In the last few years, tech companies have gotten very good at using offshore tax havens to drive down their effective tax rates. And they evidently have some company. The Wall Street Journal noted today that drug companies are also increasingly using offshore tax gimmicks to drive down their tax rates, boosting profits without investing in new medicines:

Bristol-Myers Squibb Co., BMY +0.46% in its recent earnings call, estimated its tax rate would be about 16% this year, excluding special items, down from 23% last year. Then Gilead Sciences Inc. GILD -0.23% said its rate could “decline over time” if a hepatitis C drug it is developing receives approval, because of steps the company has taken to lower taxes on the drug’s sales. Also, Amgen Inc. AMGN +0.16% reported it paid an effective tax rate of 15.9% last year, and predicts an adjusted rate of 14% or 15% this year.

Many drug makers pay effective tax rates of 20% or higher. Firms that are seeking even lower rates don’t specify their strategies, and the details can vary. But the efforts typically involve shifting revenue overseas where it can be taxed at a lower rate than in the U.S., experts say. Some companies also noted the tax benefit they will receive this year from a federal tax credit for research and development.

Reductions in their tax rates could mean hundreds of millions of dollars in extra profit for drug makers, without having to sell more drugs or launch new ones.

Brand name drug prices are also skyrocketing, giving companies more incentive to simply make tons of cash off already created products and then stash it offshore.

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) is introducing a bill today that would boost revenue by $590 billion via the elimination of huge corporate tax giveaways. Offshore tax dodging alone costs the federal government $150 billion annually.

The Business Roundtable, a group representing the CEOs of the largest corporations in the nation — including the biggest banks, retailers, and insurance companies — is calling to raise the retirement age to 70. The group argues that Social Security is no longer affordable and plans to lobby Congressional lawmakers and the administration for its plan:

An influential group of business CEOs is pushing a plan to gradually increase the full retirement age to 70 for both Social Security and Medicare and to partially privatize the health insurance program for older Americans. [...]

“America can preserve the health and retirement safety net and rein in long-term spending growth by modernizing Medicare and Social Security in a way that addresses America’s new fiscal and demographic realities,” said Gary Loveman, chairman, president and chief executive of casino giant Caesars Entertainment Corp.

Loveman, who chairs the Business Roundtable’s health and retirement committee, said the business leaders will be meeting with members of Congress and the administration to press them to enact their plan.

CEO’s representing an organization called “Fix the Debt” have made the same argument. But the idea that Social Security is unaffordable for future generations is nonsense. The program can pay full benefits for decades, and nearly full benefits after that, with literally no changes. Minor tweaks — such as raising the payroll tax cap — can render the program solvent for three-quarters of a century. Social Security is also statutorily barred from adding to the federal deficit.

It’s particularly galling for wealthy CEOs to call for raising the retirement age, as they are among those who will be least affected by the change. Average CEO pay for S&P 500 companies is nearly $13 million. Recent increases in life expectancy have only benefited wealthier workers in non-physical jobs. Poorer workers doing physical labor have not seen the same gains and would be most hurt by an increase in the retirement age.

Insurance giant AIG is considering suing the federal government over the “onerous” terms of its $182 billion federal bailout, even as it airs a slew of “Thank You America” ads supposedly expressing gratitude towards taxpayers. Former AIG chairman Maurice Greenberg is urging the company to join a lawsuit against the government, arguing that the company’s shareholders were “crushed” by the bailout.

The reaction amongst lawmakers and economic policy officials has been swift and, for the most part, incredulous:

– Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) said “It would be outrageous for this company to turn around and sue the federal government because they think the deal wasn’t generous enough… AIG should thank American taxpayers for their help, not bite the hand that fed them for helping them out in a crisis.”

– Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner are reportedly “furious” with the company.

– Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA), the new ranking member of the House Financial Services Committee, said, “It is simply outrageous that the board of the American International Group, Inc. (AIG) would even consider suing the federal government after America’s taxpayers stepped up and bailed them out over their bad bets on mortgage-backed securities…I would urge the board to drop its consideration of the lawsuit, thank the American public for the $182 billion rescue package that prevented the company’s collapse, and support the reforms in the Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act.”

