Today in London, in a long running case where a an #Energy firm was trying to extract $11bn of damages from #Nigeria for a failure to build a pipeline promised in a contract, has resulted in the case being judged to be based on a fraudulent contract and as such now looks like at an attempt at international extortion (via the UK's arbitration sector).
Once again London is being tainted by the manner in which it tramples over others' in the #corporate interest!
Rather than kowtow to #corporate demands about content, #JonStewart has chosen to end his show on #Apple+. #Media#censorship of even basic liberal content is pervasive. Folks with actual leftist views have almost no chance of being heard.
"Dark money groups have spent roughly $1 billion—mainly on television and online ads and mailers—to influence #elections in the decade since the #CitizensUnited ruling that gave rise to politically active nonprofits.
More evidence that corporate management is a flawed/inefficient system.
More than 4 out of 5 of bosses are 'accidental managers' who stumble into leadership with little training, a UK survey found
Around 82% of bosses lack any formal leadership or management training and qualifications.
A new survey by the Chartered Management Institute surveyed over 4,500 managers and workers in the UK.
Half of the managers surveyed said promotions are given based on internal relationships over performance.
Maybe we should stop promoting people because they're chummy with the boss? Maybe we should define what it actually is that managers do? Maybe we don't need so many managers in the first place?
Opened a Bluesky account but I'm basically lurking. Seems like Twitter again... too much like Twitter again because there feels like a disconnect between the platform and I. It feels gamified.
"Targeting the top-10 corporate tax dodgers, Sen. Bernie Sanders pledged on Friday to close loopholes that allow these large corporations to exploit offshore tax havens in order to avoid paying U.S. income taxes. Last year, Fortune 500 companies reportedly held over $2.1 trillion in accumulated profits offshore to evade paying U.S. taxes.
"'Three major profitable corporations not only pay nothing in federal income taxes, they actually got a rebate from the IRS,' Sanders told a town meeting in a student center at Iowa Wesleyan University.
"The presidential candidate informed his supporters that #GeneralElectric, #Boeing, and #Verizon paid no federal income taxes between 2008 and 2013. During that period, these three companies amassed more than $102 billion in combined profits, yet they received over $4.1 billion in income tax rebates from the IRS.
"In 2012, GE stashed $108 billion in offshore tax havens and would have had to pay $37.8 billion if the loopholes were closed. Receiving hundreds of millions of dollars in tax refunds from the IRS, Boeing and Verizon regularly outsource their jobs to China and other low-wage countries while hiding their profits in tax havens.
"Although #BankOfAmerica received a bailout of more than $1.3 trillion from the Federal Reserve and the Treasury Department, the bank hid $17.2 billion in offshore tax havens in 2012. Receiving a $2.5 trillion bailout during the financial crisis, #Citigroup stashed $42.6 billion offshore to avoid paying taxes in 2012.
"Faced with over 1,000 lawsuits accusing the company of selling Zoloft while secretly aware it could cause malformed hearts in newborns, #Pfizer operates subsidiaries in 151 tax havens. As the world’s largest drug manufacturer, Pfizer officially holds $74 billion in profits #offshore to avoid paying U.S. taxes.
"Although the CEOs of #Honeywell, #Merck, and #Corning have retirement accounts worth millions of dollars, these heartless tycoons want to raise the eligibility age for Medicare and Social Security to 70 while making significant cuts to Social Security. Sanders also mentioned that despite the fact that Federal Express receives $1 billion each year from the U.S. Postal Service, #FedEx was awarded a $135 million tax refund from the IRS in 2011.
"'In America today we are losing $100 billion in revenue every single year because large corporations are stashing their profits in the Cayman Islands and other offshore tax havens,' Sanders asserted.
"According to a report last year from U.S. PIRG (Public Interest Research Group) Education Fund and Citizens for Tax Justice, nearly 75% of Fortune 500 companies have tucked away $2.1 trillion in accumulated profits offshore to avoid paying U.S. income taxes. In 2014, at least 358 of these massive corporations maintained 7,622 tax haven subsidiaries throughout Bermuda, Ireland, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and other havens.
