Japan lowered its corporate tax rate one year ago this week, leaving the United States with the highest statutory corporate tax rate in the world. And as Washington turns its focus to corporate tax reform, groups of corporations aren’t letting lawmakers forget the anniversary.

The RATE Coalition, a group of corporations advocating for lower tax rates, sent top tax writers in the House and Senate a letter today noting the anniversary and renewing their push for lower tax rates, The Hill reports:

“Coupled with our complicated tax system, this rate makes American businesses less competitive and makes the U.S. a less attractive place for investment, ultimately harming businesses, investors, workers and consumers,” 18 executives and a pair of interest group presidents wrote to the top tax writers in both the House and the Senate.

“We know that some choices may be difficult and understand that base-broadeners, such as eliminating tax expenditures, may be necessary to achieve the significant reduction in the statutory rate that is required for the U.S. to better compete globally,” the executives added.

RATE isn’t alone. Business Roundtable, another corporate lobbying group that includes some of RATE’s members, announced plans to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars lobbying for lower corporate tax rates.

But while the companies are correct that America’s corporate tax rate is statutorily the highest in the world, what they aren’t noting is that few corporations actually pay the 35 percent rate. In fact, even as profits for American corporations hit a 60-year high in 2011, their effective tax rate hit a 40-year low, and the U.S. collects less in taxes as a percent of the total economy than every industrialized country in the world save Iceland. It’s been 45 years since corporations paid the full top tax rate, and 26 American companies avoided taxation altogether over the past four years.

Some of RATE’s members do, in fact, pay a rate equal to America’s top corporate tax rate. But corporations as a whole do not, largely because they are keeping record amounts of money in offshore tax havens in countries where they barely do business at all. To top it off, many of the corporations (though not RATE specifically, according to its letter) lobbying for reform are pushing for a “territorial” tax system that would make it even easier for them to shield profits from American taxation while leading to more investment and job creation in foreign countries.

Financial firms that specialize in risky high-speed trading are boosting their lobbying efforts against proposals to rein in the practice, a Wall Street Journal analysis of lobbying records found. Three Democratic lawmakers introduced legislation that would institute a small tax, known as a financial transactions tax, on high-frequency trades, which reap major profits for firms but add volatility to financial markets.

In response, high-speed trading firms have more than doubled their lobbying efforts, the Journal found:

That follows a steep increase in registered lobbying by high-speed trading firms. Such spending averaged $2.3 million in 2011 and 2012, more than double the average from 2008 to 2010, according to an analysis by The Wall Street Journal of data compiled by OpenSecrets.org, part of the Center for Responsive Politics.

Eleven European countries recently adopted a financial transactions tax; the United Kingdom already has a limited version of the tax that Labour Party lawmakers have looked into expanding. Sens. Tom Harkin (D-IA) and Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) and Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-OR) in February reintroduced their plan to levy a 0.03 percent tax, which they say will raise $352 billion over the next decade, on high-speed trades. Such taxes aim to curb the explosion in high-frequency trading that has only grown since the financial crisis, as this chart from market analyst Nanex shows:

The financial industry argues that such a tax would limit growth potential, but as DeFazio told ThinkProgress last year, the U.S. had a financial transactions tax after World War II when it experienced its greatest period of economic growth. Many business leaders support the tax, including high-speed trading’s pioneer, who said last year that the growth in that trading “has absolutely no social value.”

Former Sen. Scott Brown (R-MA)

The Boston Globe noted Monday that while Brown himself will not be a lobbyist — Senators may not lobby their former colleagues for the first two years after leaving office, under the Honest Leadership and Open Government Act of 2007 — “he will be leaning heavily on his Washington contacts to drum up business for the firm.” The position will also allow him “to begin cashing in on his contacts with the financial services industry, which he helped oversee in the Senate.”

Among the lobbying clients represented by Nixon Peabody is Goldman Sachs, the Wall Street behemoth that reportedly skirted the Dodd-Frank rules . Brown received $10,000 in PAC contributions from Goldman and more than $100,000 in contributions from its employees.

Brown was also the deciding vote against the DISCLOSE Act, which would have allowed voters to see which moneyed interests were funding secret political ads. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which reportedly received millions from Goldman Sachs, led the opposition to the bill.

Last month, Brown joined Fox News Channel as a contributor. In his first appearance in that capacity, he lamented that Congress is “dysfunctional and extremely partisan,” and promised to “stay involved” by being “part of the election process back home and other elections throughout the country.”

A recently hired economic policy director for Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign was a top lobbyist for JP Morgan Chase, Wall Street’s biggest bank, and federal documents show that he lobbied Congress and federal regulators this year on issues ranging from the implementation of new financial regulations to corporate tax reform.

Pierce Scranton, who became Romney’s economic policy director in August, is listed as JP Morgan’s executive director of the bank’s lobbying department on public federal documents filed in 2012. Those documents show that between January and July of this year, Scranton oversaw lobbying activities on a host of economic issues, including legislation dealing with home mortgage modifications and foreclosures, Chinese trade and currency manipulation, the implementation of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform Act and other financial regulations, the Jumpstart Our Small Businesses (JOBS) Act, and corporate tax reform.

Scranton, according to the documents, lobbied Congress and federal regulatory agencies on legislation regarding the “implementation of the Dodd-Frank Act.” Scranton and JP Morgan, at the time, were lobbying for a loophole in a regulation that limited risky trading; months later, the bank lost billions of dollars on risky trades that would be prohibited without such a loophole. Scranton lobbied on four pieces of legislation dealing with Dodd-Frank’s regulation of the derivatives market, according to the documents. He also met with Treasury officials in January of 2011 regarding Dodd-Frank, according to the Sunlight Foundation.

JP Morgan has been an ardent opponent of many of the rules contained in Dodd-Frank, including the regulation of the derivatives market. JP Morgan has spent nearly $10 million lobbying since the beginning of 2011, much of it aimed at Dodd-Frank and regulations it includes.

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Last week, Facebook announced it would cease using facial recognition technology on European Union users and delete all data following complaints from member states and an inquiry by the Irish Data Commissioner. While the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission here in the U.S. over Facebook’s use of the same technology, the complaint remains pending — repeating a familiar narrative of online giants facing higher levels of scrutiny in European Union countries than in the United States.

In the U.S. numerous agencies enforce a “patchwork” of laws defining online privacy protections in different sectors, leaving some areas with very little oversight and users without a clear path to pursue if they feel their rights have been violated. It’s a different story in the E.U., where online privacy policy is guided by the Data Protection Directive — a sort of bill of rights for online users that provides member nations with guidelines for national level laws guaranteeing a base level of control for users.

European protections are on the cusp of becoming even more robust with proposed regulation this year that would implement rules superseding national level laws and extending the scope of protections to apply to all foreign companies processing the data of EU residents. The new regulation also comes with some teeth: Penalties up to two percent of global revenues for offending companies.

To put that into perspective, this summer Google agreed to pay the largest Federal Trade Commission settlement ever to an individual company: It amounted to five hours of 2011 revenues. Under the proposed European Commission Data Protection rules it could have amounted to one hundred seventy-five hours of revenue.

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