– Reps. Michael Capuano (D-MA) and Peter Welch (D-VT) wrote in a letter, “AIG became the poster company for Wall Street greed, fiscal mismanagement, and executive bonuses — the taxpayer and economy be damned. Now, AIG apparently seeks to become the poster company for corporate ingratitude and chutzpah.”

– Former TARP Inspector General Neil Barofsky characterized the move as “the equivalent of a giant middle finger” to U.S. taxpayers.

AIG’s argument is that shareholders were unfairly hurt by the bailout, but a complete AIG bankruptcy likely would have been far worse for them. As ThinkProgress’ Ian Millhiser noted, “at the time when the federal government took a supermajority interest in AIG, the fair market value for this interest was only slightly north of zero. Rather than receiving zero dollars for AIG’s mix of toxic sludge, however, AIG received tens of billions of dollars from the American people.”

The Swiss bank UBS will pay $1.5 billion in fines to international regulators for manipulating the LIBOR interest rate, which helps set rates on financial products across the world. UBS is the second bank, after Barclays, to pay fines for messing with LIBOR.

According to emails released by the British Financial Services Authority, UBS traders bragged over email about their work rigging the interest rate, promising to do “fu*king humongous deal[s]” with each other if the rates were rigged a certain way:

The trader, described in Financial Services Authority documents as Trader A, wrote on instant message exchanges: “3m libor is too high cause I have kept it artificially high.” This single employee appears to have made hundreds of requests to brokers to help manipulate the rate, according to the FSA. At least 45 UBS employees in total knew of, or were involved in, the rigging of the rate, the UK regulator said.

The FSA documents suggest a macho trading culture on the UBS trading floor. Trader A also said: “if you keep 6s [i.e. the six month JPY LIBOR rate] unchanged today … I will ****ing do one humongous deal with you … Like a 50,000 buck deal.”

As Reuters’ Felix Salmon put it, “The $1.5 billion that UBS is paying in fines here is enormous, but it’s not remotely enough.” The emails read much like those circulated by Goldman Sachs when it was busy ripping off customers with self-described “shi*ty deals.”

If Congress doesn’t act, two million workers will see their unemployment benefits disappear at the end of the year due to the expiration of emergency measures put in place during the Great Recession. The expiration will be the first time Congress has ended federal benefits with unemployment so high.

But Congress is not the only entity standing between workers and the social safety net. According to a report by the Morning Call, online retail giant Amazon — via the contractors it employs to hire short-term workers — is preventing unemployed workers from accessing their benefits in an effort to drive down costs:

The pressure to keep costs down means many who take temporary jobs at an Amazon warehouse hoping it will result in long-term stability and independence instead find themselves jobless and fighting for a public benefit that represents their last financial resort.

The Morning Call attended 23 unemployment compensation hearings this year involving temporary Amazon warehouse workers hired by Integrity Staffing Solutions, including hearings for several employees who lost their jobs following illness or injury. Most workers were fighting for benefits of between $100 and $200 a week.

Advocates for the working poor say the company’s aggressive stance on unemployment compensation exploits low-wage earners who need the benefit for food, housing and other necessities while they search for other jobs. The workers are often outmatched in the unemployment process.

Unemployment insurance kept 2.3 million Americans out of poverty last year, and has the potential to create 300,000 jobs next year by pumping money into a weak economy. Unemployment benefits also discourage the long-term unemployed from dropping out of the labor force.

Fast food workers in New York City briefly walked off the job last month to protest the low wages endemic to their industry. Over the last several years, fast food companies — most prominently McDonald’s and Yum! Brands, which owns Kentucky Fried Chicken, Pizza Hut, and Taco Bell — have reaped huge profits while employing some of the largest numbers of low-wage workers in the country.

