Tag: corpocracy

US military unilaterally overturns Posse Comitatus.

“In essence, this policy change seeks to supersede Posse Comitatus,
the 1878 law which forbids the military from being involved in domestic
law enforcement “except in cases and under circumstances expressly
authorized by the Constitution or Act of Congress.” Under the Insurrection Act of 1807,
the President may deploy armed forces domestically under extreme
circumstances but Congress has to review the action every 14 days.


Under the War Powers Resolution of 1973,
the President cannot commit troops to an armed conflict for a period
longer than 60 days without an authorization from Congress of the use of
military force or a declaration of war.


Under no circumstances in current US law is it legal for
the military to deploy itself domestically without authorization from
either the President, Congress or both.”
 It looks as if the U.S. military are actively expecting some sort of trouble in which authorization for the military’s use by the command-in-chief isn’t possible.  I wonder why they are anticipating that?  Especially when the organization most capable of arranging a situation where that authorization isn’t possible is the U.S. military.
The Ciceronian historical cycle anticipates the development of an aristocracy at this point.  It’s interesting to consider from what that aristocracy might develop, as the areas of corporate and military power appear to be the two aspects of society that are increasingly immune to government regulation.  If the Ciceronian model is still relevant, the aristocracy would likely develop out of that corporate-military intersection.

A whistle, blown

A certain corporation has been actively avoiding British taxes:

A FORMER Google executive has blown the whistle on a massive and “immoral” tax avoidance scheme that has “cheated” British taxpayers out of hundreds of millions of pounds over the past decade.

Barney Jones, 34, who worked for the internet search giant between 2002 and 2006, has lifted the lid on an elaborate structure which diverts British profits through Ireland to the Bermuda tax haven.

Although Google’s London sales staff would negotiate and sign contracts with British customers, and cash was paid into a UK bank account, deals were technically booked through its Dublin office to minimise its liabilities here. Jones, a devout Christian and father of four, is ready to hand over a cache of more than 100,000 emails and documents to HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC), detailing the “concocted scheme”. 

My father was sentenced for twelve years of prison for a similar
avoidance scheme that amounted to $2 million.  Granted, that was in the USA and not the UK, but I tend to doubt that Google only used this sort of scheme to divert British profits. I wonder how much prison
time the influential and politically connected Google executives will
see?  About as much as John Corzine saw for failing to return hundreds of millions of dollars on deposit with MF Global to its depositors, I expect. 

Some versions of this sort of structure are perfectly legal, of course.  If the sales staff had been in Dublin and the cash paid into Ireland, there wouldn’t be an issue; the business would be legitimately Irish.  But the more influential corporations become, the more they expect to be permitted to not have to bother with petty matters such as sovereign nations and national law when it doesn’t suit them to do so.

This should suffice to demonstrate that corporatism is manifestly not capitalism, and moreover, that it is intrinsically hostile to national interests.  Never forget that corporations are artificial creations of the State.

Why big corporations welcome regulation

Karl Denninger explains the rationale underlying the unholy alliance between big business and big government in explaining why Amazon is welcoming online sales taxes:

Amazon, for its part, has engaged in this sort of screwball deal with its distribution centers in various states, arguing that this doesn’t give them nexus and thus they don’t need to collect tax.  When threatened they reply with the threat to close the center and fire the employees (who are residents of the subject state) or sue, which effectively stalls the clock.  This set of tactics has “worked”, because Amazon (and similar firms) are huge corporations with internal legal staffing that can fight these things and, at worst, delay the outcome driving up the costs for the states and there is virtually no chance that the company or its officers will be indicted by the states in question for tax evasion, as is the case for a small business.  The problem is that as these cases have gone on over the years it has become increasingly apparent that Amazon and these other retailers will eventually lose and be forced to both pay and collect the taxes and might be exposed to penalties, interest and retroactive tax billing for willful evasive activity.

So what Amazon appears to have decided to do is play screw the other guy by forcing them into having a “virtual” nexus that otherwise would not exist!  This is then sold to people as “fairness.”

It is nothing of the sort.

Amazon could choose to have distribution centers only in no-sales-tax states.  It could then tell the rest of the states to “pound sand.”  There is a long-standing US Supreme Court decision (“Quill”) that they can stand behind if they take this approach and are without question in the clear in doing so.  But by doing so Amazon would have a serious problem because transit time and cost become a big problem, and since everyone wants everything right now, shipping cost is a huge expense and getting larger, and Amazon sees both cutting that cost and increasing speed of delivery as a competitive advantage (it is) they want to open distribution centers close to the people who shop.

But that leaves them with a problem because to do that they create nexus, and with nexus comes compliance costs.  Since they’ve become increasingly unable to avoid this and meet their business goals they now seek to use the jackboot of government to shove it down their competitors’ throats!

Obviously, Amazon would prefer no sales taxes.  But if they’re going to have to pay them anyhow, then it is much better for Amazon if everyone, including their competitors, is forced to deal with the compliance costs that Amazon is much better suited to pay given its size.  Large corporations can more easily afford to comply with regulations, as the employees required to do so make up a much smaller percentage of their total workforce.

