First it was Vodafone stores, then Philip Green’s Topshop, Boots and grocers to the Queen Fortnum & Mason. Now direct action tax protesters are turning their sights on the Glastonbury festival, promising to use U2‘s headline performance to throw a spotlight on the group’s convoluted tax affairs.

Campaigners have promised to stop short of disrupting the set, but are determined to make their protest highly visible. Plans are afoot for a giant inflatable banner with the slogan “Bono Pay Up”, spelled out in lights.

“Bono claims to care about the developing world, but U2 greedily indulges in the very kind of tax avoidance which is crippling the poor nations of this world,” said a spokesman for Art Uncut, a group with strong links to UK Uncut.

Campaigners also want to draw attention the impact of tax avoidance on Ireland‘s parlous public finances. “We will be showing the very real impact of U2′s tax avoidance on hospitals and schools in Ireland. Anyone watching will be very much aware that Bono needs to pay up.”

The band sparked a wave of criticism in 2006 by shifting parts of its business affairs from Ireland to the Netherlands in response to a cap on generous tax breaks for artists in the republic.

Previously, worldwide royalties earned from works of art – including rock CDs – could be declared tax free as part of a popular initiative to help struggling artists and reflect Ireland’s reputation as a cultural hub. However the biggest beneficiaries were the likes of U2 rather than artists on the breadline.

Dr Sheila Killian, of the University of Limerick, said the introduction of a cap – initially set at €250,000 (£222,500) a year – was still generous and left the tax affairs of most working artists unaffected. She said: “Bono’s attitude to what tax is all about is ill thought out. Tax is about citizenship.”

Another campaigner, Richard Murphy, said: “If Bono thinks he is just like any other Irishman, he should pay his taxes like everyone else. That is the only way for Ireland to break out of the mess it is in.”

Protesters at Glastonbury are planning to float an over-sized bundle of fake cash from one part of the crowd, under an Irish tricolour, to another section of the audience under a Dutch flag.

A spokesperson for U2, who are in Vancouver, was unavailable for comment. Their manager, Paul McGuinness, has previously insisted: “U2 is a global business and pays taxes globally … At least 95% of U2′s business … takes place outside of Ireland and as a result the band pays many different kinds of taxes all over the world.”

Sources close to the band said Bono and others live in Ireland, are employers there, and are involved in philanthropic activities.

A spokesperson for One, the anti-poverty campaign group co-founded by Bono, said: “U2′s business arrangements have nothing to do with illegal tax evasion and transfer mispricing in developing countries, critical issues which Bono and One campaign on.

“One is currently lobbying for radical changes in the law that would require extractive industry corporations to report payments to governments, to ensure these substantial resources contribute to the domestic tax base instead of being stashed or siphoned off.”

The organisers of Glastonbury festival declined to comment.

source:http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2011/jun/03/u2-glastonbury-tax-protesters

I found this on anothe website

The Solution to Ireland’s Austerity Plan

“Make Bono Pay Tax”

By EAMONN McCANN

The most eye-catching placard on a 120,000-strong march in Dublin last Saturday against the Irish government’s austerity response to the tottering of the capitalist system was held aloft by a scrawny teenager with the look of a music-lover about him, reading “Make Bono Pay Tax.”

The march, organised by the Irish Congress of Trades Unions, was protesting against measures including a pay freeze plus a one percent wage levy on all public sector workers, education cut-backs which will mean, for example, the closure of special needs classes in primary schools, and much else along the same screw-the-workers, neo-liberal lines.

The cut-backs and attacks on public sector workers come against the background of a banking scandal which, proportionately, dwarfs the crimes of the bankster class in the US. Rummaging through the rubble of Anglo Irish Bank which collapsed at the end of 2008 and was nationalized in January, investigators discovered that the bank’s founder and boss Sean Fitzpatrick was secretly in hock to his own bank to the tune of €87 million, which he had shifted into Irish Life and Permanent on the day before the annual audit and shifted back again the day afterwards. Fitzpatrick—“Seanie” to both Taoiseach (Prime Minister) Brian Cowan and his predecessor Bertie Ahern—had performed this manoeuvre with sums of around €80 million every year for the past seven years.

It emerged, too, that the bank had last year given loans worth €451 million to ten customers buying shares in the bank, the loans being secured on the same shares. As well, 15 individuals owed the bank at least half a billion each, much of it secured on property holdings which may now be worth as little as shares in Anglo Irish (€17 in mid-2007, 12 cents at the time of nationalization).

The bail-out burden of all this falls on the tax-payers. Hence the mass fury expressed on the Dublin march and the dismay of many at the nervous pusillanimity of union leaders on the platform, whose main call was not to march on another couple of hundred yards to Anglo Irish headquarters and burn it down but to “exert pressure” on the government to agree to reopen talks on a “package of measures”.Hence, too, a new focus on tax-avoiders who live high off the hog in Dublin while basing their businesses in Euro-zone tax-shelters. Like U2.

