U.S. President Barack Obama is looking to cut the country's corporate tax rate from 35 to 28 percent, while eliminating dozens of tax-saving loopholes American companies now enjoy.
Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner is to unveil the tax overhaul, two days before a tax proposal being offered by one-time venture capitalist Mitt Romney. He is one of the leading Republican presidential contenders seeking his party's nomination to face Mr. Obama, a Democrat, in next November's national election.
Government officials say the president's plan would cut the effective tax rate for manufacturing firms from the 32-percent average to 25 percent. But his proposal would raise taxes on oil and natural gas companies. It also would require, for the first time, that U.S. companies operating overseas pay a minimum tax on their foreign earnings.
The top U.S. corporate rate of 35 percent is among the highest in the world, putting American firms at an economic disadvantage. But numerous U.S. corporations, after taking allowable deductions for business expenses, often pay at a substantially lower rate, and occasionally, nothing.
An international media rights group says at least 46 journalists were killed worldwide last year, with Pakistan the deadliest country for the second year in a row.
In its annual “Attacks on the Press” report, the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists said deaths during dangerous assignments, such as covering street protests, reached a record level in 2011, as political unrest swept the Arab world.
The report says 17 journalists died on dangerous assignments. Country-by-country, Pakistan had the most deaths with seven, while Libya and Iraq followed with five each, and Mexico had three.
Photographers and camera operators made up about 40 percent of the overall death toll. The group noted an increase in the deaths of Internet journalists, who it says rarely appeared in the death toll before 2008. Nine online journalists were killed last year.
The death toll for 2011 was two fatalities more than in 2010.
The Committee to Protect Journalists also says it is investigating another 35 deaths from last year to determine if they were related to the person's media work.
Meanwhile, the CPJ report says 179 journalists were imprisoned last year, the highest number since the mid-1990s. Iran had the most in jail, with 42, while Eritrea, China, Burma, Vietnam, Syria, and Turkey also ranked among the world's top jailers.
The Obama administration is trying to attract more foreign investors to boost the U.S. economy. Washington is encouraging U.S. firms to get out and compete for a larger share of the international market.
U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton says the reason behind this push for greater foreign investment is clear: Americans need jobs.
She says free-trade agreements with South Korea, Colombia, and Panama have helped put the United States on track to double U.S. exports over five years as Washington moves to keep pace with emerging economies.
"Our power in the 21st century depends not just on the size of our military but also on what we grow, how well we innovate, what we make, and how effectively we sell. Rising powers like China, India, and Brazil understand this as well, and we cannot sit on the sidelines while they put economics at the center of their foreign policies,” Clinton said.
Secretary Clinton spoke at a global business conference that joined U.S. business support groups from more than 100 countries with private sector leaders and government officials from the departments of State, Commerce, Treasury, and Energy.
She says “jobs diplomacy” means bringing more foreign investors to the U.S., selling more domestic goods abroad, and ensuring that companies compete fairly across borders.
Part of leveling that playing field is fighting corruption, forced technology transfers, the piracy of intellectual property, and preferential treatment for state-owned firms to ensure that the global economic system is transparent and fair.
She says the United States will not stand by when its competitors do not play by the rules.
"This administration has already brought trade cases against China at nearly twice the rate of our predecessors. And now a special new Trade Enforcement Unit is being established to go after unfair trading practices. Last Friday, the president announced that when other nations provide unfair financing for their exports, we will offer matching support to competing U.S. firms,” Clinton said.
For all the changes she says the Obama administration is making to better help U.S. businesses compete abroad, Clinton says it is up to the private sector to take advantage.
"Foreign leaders often say to me, “Where are the American businesses? How come they are not here competing for this construction contract or that mining deal? What are they waiting for?” As I have described today, this administration is doing everything we can to help American companies, large and small, compete and succeed. But ultimately, we know it is up to you. We can not help you if you are not hungry enough to get out there and compete for the business that is going to be available,” Clinton said.
The global business conference continues Wednesday with regional sessions targeting specific opportunities for private sector investors in individual markets.
