We Speak For Earth
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ikenbot CWL -
mohandasgandhi Mohandas Gandhi -
realcleverscience Real Clever Science -
socialuprooting Social Uprooting -
abstractnerd Abstract Nerd -
perscientiamlibertas A Matter of the Most Pleasant Fraternal Confidence
Google Chairman Eric Schmidt Defends Tax Dodge: ‘It’s Called Capitalism’
Google’s chairman says he is “proud” of the way his company avoids paying taxes.
“It’s called capitalism,“ Eric Schmidt told Bloomberg in a Wednesday article. “We are proudly capitalistic. I’m not confused about this.”
“We pay lots of taxes; we pay them in the legally prescribed ways,“ he said. “I am very proud of the structure that we set up. We did it based on the incentives that the governments offered us to operate.”
Bloomberg reported on Monday that Google avoided paying $2 billion in global income taxes last year by housing profits in Bermuda, which has no corporate income tax. Google already had been paying a 2.4 percent overseas tax rate through tax avoidance strategies, according to a 2010 Bloomberg report. Its overall effective tax rate was 22.2 percent in 2009.
Google could not be reached for comment.
Google’s effective U.S. tax rate is unclear. Citizens for Tax Justice did not analyze Google in a 2011 study because Google reports most of its profits as foreign, even though that may not be true.
Other big companies have avoided taxes by shifting revenue abroad. Boeing, DuPont, Capital One and General Electric paid a negative effective U.S. tax rate in 2010, according to Citizens for Tax Justice. Apple paid a total effective tax rate of just 9.8 percent last year, according to The New York Times.
The U.S. government has been struggling to balance its budget; its annual deficit is projected to be $1.1 trillion this year. But taxing companies more is not really on the table. Both the Obama administration and congressional Republicans have proposed cutting the corporate tax rate.
Google is a member of the Silicon Valley Leadership Group’s Tax Policy Committee, which advocates for tax reform. The group says on its website that California should “lower overall tax burdens” and give companies “tax-based incentives.”
Capitalism
(via socialuprooting)
News that that a swarm of termites deep inside the British banking system have been fiddling the interbank interest rates (LIBOR) for years in order to systematically vacuum a few billion pence off the exchange floors for themselves is the latest blow to the credibility of the global money system - and probably a fine overture to a looming climactic implosion of the gigantic, creaking, smoldering, reeking, duck-taped edifice of broken promises, booby-trapped hedge obligations, counterparty follies, central bank euchres, sovereign flim-flams, and countless chicanes too various, dark, and deep to smoke out. Next, we’ll probably hear that Lloyd Blankfein over at Goldman Sachs has been tinkering with the rotation of the earth in order to gain a few micro-milliseconds of advantage in his firm’s high frequency trading rackets. After all, back in 2008 Lloyd himself claimed to be “doing God’s work.”
In short, world banking is now hopelessly pranged, and I am not at all sure the project of civilization (modern edition) can continue by other means. The impairments of capital formation are now so profound that no one and nothing can be trusted. Not only are all bets off, but nobody will want to make any new bets - and by that I mean venture to invest accumulated wealth (capital) in some useful project designed to sustain human well-being. What remains is just the desperate hoarding of whatever remains in assets uncontaminated by the pledges of others to pony up.
All this points to a dangerous new period of political history, a deadly Hobbesian scramble to evade the falling timber in a burning house as the rudiments of a worldwide social contract go up in flames. Such is the importance of legitimacy: the basic condition for governance, especially among supposedly free people. You can meddle in a lot of distributory issues - who gets what - but when you mess with the most basic operations of money to the extent that no one is sure what it’s really worth, or what it represents, then you are deeply undermining society. This is now the condition that is set to blow up republics. [++]
(via socialuprooting)
Private companies could take responsibility for investigating crimes, patrolling neighbourhoods and even detaining suspects under a radical privatisation plan being put forward by two of the largest police forces in the country.
West Midlands and Surrey have invited bids from G4S and other major security companies on behalf of all forces across England and Wales to take over the delivery of a wide range of services previously carried out by the police.
The contract is the largest on police privatisation so far, with a potential value of £1.5bn over seven years, rising to a possible £3.5bn depending on how many other forces get involved.
Let’s see… how can we take oppressive and racist police services and make them even worse? This would be a great start!
Listen to the news today and you would think that economic growth was the only answer to all our problems. But 40 years ago The Limits to Growth, written by a group of scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and published by The Club of Rome, broke a modern taboo: it suggested that growth itself might be the problem.
It wasn’t the first time someone had suggested that an economy endlessly expanding in scale was neither possible nor necessarily desirable. As long ago as 1821, David Ricardo wrote of the ultimate equilibrium to which economic development led. And, in his Principles of Political Economy, 1848, John Stuart Mill raised and answered the question like this:
“Towards what ultimate point is society tending by its industrial progress? When the progress ceases, in what condition are we to expect that it will leave mankind? It must always have been seen, more or less distinctly, by political economists, that the increase of wealth is not boundless: that at the end of what they term the progressive state lies the stationary state, that all progress in wealth is but a postponement of this.”Why, then, did The Limits to Growth shock in 1972, and why does questioning growth today still provoke incredulity and anger? The report itself became something of an albatross for the green movement. The view entered folklore that it contained predictions about resource use that were alarmist and plain wrong. But, as New Scientist magazine reported recently, it was the critics of the book who turned out to be mistaken.
Forget about the fact that capitalism requires the existence of a mass underclass of surplus labor. Lying takes the form of mass media creating the myth that [the] feminist movement has completely transformed society, so much so that the politics of patriarchal power have been inverted and that men, particularly white men, just like emasculated black men, have become the victims of dominating women..
When this collective cultural consumption of and attachment to misinformation couples with the layers of lying individuals do in their personal lives, our capacity to face reality is severely diminished as is our will to intervene and change unjust circumstances.
Portland, Oregon, has followed in the steps of New York and Los Angeles in passing a city resolution denouncing the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision, which allowed unlimited spending by corporations and unions in elections. The resolution:
establishes “that corporations should not receive the same legal rights as natural persons do, that money is not speech and that independent expenditures should be regulated” in political campaigns…
“This is about what kind of electoral system we want to devise for ourselves,” [Mayor Sam] Adams said.
In passing the resolution, Portland took an exciting step to get money out of politics. It’s a step that United Republic supporters are working to replicate around the country. To join the effort and meet other supporters in your hometown, click here.
Read more:
Oregon Live: Portland City Council approves anti-war and corporate-personhood resolutions
