Off Topic Politics Thread

I think Lambo said it above but you are describing what already is the situation yet there is inactivity.

The public couldn't be more vocal or united in their desire to see corporations pay their fair share. And politicians are also very vocal in their agreement with the public however it is just BS wink, wink at their corporate friends.

The politicians say they agree with the public but then just do not change things.....or they do change things but open other avenues of avoidance to keep their corporate buddies onside.

That and politicians just suggesting a few crumbs be sent across to make it sound like they gave in. Like the Google payment which was in reality a fraction of a fraction of the world's smallest fraction of what they should've paid.

The whole problem however is this constant separation of them and us. Even on this page there is the idea that google doing it is worse than Joe Bloggs (not the jean company) doing it.

While there should be incremental differences and not a straight line that hurts the smaller man or individual it should come down to a simple rule of you have to pay x amount based on what you earnt from this tax law. Not stuff put aside, stashed, relieved and then hurrah zero earnings means zero tax.

There somehow needs to be a tax on turnover before it hits the accountants desk for him/her to "spend" all the turnover to make zero profit.

The whole reliance on public pressure and moral obligations will just see the status quo continue forever. It is the preverbial shrug of the shoulders. Apple have been shamed over all sorts of stuff like working conditions where their parts are made to tax arrangements. Not much tumbleweed outside the apple store on the day they released their £1000 "must have" smartphone though.

Apple are one of the masters of conditioning. They have made people believe that they have to have their product. A lot of the tech companies have done this to the point that many people believe that they could not survive without their smartphone (whether it be apple or not.)

And like in the video TSS linked above corporations across the world are at it. (BTW good video TSS I watched all of it despite it being Brand. Reminds me of a lot of things Mark Blyth talks about.)

Until people can return to a time when value, worth is separated from money then everything is purely balance sheet. And balance sheets can be very creative. Much moreso than humans although I did like the line about people being medicated to live through unbearable lives which in reality is not that far from the truth. I have said as much somewhere in this thread but can;t be bothered to search for it.

While I was using it in the context of EU migration, tax credits etc reducing a sense of pride of providing for the family and the whole of that wages suppression situation being one of the many drivers of mental illness and depression in this country.

Something else I said earlier in this thread many moons ago came up on the news today which I will search out and put in another post to make sure this post is nice and short

 

Just thought I would put this here after the news stories today of one example (of many examples I would expect.)

From my post on May 8th 2017 on page 342 of this thread (I think I have stated this much earlier than this year but couldn't find an earlier mention)

Actual post: Post 6825

And this post on July 9th 2017 on page 449 of this thread:

Actual post: Post 8969

 

Here's another video from Under The Skin. This is called, Inequality Is Killing Us All. Are We Going To Stop It?

​

Sadly, I can answer the question part of that title straight away. No.

 

Not from this lot, no way Jose!!!

 

Of course not. I had Imps and I setting up a benevolent oligarchy in mind!

 

No thanks.

"Democracy is the worst form of government, apart from all the others."

- Winston Churchill (I think. Can't be arsed to check).

 

I looked for you. Yes he said it but his actual words were 'Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.…’ which suggests someone else said it before him.

https://www.winstonchurchill.org/resources/quotes/the-worst-form-of-government/

 

Pedantry is the last refuge of the witless

Sorry, Whiteley. Democracy is a bugger though. My wife was distraught when Aston was voted off Strictly. "It's called democracy, darling" didn't go down well.

 

Lol. If they vote off the French bloke on X factor I'm not watching the rest of the series. Its bad enough they voted off the lovely Filipino girl with the constant smile and the Angelic voice.

 

It was a loan from his father that started his business, I think he had a second loan as well when 1 project got a bit sticky. His initial loan of 1 million from his father would no way be near to what he is worth today if simply put in a bank account. People have said this kind of thing before, but what they fail to realise is that tens of thousands of people have benefitted by being employed by Trump, if his money was stuck in a bank account then a lot of these people would be worse off. Obviously he received a lot from his father when his dad died, he was a very rich man, but that was 15 years after D Trump started his business

 

Not sure the companies hit by his four corporate bankruptcies would agree. Or the endless list of subcontractors whom he refused to pay. So not everyone's benefitted from being involved with him.