If elected president, Sanders plans to close these tax loopholes in order to create and maintain at least 13 million jobs by rebuilding our crumbling roads, bridges, water systems, railways, and airports. On Friday, Sanders announced his plan to crack down on corporate tax dodgers by closing loopholes allowing U.S. corporations to avoid paying federal income taxes by setting up a post office box in a tax-haven country, artificially inflating foreign tax credits, and using offshore subsidiaries to evade taxes.
"Sanders vowed to eliminate tax breaks for #BigOil, gas, and coal companies, which would result in saving more than $135 billion over the next decade. He also promised to prevent companies from avoiding taxes by corporate inversions. By acquiring or merging with a smaller foreign business, many U.S. corporations have evaded paying taxes by claiming the new company is foreign, when in reality little to no personnel or operations have moved offshore."
What if Elon Musk, the planetary migrant, isn’t destroying Twitter at the behest of the Russians or the Saudis or his own inner insufficiencies… but he and Jack are just running an experiment on how a large-scale community migrated from one platform to another?
What if Elon Musk is using Twitter as a model for an uninhabitable Earth … just to get the social data?
Affiche pour la #BnF site de Richelieu vue dans le métro. Le texte me laisse perplexe mais je la trouve belle! #corporate Et sinon, allez-y: la rénovation est très réussie, on peut aller bouquiner (gratuitement) dans la salle Ovale et visiter le musée qui expose des pièces choisies dans les collections. #bibliotheque#bibliothequeNationaleDeFrance
@baldur#MustRead for all in #corporate jobs, contracting, or working for others. I bet I rankled many employers because I didn't cow and fall to their gas-lighting.
I personally use #XMPP+#OMEMO for 1:1 chats and have deployed and maintained several #Zulip / https://zulip.com instances as a #corporate & #organizational chat, as it's more user-friendly than #IRC yet also allows for the necessary granularity and auditability.
#Corporate will try to make the economy and immigration the main issues in #election2024 as they have in every cycle since I began voting in the 90's.
It is THE reason polls have been so far off come election day and things like "red wave" did not happen in 2022. It's possible to want something so badly it's obvious. Ask #KevinMcCarthy
I know everyone is upset about Biden building a wall on the border but he could secure as much as 5% of Republican voters if you can prove to them he got it done.
US #law barring parts & products from the #Xinjiang region poses a challenge for #Tesla & other #auto companies
Tesla boasts that its #ElectricVehicles are a marvel not just of innovation but also #ethics, pledging in annual reports that it will “not knowingly accept products or services from suppliers that include forced labour or #HumanTrafficking in any form.”
Firms that appear to undermine a US ban on products made in #Xinjiang emerge near the top of #Tesla’s sprawling network of suppliers, according to a WaPo examination of #corporate records & Chinese media reports. Among them are companies that have openly complied w/ #China’s quotas for moving minority Muslim #Uyghurs out of rural villages & into factory towns through what Chinese authorities call “labor transfers” or “surplus labor employment.”
Big 3 CEOs claim their pay is high b/c its performance based. Really? When they led so poorly that the Big 3 needed taxpayer bailouts—it was workers who took a pay cut.
Now that those workers have generated immense profit—workers still get the pay cut?🤔
"Big 3 CEOs claim their pay is high b/c its performance based." - Well, without the workers to make their ideas & directions into reality, their 'performance' is dead on arrival.
While there are some notable exceptions, the truth is that becoming a CCO has less to do with ability than it has to do with being part of the right group & playing the right group politics. The 'it's not what you know but who you know' principle is prominent in the corporate world.
Nobel laureate James Buchanan is the intellectual linchpin of the Koch-funded attack on democratic institutions.
If the Tennessee-born economist James McGill Buchanan were alive today, it would suit him just fine that most well-informed journalists, liberal politicians, and even many economics students have little understanding of his work.
The reason? Duke historian Nancy MacLean contends that his philosophy is so stark that even young libertarian acolytes are only introduced to it after they have accepted the relatively sunny perspective of Ayn Rand. (Yes, you read that correctly).
