Who designed the world that we are living in?

"Laurence D. Fink, the world’s largest asset manager, has broadcast his own dedication to stakeholder capitalism and social justice while squeezing poor countries to pay impossible debts in the midst of the pandemic.

Between March 2020 and the middle of October 2021, America’s billionaires saw their collective wealth soar by 70 percent, exceeding $5 trillion, according to an analysis of Forbes data by Americans for Tax Fairness and the left-leaning Institute for Policy Studies. That mountain of money was controlled by a mere 745 people.

The beneficiaries have succeeded in sharing little of their gains with the government, a wildly successful mode of tax avoidance that is largely legal. In a triumph of lobbying, the billionaire class has salted the tax code with boondoggles and starved tax collectors of resources.

Pharmaceutical executives and the pandemic make for an interesting case study in how one might construe heroics. The industry harnessed publicly funded research to develop lifesaving coronavirus vaccines in record time. But it has sold most of its wares at the highest prices in the most lucrative markets, reaping hundreds of millions of dollars in profits while leaving the bulk of humanity unprotected. Executives unleashed lobbyists to kill attempts to ramp up production and distribution — an ideal recipe, it turns out, for the Omicron variant.

During President Bill Clinton’s administration, the Treasury Department opened up a loophole that enabled executives at multinational corporations to set up subsidiaries in foreign countries that beckoned with low taxes — Ireland was a popular choice — and then legally transfer their intellectual property there. Their new international outposts charged the rest of the corporation exorbitant licensing fees to use the intellectual property.
The net effect: On their American earnings statements, the wealthiest corporations looked like money losers, paying taxes accordingly.

In the decade and a half after Mr. Clinton’s Treasury bestowed this gift on American corporations, their effective tax bills dropped to 26 percent of their revenues, from 35 percent. So-called profit shifting has been costing the American Treasury $60 billion a year in lost taxes."