Proven by science, or at least by the Congressional Research Office, the legislative analytical arm looks into ‘profit shifting’ by American multi-national corporations. Profit-shifting is the practice of using global tricks to declare the majority of profits in tax haven countries while investing virtually zero in hiring and infrastructure in the same places.
This is the utilization of small nothing-nations like Bermuda, Luxembourg and Switzerland, to launder profit so that tax payment to Uncle Sam are avoided. In such a way one has read news of US oil giants with central shell offices in Zug, Switzerland, or Apple routing its iTunes and iJunk store purchases through Luxembourg.
This is not new and the Congressional Research Service does not phrase it so indelicately. But it is good that the agency has analyzed the trend — which is upward — and reported the truth in “An Analysis of Where American Companies Report Profits: Indications of Profit-Shifting,” ably distributed by Steven Aftergood and his Secrecy blog here.
“The analysis appears to show that American companies report earning profits in tax haven or tax-preferred countries that, when compared to more traditional economies, appear to be disproportionate to hiring and capital investment in those countries,” reads the CRS report summary. “Profits reported by American companies also appear to be disproportionate to national output in the tax haven countries, and in some countries, these reported profits actually exceed total economic output.”
In other words, the financial structures of Bermuda, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Ireland, Switzerland and others appear to have been modified and used exactly because they enable tax avoidance as international parasite nations.
Again, “An Analysis of Where American Companies Report Profits: Indications of Profit-Shifting,” at Secrecy blog here.
It’s probably futile to try to change current Republicans. It’s smarter to build a new wing of the Republican Party, one that can compete in the Northeast, the mid-Atlantic states, in the upper Midwest and along the West Coast.
Not much of a surprise from the New York Times, a quick piece on corporate hiring in the economy that produces little. Corporate America is now hiring primarily through connections, which leaves anyone out of work for a long time discarded. America has always hated the unemployed.
It also points out that resumes sites like Monster and Careerbuilder are largely a waste of time.
One of the questions, or rather assertions from the crowd:
Online job search is a waste of time. Once you have given up as I have, how is one expected to go out and try to put on a positive face when all one faces is no positive direction? Everything in the United States is a scam.
For many, it’s a very accurate observation. Much of daily life is filled with scams from corporate America and to survive everyone must go about the task of trying to always avoid the tricks and traps. And the past four years have made it abundantly clear that no will exists anywhere in the country — except maybe in the writings of Paul Krugman — to lessen unemployment, decrease inequality, and raise the pay and declining living standards of average Americans. In fact, these are things that are vigorously opposed in the current system.
Of course, the headhunter couldn’t admit this was so. But he couldn’t actually lie in front of everyone, either, so he had to talk in a circle:
No, everything is not a scam. There are a lot of companies that are hiring, but there are more that are nervous about investing in more personnel in a volatile economy. It’s understandable: So much is in flux today that companies hesitate to spend money, and they over-compensate by insisting on “perfect hires??? …
First, we already know that applying for jobs online is largely a waste of time …
The “hiring expert” who insisted not everything was a scam emphasized the importance of knowing someone on the inside, of having a network. Then he conceded most people didn’t have the luck or resources to cultivate such relationships. And not tackled was the hard fact that once you’ve been unemployed nobody wants to know you — which is the same as having no “network.”
Economists and other experts say the recession has severed networks for many workers, especially the long-term unemployed, whose ranks have remained high even as the economy recovers.
“You’re submitting your résumé to a black hole,??? it reads at one point.
Although the phenomenon has intensified it’s not unique. When I was being trained in chemistry, none of the undergraduates (the bachelors and masters candidates) I worked with got first positions by sending out resumes in response to ads in the trade journals like Science and C&E News. It just didn’t happen. They could all use their rejection notices as wallpaper.
When they got hired it was always through leveraging someone they already knew at a company, or pleading with a relative who worked at a firm to get them an in.
Human resource departments were simply barriers.