If Americans really knew what Buchanan thought and promoted, and how destructively his vision is manifesting under their noses, it would dawn on them how close the country is to a transformation most would not even want to imagine, much less accept.
Buchanan’s view of human nature was distinctly dismal. Adam Smith saw human beings as self-interested and hungry for personal power and material comfort, but he also acknowledged social instincts like compassion and fairness.
Buchanan, in contrast, insisted that people were primarily driven by venal self-interest.
Crediting people with altruism or a desire to serve others was “romantic” fantasy: politicians and government workers were out for themselves, and so, for that matter, were teachers, doctors, and civil rights activists. They wanted to control others and wrest away their resources: “Each person seeks mastery over a world of slaves,” he wrote in his 1975 book, The Limits of Liberty.
The people who needed protection were property owners, and their rights could only be secured though constitutional limits to prevent the majority of voters from encroaching on them, an idea Buchanan lays out in works like Property as a Guarantor of Liberty (1993).
Buchanan saw society as a cutthroat realm of makers (entrepreneurs) constantly under siege by takers (everybody else).
His own language was often more stark, warning the alleged “prey” of “parasites” and “predators” out to fleece them. https://www.ineteconomics.org/perspectives/blog/meet-the-economist-behind-the-one-percents-stealth-takeover-of-america
In 1965 James M. Buchanan launched a center dedicated to his theories at the University of Virginia, which later relocated to George Mason University.
Nancy MacLean describes how he trained thinkers to push back against the Brown v. Board of Education decision to desegregate America’s public schools and to challenge the constitutional perspectives and federal policy that enabled it.
She notes that he took care to use economic and political precepts, rather than overtly racial arguments, to make his case, which nonetheless gave cover to racists who knew that spelling out their prejudices would alienate the country.
All the while, a ghost hovered in the background — that of John C. #Calhoun of South Carolina, senator and seventh vice president of the United States.
Calhoun was an intellectual and political powerhouse in the South from the 1820s until his death in 1850, expending his formidable energy to defend slavery. Calhoun, called the “#Marx of the #Master#Class” by historian Richard Hofstadter, saw himself and his fellow southern oligarchs as victims of the majority.
Therefore, as MacLean explains, he sought to create “#constitutional#gadgets” to constrict the operations of government.
Economists Tyler #Cowen and Alexander #Tabarrok, both of George Mason University, have noted the two men’s affinities, heralding Calhoun “a precursor of modern #public#choice theory” who “anticipates” Buchanan’s thinking.
MacLean observes that both focused on how #democracy constrains property owners and aimed for ways to restrict the latitude of voters.
She argues that unlike even the most property-friendly founders Alexander Hamilton and James Madison, Buchanan wanted a private governing #elite of #corporate#power that was wholly released from public accountability.
Suppressing voting, changing legislative processes so that a normal majority could no longer prevail, sowing public distrust of government institutions— all these were tactics toward the goal.
But the Holy Grail was the #Constitution: alter it and you could increase and secure the power of the wealthy in a way that no politician could ever challenge.
by Joshua Kaplan, Justin Elliott & Alex Mierjeski @ProPublica
#Thomas has attended at least two #Koch donor summits, putting him in the extraordinary position of having helped a #political network that has brought multiple #cases before the #SupremeCourt.
Charles & David #Koch’s access to #ClarenceThomas has gone well beyond his participation in their #donor events. For years, the #KochBrothers had opportunities to meet privately w/ #Thomas thanks to the justice’s regular trips to the #BohemianGrove, an all-male retreat that attracts some of the nation’s most #influential#corporate & #political figures. Thomas has been a regular… for 25 yrs as #HarlanCrow’s guest, acc/to internal docs & interviews w/dozens of members, other guests & workers….
“By announcing hundreds of new oil and gas licences, the prime minister, Rishi Sunak, has become a “dangerous radical” pursuing “moral and economic madness”.
That is not the judgment of Just Stop Oil, or any other environmental campaign group, but the United Nations secretary general, António Guterres.”