Perhaps if the money had been invested it would have helped to fund more and better jobs from companies that didn't go bankrupt and who paid their suppliers. Who can tell? I'm sure it's George Soros's fault anyway.

Vin

 

What is reasonable apart from the full amount then?

 

Indeed.!

 

This really underestimates his father's influence. Yeah, he gave him a $1m loan. He also gave him several large loans later in life, and (illegally) funneled money to Donald via his casino to keep him afloat. And that doesn't even touch on the fact that Donald took over his father's company in the 1970s, which was already worth hundreds of millions.

He has had every advantage afforded him, failed several times, and still benefited from his advantages enough to become more or less successful.

 

That's not how it works.

Look at it like this way. Trump takes a big loan from a bank to build a casino. So, the money that was used to buy materials and pay contractors and various third party vendors and staff wages... where did it come from? The bank. And where did the bank get the money? From people who put their savings in the bank.

Therefore, had Trump put his money in the bank then the bank would have more money to lend. They would have lent it to some other person, and maybe that person uses it to build and start a casino. Or maybe some other business, it really doesn't matter. And perhaps they might have lent it to projects that were more successful than Trump's, as he defaulted on several loans.

The silly myth that rich people and politicians try to sell you on is that because they employ somebody, they "created" a job. But in reality all they did was shift labor resources from some other project or company to theirs. If Trump didn't build a building in Manhattan, someone else would. And in fact, Trump doesn't even build buildings anymore. Some other investor builds them, and then pays Trump a fee to slap Trump's name on it.

 

you really think that a bank can only lend so much and then it has no money left? even if someone with the financial strength as trump wanted a billion dollar loan, and a bank could not cope, they would farm out a percentage to other banks to cut their risk, pretty much as a bookie does with a big bet.
are you trying to say without trump someone else would have taken the risk to put up a major building where trump tower stands, without steve jobs someone else would have built apple, without bill gates someone else would have built microsoft?

 

I don’t know who this guy is but someone called Richard Murphy, an expert in tax and Professor in International Political Economy, has produced the following report.

https://evolvepolitics.com/on-every...ar-better-with-our-tax-money-than-the-tories/

 

100bn to get out of EU...


Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha

 

If Morris Chang at TSM isn’t pushing the envelope and making chips smaller and more powerful, then the iPhone might be twice the size. If Samsung isn’t pioneering OLED touchscreen technology, the iPhone might look like ****. If Foxconn isn’t assembling iPhones at a ridiculously cheap cost, the iPhone might cost twice as much.

And if the iPhone was that crappy, would anyone buy it? So really, aren’t we, the consumers the one actually keeping those companies and therefore their employees afloat? Did Apple create the job of someone in China building iPhones? Or was it Foxconn, the company that actually employs them and pays their (very meager) wages?

Tim Cook is not doing any of this out of the goodness of his heart. After all, those Foxconn jobs are so ****ty workers were throwing themselves off buildings. He NEEDS those components to be competitive. He isn’t creating jobs, he using the cheapest and best labor possible. He is bidding on TSM’s services, otherwise they sell chips to someone else. Of course TSM goes with Apple because they offer the best deal, so they need Apple as well.

That is how the market works. No one specific entity creates a job. Jobs (along with everything else) are created by the laws of supply and demand and parties acting in partnership while serving their own interests.

There was a time when conservatives understood that. They abandoned those principle long ago. In the US, basically since Reagan. UK has never been as gung-ho about free markets and efficiency over equity, but the right over there seems to have forgotten basic economic principles as well.

I do not know how pro-capitalist I am. But I mean, if you’re going to be all free market about stuff, then at least do it right. Job creation is a myth through which they try to sell you on crony capitalism, supply side economics and other BS.