Obama is driving Houston oil companies to move to Switzerland

unamerican assholes!

 

It's also too bad that people like you, who make more completely ignorant and worthless comments than anyone else here, also get to vote. Sad, isn't it?

The fact you would make that statement is incredible, the ultimate irony.

 

The benefits theses corporations give to society are reduced significantly by the harm their overweening power causes society. I'd say, at best, they're breaking even in the +/- column - and meanwhile, they're getting ****ing wealthy off of us.

 

It will be really hungry human potential when the jobs from these companies have gone bye-bye.

To ignore the realities of the economic impact is just as dumb as the line in the sand "you are with us or you are with the terrorists."

You speak of corporations as though we can exist without them. People need jobs and corporations provide them. If you make things bad enough for the corporations, they will provide those jobs to somebody else's citizens.

Just ask the people of Plano, Texas how things can be when you make the relocation of business to your area attractive. They had a really good run with Frito-Lay, et al setting up shop in their fair burgh.

 

Conversely, you're getting filthy rich off of them.

If you can come up with a better system then a free market with some degree of gouvernment intervention and a better economic agent then a corporation, then by all means, suggest them. Last I checked, all ten of the world's top economies by GDP (and I'd venture top 30) embraced the model and so did all of the top ten in standards of living on the Human Development Index. Even if you are poor, you are living better then 99% of humanity has in the past; humanity is in a period of wealth and innovation never before seen and everyone is benefiting from the power of the corporation, unintended or not. The concept of a "middle class", with purchasing power of the level current to the average American, would've been impossible to think of just two hundred years before. Breaking even, my ass.

 

What's the corporate tax code in Switzerland?

 

You mean the same president who wants to give nearly another trillion in tax cuts? Im a million dollars in debt. My real wealth is great! Why don't you lend me another $100,000 to go piss away in vegas?

Our real wealth as a country is complete crap. Our economy is in the crapper. Our financial sector is in ruins. Real estate is dropping and the only ones who can afford buying large chunks of it are the rich. Jobs are being outsourced. Domestic companies are being bought out by foreigners. Consumers continue to consume more than they produce.

Yet some of the responses are, "well, cya!, you're not that important to our economy". Thats ok, we'll start up some social programs to drop unemployment. Just add it to our deficit.

 

This is difficult to gauge - the free market is global now, and considering a 'better' system requires a degree of a-fish-thinking-outside-of-the-water that is difficult for the majority of people. It's what Max Weber called the 'Iron Cage' of perception - where a particular mode of organizing society is so dominant that it becomes almost impossible to imagine oneself outside of that organizational scheme. I am not in favor of communism - I believe that the world has never seen pure capitalism or pure communism except on a very small scale for a very limited time. Both capitalism and communism, both 'C' words, function primarily as rigid ideologies that mask the operations of the powerful behind the false notion that they both work according to non-personal and abstract entities - either the "invisible hand" of the free market or the "needs of the people."

I am in favor of local economies and economies that work on smaller scales. No entity that people require to survive and require to take advantage of advances in technology (healthcare, transportation, communication, adequate housing, etc,) should be run by any organization for profit. They should break even. Conversely, if people want to sell iPhones and elective plastic surgery and McMansions and fancy sportscars on a genuinely free market, then more power to them.

Corporations should be broken up in favor of localized economies of scale. They should have geographical boundaries placed on them to limit the degree of their influence to a particular space. They should not be recognized as INDIVIDUAL legal entities, but instead as a conglomerate of distinct (and named) individuals who are liable for the operations of that company.

Would you call the Scandinavian countries 'capitalist'? Would you still call China 'communist'? These are moot points - the model they're supposedly embracing only exists in the abstract. The global corporate structure allows for a centralization of power through the accumulation of capital that is ultimately undemocratic because it gives disproportionate power to small cadres of people. And those people then wield that power in a manner that only furthers their own ends.

