Jack Yan on Tumblr

Posts tagged globalization

While most newspapers groups in Britain pay 30% or more in corporation tax, Murdoch’s News International (which since 1986 has made profits of nearly £1bn (£979.4m) pays virtually nothing. Thanks to the adroit but quite legal way in which Murdoch’s accountants have transferred profits and losses in his multinational company from one country to another, sometimes involving letterbox companies in offshore tax havens. It may be an embarrassing disclosure to both Murdoch and his new friend Tony Blair. It also explains how his BSkyB can afford to secure a virtual monopoly on all football matches played in Britain. And he can afford to wage a price war on weaker papers.

Mail on Sunday, December 3, 1995 (source not independently verified).

What will the internet be like after SOPA? Imagine a library filled with nothing but fliers, catalogues, and calling cards. That will be the internet in a nutshell. If content holders go crazy with copyright complaints, the only websites left will be sites belonging to companies with teams of lawyers, or advertising sites, or personal or organizational sites made by people who know how to build non-copyright infringing sites, none of which will have comment sections. In other words, it will be boring.

Ariane Barnes: ‘SOPA will be the death of the internet’

The protest movements are indeed against Big Business—a perfectly justified cause—and against “governments”. What they have really divined, however, albeit a bit late in the day, is that they have for decades bought into a fraudulent democracy: they dutifully vote for political parties—which then hand their democratic mandate and people’s power to the banks and the derivative traders and the rating agencies, all three backed up by the slovenly and dishonest coterie of “experts” from America’s top universities and “think tanks”, who maintain the fiction that this is a crisis of globalization rather than a massive financial con trick foisted on the voters.

Robert Fisk: ‘Bankers are the dictators of the west’, The Independent

… you are left with about 30%–40% of working age Americans productively employed. And everyone else lives off them.

That is the real economic crisis (mirrored in most other Western countries) and all brought about by the corrupt depredations of government over many decades. It was long hidden by the combination of government borrowing (consuming now what should have been productive investment for the future, and thus stolen from future retirees), an expanding working age population and, for a time, the desire of China and other Asian countries to grow their industry by providing loans to Western countries to buy the output (loans, which they now realize, will not be repaid). All of those ameliorating factors have now reversed and the grand ponzi scheme of post WWII Western governments is fully exposed.

‘BazzaMcKenzie’, commenting on The Daily Telegraph’s website on the US debt crisis

What we are seeing here is a clash between politicians who (perhaps belatedly) are recognising that the laws they enact can’t always tether a business of News Corporation’s size and power and a company that—like many multinational companies—is obsessed with the letter of the law and has a history of ruthlessly exploiting the letter of the law for commercial advantage[.]

Robert Peston, BBC business editor, on Rupert Murdoch v. Parliament