On Monday, the Archbishop Bishop of York charged that individuals and corporations that avoid paying taxes are robbing God, just days before the G8 nations announced a plan to crackdown on global tax evasion. Companies “should have a conscience which says that a child is dying tonight because of some of their actions,” John Sentamu said: “It is sinful, simply because Jesus was very clear; pay to Caesar what belongs to Caesar and to God what belongs to God.”

Sentamu’s comments are a veiled reference to companies like Apple, Starbucks, and Google, which use complicated webs of foreign tax shelters and other gimmicks to lower their tax bills at home and abroad.

A recent report found that 30 of the largest American multinationals with more than $160 billion in profits paid zero in U.S. income taxes over a three-year period, while revelations of low rates overseas paid overseas sparked outrage in Great Britain and raised concerns across Europe.

Leaders of the G8 nations agreed on Tuesday to institute changes that will require shell companies to be more transparent about the “beneficial ownership” of businesses and share information about “who benefits from the operations of shell companies, special purpose companies and trust arrangements often employed by tax evaders.” Countries are also encouraged to close loopholes that allow for tax avoidance.

Experts see “Ireland, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg as the worst actors on corporate tax avoidance, but larger European players including the U.K. have reduced various rates in ways that encourage tax avoidance.” The policies perpetuate a race to the bottom “in taxing many of the world’s richest companies, chased by regressive sales tax hikes and public service cuts to maintain some fiscal balance.”

Apple, which uses a system of subsidiaries to avoid taxes, claims that it “has conducted all of its business with the highest of ethical standards.” But Sentamu warned that companies avoiding taxes are “not only robbing the poor of what they could be getting, they are actually robbing God, because God says ‘bring into my store house all the tithes.’”

“So if God has told us to be just, to walk humbly and to be merciful and then we behave in a very strange way – God is being robbed, the world is being robbed, your neighbour is being robbed,” he said.

The unemployment rate hit another record high in April for the 17 countries in the eurozone, rising to 12.2 percent. That beat the 12.1 percent high in March. The area has seen record-breaking unemployment for many months now.

An additional 95,000 people were unemployed in April, according to Eurostat, putting the total number of unemployed workers at 19.38 million. If the current pace continues, the number of unemployed could rise above 20 million this year.

The eurozone economy has been struggling with growth. Its ongoing recession is now the longest in the history of the euro. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) revised its growth forecast for the area on Wednesday from a slight 0.1 percent contraction to a 0.6 percent decline.

The economic pain has recently led eurozone leaders to back off of the austerity measures many believe have been a drag on the area’s growth. Italy, Spain, France, and Germany have been given a reprieve from some austerity rules imposed by the eurozone’s central government. Other European leaders have also called for a shift away from austerity.

The United States initially shied away from austerity, boosting the economy with President Obama’s stimulus package, which led to higher economic growth than in Europe. But the country has now embraced austerity, with government spending dropping, including sequestration’s automatic budget cuts. Those cuts are starting to be a drag on the country’s economic growth.

One day after a Senate hearing during which Apple executives explained how they avoid nearly all taxation on tens of billions in international sales, European leaders are reportedly reshuffling an agenda summit to zero in on corporate tax avoidance:

The four-hour summit was originally called to discuss energy policy, but investigations in Britain, France and the United States exposing how little tax major international companies have been paying by carefully structuring their European operations has forced the issue to the top of the agenda.

France and Britain in particular have grown concerned by the sheer scale of the legal tax schemes, with a U.S. investigation revealing on Monday that Apple Inc had paid just 2 percent tax on $74 billion in overseas income, largely by exploiting a loophole in Ireland’s tax code.

That followed reports that the British unit of Amazon paid just $3.7 million tax on 2012 sales of $6.5 billion, and similar revelations concerning the UK operations of Google and Starbucks.

The summit is unlikely to produce immediate action, but there are two opportunities on the horizon to refine an international consensus on corporate tax reform. The next G8 summit is in June, and takes place in Ireland, whose crucial role in tax evasion schemes by multinationals was central to the Apple hearings on Tuesday. And in July, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development will put out an “action plan” on tax avoidance.

International coordination in Europe is crucial if any curbs on corporate tax dodging are to be effective, as a pair of recent Bloomberg stories indicate. The continent is so central to the tax schemes employed by Apple, Google, and others that tax lawyers have coined nicknames like “the Double Irish” and “the Dutch Sandwich” for specific profit-shifting gambits.