The New York Times piece spends a lot of time discussing hiring at Deloitte & Touche, one of the big parasite consulting and accounting firms of the country, a business that encompasses everything but which contributes very little observable to the social good.
Another firm mentioned hiring more and more by acquaintance is a national rent-a-car company.
If a rent-a-car company is run by people so venal and stupid that it thinks that the only good employees for standing behind a counter and working a scheduling and tracking program on a computer network, moving cars around a parking lot and handing out keys can be obtained only by digging through the friends of current workers, it speaks volumes about their regard for people, including their own.
“Who knows? Maybe you’ll find a Bushmaster AR-15 under your tree some frosty Christmas morning!???
The lede: Threatened by long-term declining participation in shooting sports, the firearms industry has poured millions of dollars into a broad campaign to ensure its future by getting guns into the hands of more, and younger, children … The industry’s strategies include giving firearms, ammunition and cash to youth groups; weakening state restrictions on hunting by young children; marketing an affordable military-style rifle for ‘junior shooters’ …”
Thousands of people, many holding signs with names of gun violence victims and messages such as “Ban Assault Weapons Now,” joined a rally for gun control on Saturday, marching from the Capitol to the Washington Monument …
Once the crowd arrived at the monument, speakers called for a ban on military-style assault weapons and high-capacity ammunition and for universal background checks on gun sales.
Education Secretary Arne Duncan told the crowd it’s not about taking away Second Amendment gun rights, but about gun safety and saving lives. He said he and President Barack Obama would do everything they could to enact gun control policies.
As I’ve pointed out, the gun nut lobby has worked hard cultivating its image as rage-filled white male ogres who are stockpiling arms, a group that frightens or repulses normal people.
The only thing protecting it are feckless Democrats and the entirety of the minority GOP. They’ve lost any good will they might have had with everyone else.
And about the liberties I took with the photo: Yes, I put my fingers on the scale. But I didn’t have to.
When a kid I went to the original vomit bag as advertising hook movie, Mark of the Devil, for a Saturday matinee in Pine Grove. It worked. Everyone in my grade wanted to go.
Rated “V” for Violence. For the NRA, Wayne LaPierre and the insurrectionist lobby, that’s fair, dontcha think? It would be a heckuva grindhouse movie.
Foster Friess, the crazy Republican plutocrat infamous for going on television and making a witless joke about how women used Bayer aspirin for contraception back in his day, AND who bankrolled equally crazy homophobe Rick Santorum’s presidential bid … is now even more crazy, apparently.
In today’s Washington Times, the DC newspaper that lives to publish every single belief, everyday, in Republican Crazy World, Friess has evidently come to the conclusion that it’s possible for his party of nuts rabidly homophobic people to win the gay vote.
How do they do this?
By telling gay people in America the GOP is their protector against the creeping menace of sharia law. That is, they will continue to try and beat up on Muslims in this country and that will make gay people like them more. (Or maybe he didn’t really mean it and was trying to do anything to avoid talking about gay marriage. And WaTimes editors are desperate to reinvigorate the party with the weirdest things that can be thought up.)
Anyway, there can be no doubt it is an ingenious strategy, right there with having a woman hold a pellet between her knees as birth control.
An influential GOP donor said Friday that Republicans should do more to make sure that gay men and lesbian women do not fall victim to the sort of Shariah law practiced by hard-line Islamists.
Foster Friess, the the multimillionaire who helped keep Rick Santorum’s presidential dreams afloat in the GOP primary last year, told reporters at a breakfast hosted by the Christian Science Monitor that he wants to make sure that gay people are not killed in foreign nations because of their sexual preference.
Asked whether the Republican Party should embrace gay marriage, the 72-year-old investment manager said, “We have to protect the gay people in our country from Shariah law.”
There is no sharia law in the US. But every week, like clockwork, someone on the editorial pages of the Washington Times, insists there is. I always get a newsletter in my mailbox about it.
