About John Christensen
Paying for the Pandemic and a Just Transition
The aim of the report is to present aggregate figures while also highlighting real life examples that can act as a blueprint for a future that treats humanity with equity and dignity. Ultimately, the $9.457 trillion a year headline figure drawn from these proposals show that moving towards a just world depends on political power rather than availability of financial resources.
Getting a Grip on Global Financial Infrastructure
The United States has long relied on informal agreements with private sector institutions to assert its interests in the global financial system. If we are to fight kleptocracy, we need to make this privately run plumbing more accountable to international institutions, argues Edoardo Saravalle in this blog reproduced from a recent edition of Tax Justice Focus. Getting a Grip on
Read the full article…The Elephant Trap: The Language of National Security and the Politics of Liberation
Rather than attempting to scare people into voting for the left – a strategy that can only ever help those on the right – we need to encourage them to believe that the world can be different. In other words, we need a politics based on the language of hope.
The Financial Infrastructure of Corruption
We recently published a special edition of Tax Justice Focus on national security, guest edited by Jack Blum, Charles Davidson and Ben Judah. You can read their editorial here. In the following article, Yakov Feygin from the Berggruen Institute, argues that the United States could and should use its central position in the global monetary system to tackle the related phenomena of tax
Read the full article…Tax havens harm our well-being and security
With the reputations of both London and New York tarnished by being labelled as laundromats for kleptocrats and organised crime, the soft power diplomatic advantages that the UK and USA previously enjoyed from being able to project moral authority across the world have been washed away by the sea of scandals.
Offshore, National Security and Britain’s Role
As far-right movements threaten to take liberal democracies back to the 1930s, it is becoming increasingly clear that the offshore system, where wealth continues to accumulate in staggering quantities, is a source of serious and intensifying threats to international and national security.
Carbon Taxes Can Be Progressive: Myth-busting and Mainstreaming Carbon Taxes
Josephine Public doesn’t know the best news of all: carbon taxes are fair, as the wealthiest and the biggest polluters pay the most.
What’s your SCORE? The case for Sustainable Cost Reporting
We recently published a two part Tax Justice Focus special on climate crisis and tax justice. This blog reproduces the article by Richard Murphy, in which he outlines how radical changes to accounting rules would require companies to comprehensively disclose their carbon emissions. Sustainable Cost Reporting, Richard argues, would put company directors into a position where they must accept responsibility for the
Read the full article…Nixon-era laws have shaped western racism and protected ‘enablers’ of financial crimes
The racism, brutality and bigotry directed at the Black community has been normalised under the guise of so-called crime control laws and criminal justice.
Fossil Fuel Subsidies and Taxation: Two Sides of the Same Carbon Coin
We recently published a two part Tax Justice Focus special on climate crisis and tax justice. This blog reproduces the article by Laura Merrill, in which she outlines how massive direct and indirect state subsidies have overwhelmingly distorted energy markets to favour fossil-fuel consumption, skewing investment decisions and slowing uptake of renewable technologies. Despite vague commitments from G20 countries to phase out
Read the full article…Black Zero against the Climate
Last week we published the second part of our Tax Justice Focus special on climate crisis and tax justice. This blog reproduces the lead article by famed German economist Peter Bofinger, in which he argues the case for a radical transformation of our understanding of how economics works, and why the state must take the financial lead in investing in
Read the full article…Climate justice and economic justice are the same fight
As the economic shock of the pandemic deepens, hunger stalks the streets of supposedly rich countries, revealing the deep inequalities that existed even before Covid-19 struck. In the second of our two part Tax Justice Focus edition on financing the climate transition (the first part is available here), we explore the links between economic justice and climate justice, and argue
Read the full article…Guest Blog: How to Tackle Audit Failures
Auditors have been described as gatekeepers of capitalism, yet there is widespread concern that the current Coronavirus pandemic, and the global recession that will inevitably accompany it, reveals a pattern of audit failures similar to recent high-profile corporate failures which surfaced in the past two years. In this guest blog, researchers Adam Leaver, Leonard Seabrooke, Saila Stausholm, and Duncan Wigan
Read the full article…Financing Climate Justice
As the climate crisis comes into ever sharper focus the question of how we pay for a just transition takes on ever greater urgency. In this, the first of a two-part special edition of Tax Justice Focus, guest edited by TJN Senior Adviser James Henry, we have brought together key policy proposals to make what is now urgently necessary possible.
Read the full article…