U.S. President Barack Obama has praised Congress for extending a payroll tax cut, but says more needs to be done to help struggling and middle-class Americans.
In Washington, Mr. Obama said the average working American saves $40 a paycheck with the tax cut. He said that money is a “big deal” for the typical family and will help pay for rent, groceries or the rising cost of gasoline.
He urged lawmakers on Capitol Hill to keep making progress and not to get caught up in partisan battles ahead of November's general election.
“Now my message to Congress is do not stop here. Keep going. Keep taking the action that people are calling for to keep this economy growing. This may be an election year, but the American people have no patience for gridlock, and just a reflexive partisanship and just paying attention to poll numbers and the next elections, instead of the next generation and what we can do to strengthen opportunity for all Americans.”
He said lawmakers should work on helping small businesses and pass a measure so people making more than $1 million a year pay a tax rate of at least 30 percent.
Congress on Friday passed the bill that extended the payroll tax cut and unemployment benefits. It passed after leaders in the Republican-controlled House of Representatives dropped a demand to offset the payroll tax cut with reductions in spending.
Pensioners march during an anti-austerity rally in front of the parliament in Athens, Greece, February 22, 2012.
The Fitch financial services company is again downgrading the credit rating of Greece, saying that the debt-ridden country is "highly likely" to default on its financial obligations even after securing a new bailout from its European neighbors.
Fitch said Wednesday it has cut Greece two notches (from CCC to C), pushing the credit standing for the Athens government deeper into junk status. The ratings company took the action after Greece earlier this week secured a new $172 billion international bailout and negotiated a $142 billion writeoff of the debt it owes large financial institutions.
While Greece has reached a general agreement on elimination of more than half the debt its owes private creditors, it must now negotiate the specific terms of the writedown with individual banks and other investors. Greek officials say that when about two-thirds of its lenders agree to cut the amount the are owed, they will impose the same debt reduction involuntarily on its remaining lenders.
Fitch said such involuntary debt cuts for the private creditors will amount to a Greek default, and called the arrangement "distressed and de facto coercive."
Greek Prime Minister Lucas Papademos says the country has a lot of work to do before it starts to collect the new bailout money, its second rescue package in two years.
The Greek parliament has agreed in principle to the package of spending and job cuts demanded by the European Union and the International Monetary Fund. The lawmakers must now pass all 79 specific measures included in the package before getting the bailout funds.
The bailout will likely avoid the bankruptcy Greece faces if it cannot pay investors $19 billion when government bonds come due, March 20th.
The rescue package requires Greece to make deep and unpopular spending cuts. They include a 22 percent cut in the country's minimum wage and the elimination of 15,000 government jobs.
Thousands of Greeks have held sometimes violent street protests against the cuts, saying they have already sacrificed enough. More protests were planned for later Wednesday.
The head of the EU delegation to the United States, Ambassador Joao Vale de Almeida, told VOA in an exclusive interview that the bloc has learned a lot from the crisis, namely the need for a mechanism to deal with emergency situations, an improved level of economic governance and solidarity among all members of the 17-nation bloc that uses the euro.
"I think we learned a lot. We learned a lot about the means that we need to have to deal with emergency situations," said the ambassador. "We didn't have them before. We created, we developed them to deal with the cases like Greece and a few other countries."
"Secondly, we learned that our governance system was not yet at the right level of sophistication, and we are in fact changing a lot; if not, there is a small revolution going on inside the euro area in the way we deal with what we call the economic governance. There is a lot being changed. And thirdly, I think we learned a very simple lesson. When you are part of a system, there has to be solidarity," he added.
Greece got a $145 billion bailout last year and is, by far, the biggest recipient of international aid in eurozone history. Yet Greece accounts for just two percent of the eurozone economy.
Some information for this report was provided by AP, AFP and Reuters.
Since the late 1920s, Japanese coffee shops catering for jazz music fans have been a fixture in cities across the country. For decades, they disseminated cutting-edge Western culture and later, the counter-culture to students, intellectuals and music aficionados. Although the number of venues are dwindling, they have survived the digital age.