And while Europe’s leaders publicly decry their neighbor states’ efforts to lure corporations through tax law, they also try to outdo their neighbors. Experts point to Ireland, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg as the worst actors on corporate tax avoidance, but larger European players including the U.K. have reduced various rates in ways that encourage tax avoidance. The result is a race to the bottom in taxing many of the world’s richest companies, chased by regressive sales tax hikes and public service cuts to maintain some fiscal balance. The result, Bloomberg’s Jesse Drucker writes, is that “individuals rather than businesses are often bearing the brunt of higher taxes.”

European powers are illustrating the inherent weaknesses of the territorial approach to reform which Apple’s CEO Tim Cook advocated in Tuesday’s Senate hearing. This summer’s G8 meeting and OECD release are opportunities for the sort of paradigm shift that was absent in Cook’s testimony, from failed territorial approaches to a destination-based system of corporate taxes that could both stem the tax avoidance tide and encourage companies to invest more heavily in creating jobs at home.

Eurozone-area unemployment, still plagued by a continent-wide push for austerity, rose to yet another record high in March, and 12.1 percent of Europeans are now unemployed. Spain’s economy contracted for the seventh consecutive quarter in the first three months of 2013, and across the continent, growth is stagnant. Even Germany, home to Europe’s strongest economy and its biggest deficit hawk in Chancellor Angela Merkel, is seeing higher unemployment.

That has led European leaders to rethink their focus on austerity, largely at the urging of American officials. European officials pledged to rein in austerity efforts earlier this month, and European Union president Jose Manuel Barroso said last week that the EU was considering easing its austerity policies and deficit reduction targets to help boost growth. Others have gone farther, with officials in France and Italy calling for total abandonment of austerity, the Washington Post reports:

In France, the doubts have spread to President Francois Hollande’s Socialist Party and government, with officials suggesting that the debt-ridden continent needs to stimulate growth at all costs — even including more debt — if it is to climb out of the economic and financial crisis that began unfurling in 2008. [...]

“Italy is dying because of austerity alone,” that country’s new prime minister, Enrico Letta, complained in his first address to Parliament on Monday. “Stimulus policies can no longer wait.”

European leaders haven’t yet abandoned austerity to focus on growth that would help countries like Spain and Greece — where unemployment rates top 25 percent — but they are at least considering it. But even as the U.S. pushes those reconsiderations, lawmakers here remain focused not on growth that would help reduce America’s own persistently high unemployment rate but on reducing deficits and debt. Sequestration, the automatic budget cuts that went into effect on March 1, is America’s most irresponsible form of deficit reduction yet, and despite its gutting of vital programs and its harmful effects on economic growth, Republicans in Congress have shown no willingness to abandon it in favor of policies that would actually help the economy.

The U.S. bucked the European trend toward austerity in 2009, when President Obama signed a large stimulus bill into law that halted the recession and turned the economy around. The stimulus put the U.S. on a faster pace of growth than Europe experienced, but the focus on deficit reduction since then has only prevented the recovery from taking full effect. Though government spending has typically driven economic recoveries in the United States, it has plateaued amid deficit reduction efforts and perpetual manufactured crises (like the 2011 debt ceiling debacle) since 2010. Instead of helping the recovery, those efforts have only hurt it. But even as some European leaders rethink austerity, and even with evidence that stimulative policies sparked a better recovery than Europe’s, American lawmakers remain committed to spending cuts that will only hinder efforts to grow the economy and reduce unemployment.

The anti-austerity chorus is getting louder. On the heels of the International Monetary Fund’s warning to the U.S. against pursuing severe spending cuts and the European Union’s Economic and Monetary Affairs Commission indicating that it is moving away from the same, European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso signaled that he’s in favor of shifting away from austerity:

“While I think this policy is fundamentally right, I think it has reached its limits,” Mr. Barroso said. “A policy to be successful not only has to be properly designed, it has to have the minimum of political and social support.” […]

In his speech, Mr. Barroso hinted that some countries could be given longer to get their budget deficit in line with EU rules, which ostensibly limit it to 3% of gross domestic product.

“Even if the policy of correcting deficit is fundamentally correct, we can always discuss fine-tuning of pace,” he said. He noted, however, that EU finance ministers would have to agree to any change in the timelines.

Voices outside of government have also chimed in: Bill Gross, founder of investment firm Pimco, criticized the idea that austerity in the United Kingdom and Europe would lead to growth and instead argued that they should be spending money. This all comes on top of a new study that poked holes in the seminal research that many austerity hawks had relied on to make their case.

Meanwhile, demand for eurozone government debt has lead to the lowest yields for Spanish and Italian bonds in more than two years. Lower borrowing costs add even more firepower to the argument that EU countries should switch the focus away from deficit reduction and toward stimulus spending to get their economies back on track.

