Alex Cobham

Another reason to love creole and patois languages.

#DigitalMarronage #Fugitivity #AI

About us The Valuation Office Agency (VOA) gives the government the valuations and property advice needed to support taxation and benefits.

TIL that the UK govt employs almost 4000 civil servants to work on its property-valuation system for taxation. And one of their core jobs is guessing what a new house might have been worth if it had been built in 1991.

Stupid, stupid country.

Will linguistic creativity ultimately be our best defence?

Then saw this article:
"In Book X of The Republic, Plato excludes poets on grounds that mimetic language can distort judgment & bring society to collapse... [We find] a structurally similar failure mode in LLMs: poetic formatting can reliably bypass alignment constraints."
arxiv.org/html/2511.15...

Enjoyed this thought-provoking thread on AI and cognition...

Asylum seekers’ jewellery could be seized to pay for processing costs, says Home Office minister Idea borrowed from Denmark is latest attempt to reduce number of people seeking asylum in UK

a British government looting refugees displaced from former colonial protectorates now is it?
www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025...

6/ "1) Biggest wealth transfer in American history. 2) Kills solar industry, raising prices 3) almost a trillion dollar cut to Medicaid 4) nursing homes shutting down 5) energy shortages 6) 4.5 trillion in NEW DEBT. — I promise you this bill is worse than you think." - @brianschatz.bsky.social

Top economists call on world leaders to set up an international panel on inequality Hundreds of top economists and other experts including former U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen are calling for the world to set up an independent international panel on income and wealth inequalit...

It's clear this idea has wide support. An objective International Panel on Inequality with experts from around the world to advise governments, examine current inequality data and look for areas that need more research. Similar to the IPCC. The time is now.
apnews.com/article/glob...

We've missed out on nearly $30BN in tax from tax cheating mega-corporations & from under-taxing extreme wealth as we enter Day 5 of #COP30 & #UNtaxConvention negotiations. A better future is possible when we use tax to protect people, economies & planet. #TaxForClimate taxjustice.net/topics/un-ta...

‘Illicit financial flows as a definition is the elephant in the room’ — India at the UN tax negotiations - Tax Justice Network At UN tax negotiations, India confirms that illicit financial flows include tax abuse under the UN’s agreed definition, closing the door on any manufactured ambiguity.

Important moment from yesterday's #UNTaxConvention negotiations: India provided the definitive response to the (decade-long) attempt by OECD countries to subvert the definition of illicit financial flows by retrospectively removing corporate tax abuse from scope taxjustice.net/2025/11/14/i...

22 authors in a new OA peer-reviewed article in Soc of Sport Journal:

Israel is committing *athleticide* in Gaza, "an indispensable component of the overall genocidal campaign enforced by the Israeli settler colonial regime and bankrolled by the US."

journals.humankinetics.com/view/journal...

It's day 4 of #COP30 & #UNtaxConvention negotiations, & so far we've missed out on $21 billion in tax to tax cheating multinational corporations & to the under-taxation of extreme wealth. The problem isn't scarcity, it's weakened tax sovereignty. #ChangeTaxNotClimate
taxjustice.net/topics/un-ta...

The outcome of these talks – a world-first United Nations tax convention – will impact every one of us, wherever we are in the world, and shape people’s lives for generations to come.

It’s not just trillions of dollars on the line, but our democracies, human rights and planet.

UN tax convention - Tax Justice Network Everything you need to know about current negotiations on the biggest shakeup in history to global tax rules.

It's the second day of the Nairobi negotiation session of the UN tax convention. You can find all sorts of resources including our daily updates on the discussions here taxjustice.net/topics/un-ta...

#COP30 is underway as countries debate how to fund real climate action. The question isn’t just what they commit to, but who pays. Meanwhile in Nairobi, talks on #UNTaxConvention may give nations the power to raise fair, reliable finance for #ClimateJustice & sustainable dev.

How the Trump Administration Is Giving Even More Tax Breaks to the Wealthy

The Treasury Department and Internal Revenue Service are issuing rules that provide hundreds of billions of dollars in tax relief to big companies and the ultrarich. www.nytimes.com/2025/11/08/b...

