pretty well.”
Italy Just Handed the Global Economy Another Giant Variable
Even that possibility threatens Europe with trouble. If investors worry that Italy may leave the euro, they will demand greater rewards for continued lending. Those with the greatest debt burdens — Greece, Spain and Portugal — could see their borrowing costs rise beyond their ability to pay.
.. For now, such grim scenarios appear remote. The referendum maintains the power of the Italian legislature’s upper chamber, a potent check on the Five Star Movement, or any government pursuing radical change.
.. The consensus is that Italy can patch immediate holes in the banking system. But the referendum has destroyed what momentum existed to address the condition that is both cause and effect of the banking problem — a dire lack of economic growth.
Italy’s banks are stuffed with uncollectable debts in part because the country’s economy is smaller than it was a decade ago. Bad loans on bank balance sheets reflect that millions of people have lost jobs, eliminating spending power, while companies have seen sales evaporate.
.. Voters clearly did not trust Mr. Renzi to wield greater power. Now, they will be represented by someone with less power where it matters a great deal: Brussels and Berlin.
.. Brussels and Berlin argue, such countries must deliver so-called structural reforms, stripping away labor protections and trimming pension benefits.
.. German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble effectively threatened to banish Greece from the euro if Athens did not deliver on reforms it promised as a condition of successive European bailouts.
.. Mr. Renzi was a rare leader who carried credibility in such quarters. He gained modest relief from European spending strictures in part by pointing at his reforms.
“Renzi is the only leader in recent history who has advanced a structural reform agenda,” said Mujtaba Rahman, managing director for Europe at the Eurasia Group, a risk consultancy.
Visualisation and Cognition: Drawing Things Together
The Chinese are quite able to think in terms of a map but also to talk about navigation on an equal footing with La Pérouse. Strictly speaking, the ability to draw and to visualize does not really make a difference either, since they all draw maps more or less based on the same principle of projection, first on sand, then on paper. So perhaps there is no difference after all and, geographies being equal, relativism is right ? This, however, cannot be, because La Pérouse does something that is going to create an enormous difference between the Chinese and the European. What is, for the former, a drawing of no importance that the tide may erase, is for the latter the single object of his mission. What should be brought into the picture is how the picture is brought back. The Chinese does not have to keep track, since he can generate many maps at will, being born on this island and fated to die on it. La Pérouse is not going to stay for more than a night ; he is not born here and will die far away. What is he doing, then ? He is passing through all these places, in order to take something back to Versailles where many people expect his map todetermine who was right and wrong about whether Sakhalin was an island, who will own this and that part of the world, and along which routes the next ships should sail.
Tax Experts Check Out Arguments From Apple Over Ruling
The European Union wants to crack down on the ways that companies minimize their tax bills in Europe, especially in Ireland. In the 1980s, Ireland began modeling itself after Bermuda, a well-known corporate tax haven, said Khadija Sharife, a forensic financial researcher
.. Ireland’s corporate tax rate is 12.5 percent, compared with 35 percent in the United States.
.. The European Commission makes clear, and tax experts agree, that Ireland let Apple determine how much of the income that it generated in the country would be recognized and taxed there.
The rest of Apple’s income that was not recognized and taxed in Ireland could be put in other corporate structures that were effectively stateless. That meant the money in those structures was not taxable anywhere — not even in Ireland — and thus not subject to Ireland’s 12.5 percent tax rate.
While other companies have also had the right to negotiate with Ireland, the commission considers these sorts of loopholes a no-no.
.. Mr. Kleinbard said the commission is not replacing Ireland’s tax law with a view of what the commission thinks should happen. It is simply asking Ireland to enforce the tax rate that it has and close loopholes that allow companies like Apple not to recognize large portions of the income they generate in Ireland and pay even less.
.. It’s true the majority of Apple’s profits are taxed in the United States.
But Ms. De Simone said Apple has also kept more than $200 billion in accumulated profits offshore. That money could someday be brought home and taxed, but Apple is in control of whether or not that actually happens.
..
People would do well to also remember the total amount of government revenue being lost to low-cost tax deals, he said.
“If we allow companies like Apple to pick its tax haven — to place a few thousand employees in a place for a lower tax rate — we do add a few jobs,” he said. “But more widely, the taxes given up globally could be used for public service, worker training and infrastructure repair.”