United States Treasury Secretary Jack Lew used his first official visit to the European Union to urge leaders there to rein in their austerity efforts and instead focus on economic growth. A week later, it appears the pressure may have worked, as Euro leaders ahead of the G20 summit in Brussels this week pledged to lessen their austerity efforts in the near future, Reuters reports:

The euro zone will slow its budgetary belt-tightening to help reinvigorate economic growth, a top EU official said on Thursday, highlighting a policy shift the United States has long been pressing for.

“They are preaching to the converted,” EU Economic and Monetary Affairs Commissioner Olli Rehn told Reuters.

While European leaders argue that they had no choice but to pursue austerity in the wake of the financial crisis, when bond yields rose and the financial stability of nations like Greece, Italy, and Spain was in doubt, the focus on debt reduction has hampered economic growth. Eurozone unemployment is at record highs and the continent is back in a recession, and even the largest European economies have lagged. Great Britain, which has its own central bank and isn’t tied to the Euro, has also pursued austerity, and the results have been similar: unemployment has continued to rise and the country is on the brink of its third recession in four years.

The United States grew immediately after the recession, thanks in large part because it embraced stimulative policies instead of immediate austerity. Despite its anti-austerity urgings to the Europeans, America has since turned its attention to deficit reduction, and growth has slowed because of it. Government spending has plateaued since 2010, so instead of sparking recoveries as it traditionally has, fiscal policy has acted as a drag on the economy. The Federal Reserve has aided the recovery with stimulative monetary policies, but with borrowing costs at historic lows and unemployment still high, the U.S. could stand to heed its own advice and focus on immediate growth instead of the size of its deficits, which would naturally shrink as the economy grows anyway.

On his first official trip to Europe as head of the United States Treasury, Secretary Jack Lew urged European political and financial leaders to rethink the painful austerity plans they have enacted to address large debts and deficits across the continent and in some of Europe’s largest economies, including Spain, France, Italy, and Portugal.

European austerity has driven unemployment in the Eurozone to record highs and pushed the continent back into recession. With that in mind — and with the European economy putting headwind on the American recovery — Lew pushed European leaders to focus more on demand and employment than on deficits and debt, the Associated Press reports:

Lew, who became treasury secretary in February, started his first official trip to Europe with a meeting with EU Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso. He also met the EU’s top economic and monetary official, Commissioner Olli Rehn, and EU Council President Herman Van Rompuy.

“I was particularly interested in our European partners’ plans to strengthen sources of demand at a time of rising unemployment,” he said, speaking alongside Van Rompuy.

While austerity was meant to address deficits, it hasn’t done a particularly strong job on that front either. Countries have missed deficit targets because of slumping growth caused by rapid fiscal contraction, resulting in an austerity death spiral: countries cut spending to reduce deficits, but those spending cuts lead to slower growth that in turn makes deficits larger, causing calls for even deeper spending cuts. The United Kingdom, for instance, stands on the brink of its third recession in four years even as its austerity measures have barely achieved deficit reduction at all.

The U.S. has proceeded toward recovery much faster than its European counterparts because it focused on demand with a large stimulus package in 2009; since then, Republicans in Congress have turned the conversation to reducing spending and blocked efforts to further boost demand and employment, including the American Jobs Act, which economists said would create more than a million jobs. As a result, government spending has plateaued in the last three years and failed to pull the economy toward a full recovery as it typically has after American recessions.

The Washington Post reports search giant Google will face coordinated action by European Union (EU) data protection regulators after attempts to make Google’s new integrated privacy policy comply with privacy laws fell apart:

A taskforce of agencies led by France’s National Commission for Computing and Civil Liberties today began follow-up measures in line with their national laws after a meeting with Google yielded “no changes,” the regulator known as CNIL said in an e-mailed statement today. U.K., German, Italian, Spanish and Dutch watchdogs are also part of the taskforce.

Google announced the new privacy policy objected to by the EU states over a year ago. Under the policy, the search giant can combine information provided from one service with information from other services to create a comprehensive profile of an individual’s online behavior across Google products. Privacy protections in the EU, where an umbrella Data Protection Directive leads much of the privacy policy, are generally more stringent than in the U.S., where a “patchwork” of legislation defines online privacy rights.

While Google has been somewhat ahead of the game on protecting consumer data from government snooping, such as requiring warrants for email content data, they have faced a number of sanctions for questionable data collection practices including in the U.S. They agreed to a $22.5 million Federal Trade Commission (FTC) settlement for bypassing Safari privacy settings in 2012 and a $7 million fine in March of this year for the “Wi-Spy” incident in which Google Streetview Cars collected information from unencrypted Wi-Fi networks without consent — both of which amounted to mere hours of 2012 revenues.

Yesterday it was revealed that Google’s first Privacy Director, the London-based Alma Whitten, is stepping down and will be replaced by a California-based long-time Google engineer Lawrence You.