UN tax convention - Tax Justice Network Everything you need to know about current negotiations on the biggest shakeup in history to global tax rules.

Next round of UN global tax negotiations are kicking off in Nairobi next Monday.

Useful primer here to get up to speed thanks to Tax Justice Network @alexcobham.bsky.social et al

taxjustice.net/topics/un-ta...

🗣️ Yesterday, MPs of all stripes spoke out against the ongoing financial secrecy in certain UK Overseas Territories. They called urgent attention to its devastating impacts on their constituents, and pushed the government to act.

🧵⬇️

The world is at a fork in the road. One path leads to tax subjugation under Trump & US multinationals, while the other leads to a collective defence of tax sovereignty at the UN that protects every country’s taxing rights. @alexcobham.bsky.social#UNtaxConvention #TaxJustice2025 bit.ly/taxjustice25

$475bn lost to US-backed global gag order shielding corporate tax cheaters - Tax Justice Network A US-backed global gag order1 preventing governments from revealing the names of multinational corporations found shifting billions into tax havens has caused countries to miss out on over US$475 bill...

It's terrible.

The State of Tax Justice 2025 is out today. Find out who has been keeping us in the dark about the scale of corporate tax abuse, and just how much it has cost us all

We have the right to know which multinational corporations cheated on over a trillion in tax. Our governments had the tax records but didn’t make them public. Doing so could’ve recover hundreds of billions in tax #NameTheTaxCheaters #TaxJustice2025

Find out more: bit.ly/49wNnH0

Tomorrow, we'll be publishing the 2025 edition of our State of Tax Justice report, revealing new findings on countries' tax losses to global tax abuse. Journalists interested in the report are welcome to contact us at media@taxjustice.net. #TaxJustice2025

Petition: Transparency and Review of the free zones and ports impacts To ensure full transparency by releasing data on governance, funding, and operations of free zones. Plus a public review to assess impacts, such as job displacement and value for taxpayers money

My petition should be soaring past the 10,000 mark.
Please help me share it as widely as possible.
What's at stake is an abnormal proliferation of tax havens and feudal enclaves
petition.parliament.uk/petitions/72...

The richest Americans control $46 trillion in wealth—but many pay little or no federal tax.
👉 youtu.be/aLKacgW6YOI 👀
@bostoncollege.bsky.social professor Ray Madoff explains how the U.S. tax code has built a new aristocracy in her new book "The Second Estate" from @uchicagopress.bsky.social

The secret tax lives of billionaires are worse than you think.

A fantastic and typically cinematic INET feature on Ray Madoff and THE SECOND ESTATE, publishing this week from @uchicagopress.bsky.social.

The Us Threat To Global Tax Reform: A Proposal For Protecting Multilateralism The US Threat to Progress on Tax Multilateralism By the end of 2024, considerable progress had been made towards the construction of a comprehensive multilateral architecture for corporate taxation.  ...

"To accept the US claim to ‘exceptionalism’ on international tax matters (or worse, to allow Washington to write tax rules for the whole world) should clearly be unacceptable in a world of sovereign, independent nations." - @jayatighosh.bsky.social and @josephestiglitz.bsky.social

The Us Threat To Global Tax Reform: A Proposal For Protecting Multilateralism The US Threat to Progress on Tax Multilateralism By the end of 2024, considerable progress had been made towards the construction of a comprehensive multilateral architecture for corporate taxation.  ...

Important piece from @icrict.bsky.social co-chairs @jayatighosh.bsky.social and @josephestiglitz.bsky.social on the need for countries to stand together in the UN tax convention, in the face of US aggression.
www.cnbcafrica.com/2025/the-us-...

A mammoth day for the Patriotic Millionaires yesterday!

1⃣ 20 of our members headed to Westminster to lobby their local MPs and share our Urgent Memo on fair taxation.

"From Gaza to the Amazon, lives are treated as expendable in a system built on sacrifice. Not everything that’s green shines. False solutions sustain colonial power. We must mobilise political will and move resources through just taxation to fund survival, not destruction.”