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Joe La Fleur

9-year-old girl awarded as 'compensation' in rape case - Atlas Shrugs - 0 views

atlasshrugs2000.typepad.com/...on-in-pakistani-rape-case.html

shared by Joe La Fleur on 15 Nov 12 - No Cached
  • Joe La Fleur on 15 Nov 12
     
    THIS IS ISLAM
thinkahol *

GMF - The Copenhagen Consensus: Reading Adam Smith in Denmark - 0 views

www.gmfus.org/...article.cfm

economic policy america government denmark

shared by thinkahol * on 27 May 10 - Cached
  • thinkahol * on 27 May 10
     
    Adam Smith observed in 1776 that economies work best when governments keep their clumsy thumbs off the free market's "invisible hand." Two generations later, in 1817, the British economist David Ricardo extended Smith's insights to global trade. Just as market forces lead to the right price and quantity of products domestically, Ricardo argued, free foreign trade optimizes economic outcomes internationally. Reading Adam Smith in Copenhagen -- the center of the small, open, and highly successful Danish economy -- is a kind of out-of-body experience. On the one hand, the Danes are passionate free traders. They score well in the ratings constructed by pro-market organizations. The World Economic Forum's Global Competitiveness Index ranks Denmark third, just behind the United States and Switzerland. Denmark's financial markets are clean and transparent, its barriers to imports minimal, its labor markets the most flexible in Europe, its multinational corporations dynamic and largely unmolested by industrial policies, and its unemployment rate of 2.8 percent the second lowest in the OECD (the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development). On the other hand, Denmark spends about 50 percent of its GDP on public outlays and has the world's second-highest tax rate, after Sweden; strong trade unions; and one of the world's most equal income distributions. For the half of GDP that they pay in taxes, the Danes get not just universal health insurance but also generous child-care and family-leave arrangements, unemployment compensation that typically covers around 95 percent of lost wages, free higher education, secure pensions in old age, and the world's most creative system of worker retraining. Does Denmark have some secret formula that combines the best of Adam Smith with the best of the welfare state? Is there something culturally unique about the open-minded Danes? Can a model like the Danish one survive as a social democratic island in a turbulent sea of globali
thinkahol *

Record profits and record unemployment: Nothing's trickling down - CSMonitor.com - 0 views

www.csmonitor.com/...yment-Nothing-s-trickling-down

profits and record unemployment: Nothing's trickling down - CSMonitor.com

shared by thinkahol * on 08 Mar 11 - No Cached
  • thinkahol * on 08 Mar 11
     
    The Big Money economy is booming. According to a new Commerce Department report, third-quarter profits of American businesses rose at an annual record-breaking $1.659 trillion - besting even the boom year of 2006 (in nominal dollars). Profits have soared for seven consecutive quarters now, matching or beating their fastest pace in history. Executive pay is linked to profits, so top pay is soaring as well. Higher profits are also translating into the nice gains in the stock market, which is a boon to everyone with lots of financial assets. And Wall Street is back. Bonuses on the Street are expected to rise about 5 percent this year, according to a survey by compensation consultants Johnson Associates Inc. But nothing is trickling down to the Average Worker economy. Job growth is still anemic. At October's rate of only 50,000 new private-sector jobs, unemployment won't get down to pre-recession levels for twenty years. And almost half of October's new jobs were in temporary help.
thinkahol *

Why "business needs certainty" is destructive - Glenn Greenwald - Salon.com - 0 views