At the same time that they’re paying their workers bottom-of-the-barrel wages, these companies give huge salaries to their CEOs. Case in point, McDonald’s CEO made $8.75 million last year, while an average McDonald’s employee would need to work more than one million hours to amass such a sum, as Bloomberg News noted today:

The pay gap separating fast-food workers from their chief executive officers is growing at each of those companies. The disparity has doubled at McDonald’s Corp. in the last 10 years, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. At the same time, the company helped pay for lobbying against minimum-wage increases and sought to quash the kind of unionization efforts that erupted recently on the streets of Chicago and New York. [...]

[A McDonald's employee] would need about a million hours of work — or more than a century on the clock — to earn the $8.75 million that McDonald’s, based in the Chicago suburb of Oak Brook, paid then- CEO Jim Skinner last year.

About one in four Americans will be working in a low-wage job over the next decade. And low wages don’t just hurt workers: they hurt those workers’ children too, as a recent report from the Pew Research Center showed.

Meanwhile, chief executives at the 50 companies employing the largest number of low-wage workers made an average of $9.4 million last year. CEOs now make an average of 380 times as much as the average worker.

In addition to grappling with a persistent pay gap, working women also have to deal with extreme difficulty ascending to powerful corporate positions, according to a report by the research organization Catalyst. As Bryce Covert explained at The Nation:

Women held just over 14 percent of executive officer positions at Fortune 500 companies this year and 16.6 percent of board seats at the same. Adding insult to injury, an even smaller percent of those female executive officers are counted among the highest earners—less than 8 percent of the top earner positions were held by women. Meanwhile, a full quarter of these companies simply had no women executive officers at all and one-tenth had no women directors on their boards. [...]

Did this year represent a step forward? Not even close. Women’s share of these positions went up by a mere half of a percentage point or less last year. Even worse, 2012 was the seventh consecutive year in which we haven’t seen any growth in board seats and the third year of stagnation in the C-suite.

Overall, more than one-third of companies have no women on their board of directors. But economic evidence shows that keeping women out of the board room is a mistake. According to work by the Credit Suisse Research Institute, “companies with at least one woman on the board would have outperformed in terms of share price performance, those with no women on the board over the course of the past six years.”

After Oregon voters passed a referendum ending one corporate tax break — and with unions and education officials calling for the closure of tax loopholes to raise more revenues — one of the state’s biggest and most identifiable companies is calling for more tax certainty. And if it doesn’t get it, it is threatening to move.

Oregon Gov. John Kitzhaber (D) called a special legislative session Tuesday so lawmakers could consider handing Nike, the Oregon-based apparel and athletic shoe company, the “tax certainty” bill it is demanding. In exchange for the legislation, which will allow the governor to enter into agreements that lock-in current tax laws for certain large companies, Nike says it will create 500 jobs in the state, the Oregonian reports:

Kitzhaber said Nike officials approached him more that a month ago to discuss the company’s expansion plans. Kitzhaber said they told him that Nike was being “heavily courted” by other states but wanted to stay in Oregon.

To do so, the company wanted a guarantee that the state would continue its tax policy, known as the “single-sales factor,” in which companies are taxed only on in-state sales.

“To me, that’s an easy call,” Kitzhaber said.

In addition to the 500 jobs Nike promises to create, Kitzhaber said the tax policy could lead to 12,000 more jobs and a $2 billion boost to Oregon’s economy. But state tax preferences and subsidies aimed at specific businesses often fall flat. New Jersey, for instance, handed a food company $80 million in tax incentives last year, all so it could create just nine jobs. And Sears announced layoffs in Illinois just months after the state gave it millions in tax subsidies.

What Nike wants from Kitzhaber, though, may be even worse. At a time when Oregon is cutting funding for public education and for its colleges and universities — one of which Nike has a close relationship with — Kitzhaber is asking for legislation that would allow the governor to enter into a “tax certainty” agreement with any company that promises to create at least 500 jobs and invest at least $150 million over five years. In exchange for that investment, current tax laws would be set for a time-frame determined by the governor, essentially turning control of the state’s taxes and revenue stream over to any corporation that, like Nike, raised the possibility of moving without the maintenance of Oregon’s already-favorable corporate tax law.