It was never about the coffee. Long before customers had a choice of a double espresso or soy latte, Japanese flocked to coffee shops serving just a couple of kinds of beans, but an endless variety of bee-bop, swing and avant-garde. They are known as jazz kissa - short for kissaten - tea or coffee shops.
"Tea for Two" sung by Anita O'Day accompanied by two Japanese jazz orchestras during a live 1963 telecast in Tokyo can be heard in one cafe. The original performance was a rare opportunity for Japanese to see and hear a famous American jazz star in their own country. It was also an era when an imported jazz album cost about one-tenth of the average professional’s monthly salary.
Times and moods have changed.
One of the few surviving jazz kissa in Tokyo is Eagle, in the city’s Yotsuya district, near Sophia University. These days it mainly attracts businessmen and office workers on their lunch hour, who pay the equivalent of nine dollars to sip a cup of ordinary coffee.
Eagle was started in 1967 by jazz fan Yohei Goto, the son of a bar owner, when he was a college sophomore.
Goto says he understands that to foreigners a jazz kissa can seem like a strange place. He explains it is a library of music. You are not allowed to talk. Unlike in United States, he says, where people listen to jazz for pleasure, in Japan it is a kind of art appreciation. Goto says Japanese people seriously study jazz as a component of African-American culture.
Jazz historian, pianist and Hitotsubashi University professor Michael Molasky says, by the time Eagle opened, the genre in Japan had come to play a more significant role in Japanese society than it did in its country of origin.
“It acquired something of a cultural cachet among bohemian types, intellectuals and writers. So that, if you wanted to be considered cool, you basically had to have some familiarity with jazz, at the time. It was kind of a rite of passage. To gain familiarity you needed to listen and the only place you could listen to this stuff were these jazz kissa,” Molasky said.
Protesters against the U.S.-Japan security treaty would take refuge from pursuing riot police in the coffee shops, listening - ironically - to jazz music from America.
At some jazz listening spots these days, cocktails, in addition to coffee and tea, are on the menu.
One of them is New Dug, in Tokyo’s Shinjuku shopping district. It opened as a jazz kissa named Dig in 1961.
New Dug’s owner, Hozumi Nakadaira, recalls the days when the clientele, mostly university students, would spend hours absorbed in the music.
Nakadaira says they could stay as long as three hours if they ordered one cup of coffee. He recalls it was okay to remain as long as five hours if a customer bought a second cup.
Professor Molasky, whose latest book in Japanese is a study of the history of the country’s jazz cafés, explains another compelling aspect is their elaborate and expensive sound systems. For generations of Japanese relegated to cramped apartments with paper thin walls, the jazz kissa were an audiophile’s heaven.
“Some of the jazz magazines, around the 70s, would advertise not only the number of records - and sometimes they had like 5,000, 10,000 LP’s [albums] in their collection - but they would advertise exactly the woofers and tweeters and the speaker system. And, some places went so far as to advertise what needle they used in the cartridge for the phonograph,” Molasky said.
Despite that acoustic niche, at Eagle, which has been spinning jazz discs for 45 years, owner Goto has no illusions that the specialty music cafés will survive for even another five years. He says, proudly, they are victims of their own success.
Goto explains the kissa had a big role to play in the 1960s and 70s, but now, they have completed their job of introducing American jazz to the Japanese public and witnessing it permeate the mainstream.
The love for the voices of Carmen McRae, Sarah Vaughan, Ella Fitzgerald and Billie Holiday has also created a cottage industry of jazz vocalists in Japan.
You can hear Grace Mahya singing “Skylark,” on her new album. The tune is a 1942 jazz standard by Johnny Mercer and Hogey Carmichael. Mayha trained as a classical pianist but switched to jazz about six years ago.
Nakadaira estimates there are 500 singers, mostly Japanese women, trying to make a living belting out jazz in English.
Nakadaira says most of the audiences probably cannot understand the lyrics, yet they prefer standards sung in English. He contends that Japanese lyrics just are not considered cool or interesting to Japanese fans.
Some aficionados will study translations of the lyrics. But for Japanese jazz fans, as Duke Ellington and Ella Fitzgerald put it:
“It don't mean a thing if ain't got that swing. ...”
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