www.salon.com/...index.html

Why business needs certainty is destructive - Glenn Greenwald Salon.com

shared by thinkahol * on 19 Aug 11 - No Cached
  • thinkahol * on 19 Aug 11
     
    Businesses have had at least 25 to 30 years near complete certainty -- certainty that they will pay lower and lower taxes, that they' will face less and less regulation, that they can outsource to their hearts' content (which when it does produce savings, comes at a loss of control, increased business system rigidity, and loss of critical know how). They have also been certain that unions will be weak to powerless, that states and municipalities will give them huge subsidies to relocate, that boards of directors will put top executives on the up escalator for more and more compensation because director pay benefits from this cozy collusion, that the financial markets will always look to short term earnings no matter how dodgy the accounting, that the accounting firms will provide plenty of cover, that the SEC will never investigate anything more serious than insider trading (Enron being the exception that proved the rule). So this haranguing about certainty simply reveals how warped big commerce has become in the US. Top management of supposedly capitalist enterprises want a high degree of certainty in their own profits and pay. Rather than earn their returns the old fashioned way, by serving customers well, by innovating, by expanding into new markets, their 'certainty' amounts to being paid handsomely for doing things that carry no risk. But since risk and uncertainty are inherent to the human condition, what they instead have engaged in is a massive scheme of risk transfer, of increasing rewards to themselves to the long term detriment of their enterprises and ultimately society as a whole.
Omnipotent Poobah

Well, Duh! Wall Street Hasn't Changed - 0 views

omnipotentpoobah.com/...-duh-wall-street-hasnt-changed

economics wall street bailout ceo obama politics

shared by Omnipotent Poobah on 16 Sep 09 - No Cached
  • Omnipotent Poobah on 16 Sep 09
     
    Some seem surprised that Wall Street's outrageous behavior continues unabated, which is about as insightful as saying they never saw the meltdown coming. Astronomical compensation, uber-risky investment behavior, and sales of new, more exotic investment instruments is still in vogue in Gordon Geckoland.
thinkahol *

Overcoming Despair as the Republicans Take Over: A Conversation with Noam Chomsky | Tik... - 0 views

www.tikkun.org/...conversation-with-noam-chomsky

Overcoming Despair as the Republicans Take Over: A Conversation with Noam Chomsky | Tikkun Magazine

shared by thinkahol * on 22 Jun 11 - No Cached
  • thinkahol * on 22 Jun 11
     
    Michael Lerner (ML): You have made many excellent analyses of the power of global capital and its capacity to undermine ordinary citizens' efforts to transform the global reality toward a more humane and generous world. If there were a serious movement in the U.S. ready to challenge global capital, what should such a movement do? Or is it, as many believe, hopeless, given the power of capital to control the media, undermine democratic movements, and use the police/military power and the co-optive power of mass entertainment, endless spectacle, and financial compensations for many of the smartest people coming up through working-class and middle-income routes? What path is rational for a movement seeking to build a world of environmental sanity, social justice, and peace, yet facing such a sophisticated, powerful, and well-organized social order?
thinkahol *

The super-rich CEO scam - and how to stop it : Johann Hari - 0 views

johannhari.com/...ch-ceo-scam-and-how-to-stop-it

ceo compensation pay economy

shared by thinkahol * on 13 Jun 10 - Cached
  • thinkahol * on 13 Jun 10
     
    We are emerging now from a long dream- boom, built on a mess of financial trickery rather than on producing anything worthwhile. In the Nineties and the noughties we didn't become more efficient or more productive - we simply became better at being conned. All the "triumphs of deregulation" bragged about by market fundamentalists from Ronald Reagan to Tony Blair were built on a nitroglycerine- base of credit default swaps and subprime mortgages. The profits went almost entirely to the richest one per cent, while the bill after the burst goes to all of us.
Skeptical Debunker

Tax Bomber Stack Wanted Independent Contractor Status to Avoid Paying Taxes - 0 views