Money is power in a capitalist system - and corporations, in order to maintain and increase their money, need to take our money. And now they're much bigger than we are. For example, if you need medicine for your diabetes, you don't have the choice of making it yourself - so you have to cede your power (money) and contribute to Merck's power (money). Banks charge outrageous overdraft fees, Government Bureacracies charge ever-increasing fees for ever-more-obscure infractions ... these are examples of individuals being forced to surrender their power to the greater power of a larger entity. And this power has greater consequences for those who start off with lesser powers - a poor uninsured person paying $150 a month for medicine is in much worse shape than an insured middle-class person. There are consequences from this power - it's not just an abstraction. People suffer from lack of power (money) in this system, and that suffering does not (in the majority of cases) relate in any way to the content of that person's character - real douchebags live great lives and genuinely good people get ****ed.

This is disingenuous. There's no way to convert modern abstract value (from printed currency) to, for example, mercantilism (because it operated on the concrete forms of gold/silver). Again, the great illusion fostered by capitalism is that it operates according to depersonalized principles - but, in reality, it's just as static and controlled a system as hereditary monarchy, as the-guy-with-the-most-goats rules, and as the-guy-with-the-biggest-army-wins diplomacy.

And, since the world has been the host for the 'free market' for a very, very long time it's impossible to say whether this is the best form of organization. If the Memphis Grizzlies were the only team in the NBA, it would be true if you said they were the best team in the NBA.

People are (supposedly) living better than 99% of the people in the past because of advances in technology - but how do we know that capitalism created these advances? We don't because all we've had is capitalism. It's just as absurdly hypothetical to assert that advances in medicine, agriculture, and transportation can be attributed to capitalism as it would be to assert that they can be attributed to god. We just don't know if these advances would have come in a different form of economic social organization. Both the assertion and the question are hypothetical and unsupportable.

There are also more people living in poverty than have ever lived in the past. There are more people with fatal illnesses than there have ever been in the past. There are more people who do not eat well than have ever existed in the past. It is now possible to kill more people at once than it ever was in the past (and we have a few examples of that happening already). There are just more people than have ever existed in the past so this list could be endless in either direction. Your view of history excludes everything that cannot be considered 'progress' - so is history only a story of progress? That's a rather simplistic view of the movement of time.

It would have been impossible to think of the 'middle class' two hundred years before because it would have been impossible for it to exist two hundred years before. Also, that phrase didn't really become common until the middle of the nineteenth century. It's another abstraction that works from the supposition that things haven't changed. Again, your statement is essentially nonsense - it would also have been impossible for Britney Spears to exist two hundred years ago, for professional hot-dog eating to exist two hundred years ago, and so on - so, are both of these signs of the improvement of humanity? People lived according to a hierarchy 200 years ago just as they do now, and that hierarchy is just as arbitrary as it is now. So, in that respect, nothing has changed. There are still a handful of powerful people endorsing an illusory system to protect their power from the millions of people who are subject to its influence.

No matter what you want to call power (money, goats, direct connection to divinity, heredity, etc.,), it still operates pretty much the same as it always has. A handful of people rule a large group of people and then use their power over language to convince that large group of people that the power hierarchy works in their best interest (even while it exploits them).

None of your explanations make sense. They sound reasonable, but a simple examination of the assumptions that lay behind them displays them for the empty abstractions that they truly are.

And I'm not in favor of people unjustifiably suffering for the sake of these abstractions.

 

Isn't there an easy compromise here?

Lower the tax rates, and close the tax loopholes for companies that have overseas tax shelters.

Is that not fair?

 

Well, it's not like he has a choice, what with the disaster being handed to him.

Do you really want him to deficit spend extensively over the next four years? I think America has already swallowed enough of that from the last eight years.

 

so you're still going to ignore that these companies started leaving long before anyone had any idea who the next president will be. nice, more mess for obama to clean up and unrealistic standards to live up to.

 

the fact is these companies do business all around the world, they hire people from all around the world. oil companies leaving, toyota building plants here, its all the same

 

do you deny that companies have already started leaving town? long before this election?

 

edit:

 

save? save from what, they aren't making enough money? they are moving their headquarters for tax purposes, they aren't relocating all their jobs. weatherford builds oif field equipment. those jobs aren't going anywhere. all they are doing is avoiding taxes.