US Politics Mega-thread - Page 9027

In our day, we can’t quite see anything wrong with monopoly. We’re certain that our tech giants achieved their dominance fairly and squarely through the free market, by dint of technical genius.

To conjure this image of meritocratic triumph requires overlooking several pungent truths about the nature of these new monopolies. Their dominance is less than pure.

They owe their dominance to innovation, but also to tax avoidance.

Of course, every big American corporation tries to limit the tax bill. Armies of accountants are a staple of capitalism; the manufacture of new deductions is one of our country’s greatest showcases of innovation. But the tech companies are especially slippery with the tax man. They have hatched schemes that their competitors – brick-and mortar firms, media companies – couldn’t dare attempt.

When Jeff Bezos first conceived of Amazon, he originally wanted to locate the company on a California Indian reservation, where it would pay hardly any tax. Authorities rejected that gambit. But Bezos understood that internet commerce challenged traditional ideas about taxation. Thanks to a court ruling, rendered just as he launched his company, Amazon could get away without paying sales tax to the states to which it shipped its goods.

Google has the same sort of unpatriotic accounting schemes. Google has also shifted assets to Bermuda, that famous mecca of high tech. By the end of 2015, it had “permanently reinvested” $58.3bn of its profits in foreign tax havens, earnings on which it pays no US tax.

The tech companies maintain every shred of data, yet seem to want to purge every bit of taxable earnings. The year Facebook went public, it recorded $1.1bn in American profits, but didn’t pay a cent of federal or state income tax. Indeed, it earned a $429m refund. According to Citizens for Tax Justice, Facebook bilked the treasury by taking a single deduction: it wrote off the stock options it gave to its executives.

These companies can afford to push the limits of acceptable behavior, because they have paid such care and attention to Washington. While the tech companies are hardly the image of corpulent K Street, they have built massive lobbying operations that pace the halls of the regulatory agencies and Congress, stacked with skillful hacks.

Google executives set foot in the Obama White House more often than those of any other corporation – its head lobbyist visited 128 times. Google spread its money across Washington with joyous ecumenicism. Google spent about $17m on influence peddlers of both partisan varietals. By one count, Google poured more into its DC apparatus than any other public company. An investigation by The Intercept concluded: “Google has achieved a kind of vertical integration with the government.” Somehow Google managed to overcome the recommendation of staffers on the Federal Trade Commission who found Google’s monopolistic machinations worthy of a lawsuit.

Lobbyists for the companies have preserved a blissful state of barely regulated, barely taxed monopoly. They have played the politics brilliantly. Obama spent his presidency cheering on the tech companies, even pleading with the Europeans not to collect the taxes owed to them. In return, the tech companies have sent their best brains to work for the Democratic administration and its political campaigns.

The tech companies have so mastered Washington, they have acquired such cultural prestige, that it’s hard to imagine the system ever restraining them. But we know that politics doesn’t repose in a steady state, and the companies have one gaping vulnerability – they aggressively surveil users. Thus far, the public has tolerated these invasions, but that won’t last forever.

Hackers are constantly testing security cordons, and constantly bursting through them. Everybody has tolerated this as a fact of digital life, a minor price to pay for its wonders. With the exception of Russian interference in our election, these have been relatively minor breaches. They will prove throat clearing compared with the Big One, the inevitable mega-hack that will rumble society to its core.

The Big One might be an exposed cache of intimate information that disrupts marital relations en masse, as the Ashley Madison hack did on a small scale. It might disrupt our financial system, so that fortunes disappear in an unrecoverable flash. Or it might trigger an actual explosion of infrastructure that kills. If we could predict, we could prevent, but we can’t.

The tech companies can see the Big One coming, and they are bracing for the fallout, which is a perfectly reasonable posture. Their companies have created devices and code that enable omnipresent surveillance; their pack-rat servers hoard personal data. These companies could logically carry the blame for a massive attack.

The best analogy is the financial crisis of 2008. There was nothing that the banks could do to gain political traction in the face of the catastrophe that they unleashed. When the Big One arrives, the tech companies will be vulnerable to the regulation that they have skillfully avoided. (Shamefully, there’s no modern law governing the
use of data.) Just as the financial crisis triggered the creation of Elizabeth Warren’s Consumer Financial Protection Bureau – the rare launch of a new agency – the Big One has the potential for creating a sizable regulatory infrastructure.

On October 20 2017 03:17 Foxxan wrote:
The president isnt even in control. The shadow goverment is. Whatever that is, its a force that is hidden and control the strings.

I think they have not only control of U.S but other countries as well. This means they control C.I.A, FBI, media and more stuff.
Ever wondered why media always have the same propaganda? Never truly investigates stuff or ask "true" questions?
So called freedom of speach, why is it that they brush off important questions as nothing?


The whole medical care is fake, vaccinations are deadly, and the food in U.S deadly as fuck as well.
The irony is that SWEDEN politicans wants to say YES to this deadly food.

There are COUNTLESS of studies showing that this food, vaccinations and medical care is very dangerous. Medical care=their surgeries and medicines.
They are using media

Why is it that whenever someone is talking about curing cancer with right nutritient its brushed off as nothing? Why dont they truly look into it?
When someone says that studies show that this food for example is very bad, you can hear something along these lines:
"I am a neutral scientist and my studies show its not dangerous, therefore the other study has done it wrong"


Here is a ex cia giving info about shadow goverment
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XHbrOg092GA


Here is some stuff about vaccinations.
I have more links but they are in swedish
https://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2017/07/02/critical-vaccine-studies.aspx


Here is link showing that MONSANTO, the leader of GMO food and other posinous food stuff have been found guilty of crimes against humanity
https://www.newstarget.com/2017-05-05-international-tribunal-finds-monsanto-guilty-of-crimes-against-humanity.html


Cant really find other links talking about GMO, i only have links in swedish.


There are numberous reserarches saying that conflict of interest is really big when it comes to reserach.
The ones that are supposed to "protect" us, arent doing that one bit.
Many politicnas are bought, even in sweden. Iam very certain of this because THEY IGNORE ALL RESEARCH that says that this product is bad. And then they only talk about reserarch that shows good stuff. Thats what media is doing as well, they show their propaganda, and manipulate.