More than 40 years ago, the Beatles followed Maharishi Mahesh Yogi to India in search of a spiritual haven. Three years ago, U2 followed him, in search of a tax haven. (By the time the Maharishi faded from mortal life in February 2006, he was living at his Dutch estate, presiding over a business empire worth more than a man who scorned money could be bothered to count. He’d moved to Holland in 1990 for tax purposes. Or, rather, no-tax purposes.”)

Cork-born British television super-star Graham Norton commented at the time: “People like Bono really annoy me. He goes to hell and back to avoid paying tax. He has a special accountant. He works out Irish tax loopholes. And then he’s asking me to buy a well for an African village. Tarmac a road or pay for a school, you tight-wad!”

But Norton’s words of modest wisdom didn’t resonate the media mainstream which endlessly  celebraties Bono. They laud his selflessness in occasionally taking time off from counting the cash he had squirrelled away to berate the Irish authorities for refusing to give more of the money they had collected from tax-compliant citizens towards alleviating world hunger. They report worshipfully on Bono’s peregrinations around the planet in the company of the liars, murderers, thieves and whores who were have run the global economy into ruin.

The arrival of U2 confirmed Holland as the European Union’s number one tax haven. Corporations which have joined the band in establishing headquarters there to avoid paying tax in their home countries include Coca Cola, Ikea, Nike and Gucci.

The band is set to tour their new album, “No Line on the Horizon”. So stand by for the latest swirl of jangly guitar enclosed in a fog of undefined feeling. Expect no grit, no danger, nothing jagged or ragged to disturb tranquillity, but a toxic cloud of fluffy rhetoric, a soundtrack for the terminally self-satisfied, not forgetting heart-felt homilies on how to live a moral life.

The best response to one of those breathless Bono appeals for uplift came at a Glasgow gig when he hushed the audience to reverent silence before starting slowly to clap. “Every time I clap my hands,” he whispered into the microphone, “a child in Africa dies…”

A voice responded in broad Glasgow accent: “Well, fucking stop doin’ it then.”

All of which is mere intro to lyrics (by Bono impersonator Paul O’Toole) sung outside the Dail (parliament) in Dublin on Wednesday, at a follow-up- demo organized by the Debt and Development Coalition Ireland.

I want to run, my money to hide
I want build paper walls and keep it inside
I want to seek shelter from income tax pain
Where the accounts have no names
See my tax bill disappear without a trace
Where the accounts have no names

Where the accounts have no names
Where the accounts have no names
Where the accounts have no names
Keeping our fortune is something we love
Something we love
And when we go there, we go without you
Revenue we don’t do

Ireland is bankrupt and though it’s going bust
Our well paid accountants made sure it don’t affect us
They showed us a place to avoid all the pain

Where the accounts have no names
Where the accounts have no names
Where the accounts have no names
Avoiding tax is something we love
Something we love

And when we go there, we forget about you
Revenue we don’t do

Tax demands turn to rust
We’ve used the law and left on the wind
Left on the wind

On the subject of tax our love turns to rust
See our dosh is in trusts
Dosh is in trusts
And when we go there, we forget about you
Revenue we don’t do

Or:

I have paid highest fees
I have moved overseas
Only to pay less tax
Only to pay less tax

I have run
I have crawled
I’ve done so much you’d be appalled
You’d be appalled
Only to pay less tax

But I still haven’t learned about democracy
No I still haven’t learned about democracy

I know avoiding tax ain’t fair
It’s just because I’m a millionaire
I don’t need to pay like you
No I won’t pay like you

Cause I still haven’t learned about democracy
But I still haven’t learned about democracy

You paid your tax and you
Laid the blame
Carried the burden
Of my shame
Of my shame
You know I’m still running

Cause I still haven’t learned about democracy
No I still haven’t learned about democracy
But I still haven’t learned about democracy
But I still haven’t learned about.

In the day of the Beatles, it was peace and harmony to the tune of “All You Need Is Love.”

Now, it’s “Get It While You Can” to the tune of a billion dollars. Rock and roll, where did it go wrong?

None of this is to deny that U2 could play a part in restoring unity of purpose to the Irish people in these dangerously divisive times. I reckon that “Make Bono Pay Tax” could prove a slogan around which the nation might gather.

And another thing. It will be remembered that, last May in Dublin’s Merrion Hotel after a Springsteen gig, Bono undertook to take part in a public debate with Dave Marsh on the effectiveness of celebrity politics. A couple of weeks later, U2’s New York office told Marsh that they’d schedule the discussion once the new album was finished. Like, now. So I emailed Marsh last week to find out the details.

“He backed out, without offering an explanation (and I was too smart to ask)” came the prompt reply. “We may draw our own conclusions.”

Eamonn McCann is a troublemaker and can be reached at Eamonderry@aol.com

source: http://www.counterpunch.org/mccann02262009.html

Comment: Nothing more canbe said !