blog.pappastax.com/...r-status-to-avoid-paying-taxes

Joseph Stack independent contractor tax implications lawyer analysis

shared by Skeptical Debunker on 22 Feb 10 - Cached
  • Stack was upset that §1706 did precisely what it was designed to do: Deprive him of the chance to exploit independent contractor status to avoid paying taxes through non-filing or through the understatement of income, overstatement of deductions, and avoidance of income tax withholding. In spite of the overwhelming advantages attendant to employee status, Joe Stack desperately wanted to be treated as an independent contractor for one simple reason: It would have made his tax protesting easier.4 Footnotes: ¹  We have met many taxpayers who worked as independent contractors for years without so much as a peep of protest until they realized, ex post facto, that it might have better for them to have been treated as employees. In our experience, workers tend to be content with their independent contractor status until one of the following happens: They get fired or quit They get hurt on the job They get sued for something they did while on the job They need a bank loan (and employment verification)  ²  If Stack had been an independent contractor and was subsequently “fired” by his principal, my hunch is it would have taken him less time to file a claim for unemployment compensation than it takes Apolo Ohno to finish short track. ³  Indeed, §1706 was included in TRA ‘86 because the CBO had estimated that the government was losing up to 30% of taxes because independent contractors were either not reporting all of their income on their tax returns or were claiming fraudulent or questionable deductions against that income. 4   Like all tax protestors, Stack knew that once the IRS had collected his taxes through payroll withholding it would never give it back to him based on previously refuted tax protestor arguments. Consequently, his only chance of avoiding taxes was to control his own tax payments and then use his frivolous arguments to evade or at least defer paying taxes.
  • Skeptical Debunker on 22 Feb 10
     
    Enacted in 1978, §530 is a safe harbor law that lists several conditions which if met allows workers to be treated as independent contractors rather than employees.\n\n Joe Stack was compelled to burn his house down, murder his wife and children and fly his airplane into the side of a federal building because 24 years ago Congress passed and President Reagan signed into law the Tax Reform Act of 1986 that added sub-section (d) to §530 thereby excluding engineers and computer programmers from the safe harbor provisions of §530 .\n\nThe passage of this law (§1706 of the Tax Reform Act of 1986) did not as some have suggested make all engineers and computer programmers employees, it merely made them subject to the 20 factor common law test historically used for determination of a worker's status. In other words, had Joe Stack been truly independent from the company or companies to whom he provided services, he could have, should have and would have been treated as an independent contractor rather than an employee.
Bakari Chavanu

bonuses-put-goldman-in-public-relations-bind: Personal Finance News from Yahoo! Finance - 0 views

finance.yahoo.com/...ldman-in-public-relations-bind

capitalism politics

shared by Bakari Chavanu on 16 Oct 09 - Cached
  • But these days that old dictum is being truncated to just “greedy” by some Goldman critics. While many ordinary Americans are still waiting for an economic recovery, Goldman and its employees are enjoying one of the richest periods in the bank’s 140-year history.
  • For Goldman employees, it is almost as if the financial crisis never happened. Only months after paying back billions of taxpayer dollars, Goldman Sachs is on pace to pay annual bonuses that will rival the record payouts that it made in 2007, at the height of the bubble. In the last nine months, the bank set aside about $16.7 billion for compensation — on track to pay each of its 31,700 employees close to $700,000 this year. Top producers are expecting multimillion-dollar paydays.
  • But its strong financial showing — a profit of $3.19 billion in the third quarter — was overshadowed by Goldman’s swelling bonus pool. Goldman set aside nearly half of its revenue to reward its employees, a common practice on Wall Street, even in this post-bailout era.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Even in 2008, the most tumultuous year in modern Wall Street history, Goldman employees reaped rewards that most people can only dream about. Goldman paid out $4.82 billion in bonuses last year, awarding 953 employees at least $1 million each and 78 executives $5 million or more. The rewards for 2009 will be far greater.
  • “We are very focused on what is going on in the world,” Mr. Viniar replied to a barrage of questions about whether the bank should pay outsize bonuses in these hard economic times. “We are focused on the economic climate. We are focused on what is going on with other people.”
Omnipotent Poobah

Jesus! I Give Unto Thee the Holy Bonus - 1 views

omnipotentpoobah.com/...-give-unto-thee-the-holy-bonus

ceo compensation john varley brian griffiths economics religion money changers

shared by Omnipotent Poobah on 05 Nov 09 - Cached
  • Omnipotent Poobah on 05 Nov 09
     
    It takes a crapweasel with unbelievably huge balls to suggest that God thinks it's great CEOs to make more money than - well, God. John Varley, CEO of Barclays Bank, has had an epiphany.
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