This is a relatively harmless example, but it should suffice to demonstrate the absurdity of pretending that big business is the enemy of big government.

The decline of entrepreneurialism

Glenn Reynolds observes the current lack of startups with appropriate concern:

[T]he latest data indicate that start-ups are becoming rarer, not more common. A new report from JPMorgan economist Mike Feroli indicates that employment in start-ups is plunging. New jobs in the economy tend to come from new businesses, but we’re getting fewer new businesses. That doesn’t bode well.

In fact, it is yet another sign of a United States that is looking more like Europe: A society in which big businesses have cozy relationships with big government, while unemployment remains comparatively high. If you’re fortunate enough to have a job at one of those government-connected businesses, GE, for example, your situation is pretty good. If you’re a recent college graduate looking for work, your situation is not so great. If you’re a low-skilled worker, your situation is dreadful.

So what’s to blame for this change? A lot of things, probably. One reason, I suspect, for a job market that looks more like Europe is a regulatory and legal environment that looks more like Europe’s. High regulatory loads — the product of ObamaCare and numerous other laws — systematically harm small businesses, which can’t afford the personnel needed for compliance, to the benefit of large corporations, which can.

Likewise, higher taxes reduce the rewards for success, making people less likely to invest their money (or time) into new businesses. And local regulatory bodies, too, make starting new businesses harder.

But I wonder if the biggest problem isn’t cultural.

Reynolds is right to be concerned.  Entrepreneurialism is the engine of economic growth, technological advancement, and scientific progress. I suspect he is not only right, but that the cultural problem can be narrowed down considerably and connected to another recent phenomenon.  And, to be honest, I’m a little surprised that Reynolds didn’t make the connection, because that phenomenon is one of his primary bugaboos: the education bubble.

I started my first company when I was 23. It did rather well. But I would probably have been much more successful if I had followed the lead of Bill Gates, Michael Dell, and others and dropped out of school midway through my sophomore year.  With the considerable help of one of my father’s engineers, I’d designed an Ad Lib-compatible, stereo, CD-quality 16-bit, 16-channel sound board at a time when Ad Lib reigned supreme in the game’s industry with its MIDI card and Creative Labs had just introduced its first 8-bit, mono, 22 KHz Soundblaster.

We got two of the cards working over Christmas break, then I went back to school like a good little upper middle class worker bee and the project languished in a corporate bureaucracy that had no interest in game-related hardware until it died completely when the engineer who had worked on it left for another company before the summer.  Four and a half years later, Media Vision introduced its hugely successful Pro Audio Spectrum, which was almost exactly the same card we had built in the lab.

I’m not blaming anyone else for my failure to follow through on my ideas. It was my fault, no one else’s.  Let’s face it, if there is a theme to my life, that is it: once I have something working to my satisfaction, I tend to lose at least an amount of interest in it. But far from being encouraged to take advantage of the window of opportunity, I was actively discouraged from even the thought of dropping out of college.  I’d tentatively mentioned the possibility once we got the card working and it was greeted with what can only be described as unmitigated horror.  The idea that an intelligent individual from a good family would not be “educated” was simply not to be countenanced, and besides, I could always pursue the opportunity after I finished my degree in another two and a half years.

That seemed to make sense to me.  And indeed, it would have even been possible considering the timeline.  But opportunity doesn’t follow a nice orderly schedule, and as it happened, I never even looked at that sound card again.

The cult of the college degree is now even more widespread than it was back in the late 1980s, more people than ever are attending college, they are attending longer, and they are going into significant debt to do so.  This means that not only are more young men putting off their entrepreneurial activity for four to eight years during the most risk-friendly and most creative period of their lives, but they are far less able to afford to take risks once they graduate.

As a result, what we have now is young lawyers and MBAs in debt instead of young CEOs running their own startups.  Fortunately, the feminization of the university is beginning to cause young men to question the value of a college degree, so there may be a silver lining in the devolution of the academy.

The taxes and regulations aren’t helping either, of course. My father, for example, started three companies that employed hundreds of people and paid tens of millions in taxes.  He has spent the last six years living off the public dime, and in addition to the huge opportunity cost of locking him up, (which amounts to millions of dollars and scores of jobs), the actual cost of keeping him locked up in a Federal minimum-security prison amounts to about one-third of the amount he was charged with failing to pay.  Even if one is convinced he is the worst, most evil criminal of all time, from the macrosocietal perspective this is observably a case of society shooting itself in the foot.

So why should potential entrepreneurs bother?  It’s too much work combined with too much risk… and success only comes with even more risk. (My father’s imprisonment was the culmination of a battle with the IRS over an Irish subsidiary that began in 1992.) The younger versions of the best and brightest who once started companies are the most likely to see that it is now a better-paying, lower-risk option to get a glamor degree, join the parasitical class, and work up the hierarchy until reaching a position where one is able to use someone else’s organization to direct someone else’s money to one’s own pocket.  Why be an entrepreneur spending the next 10 years building a company when in the same amount of time you can expect to be an executive, or better yet, a consultant?

Why build when you can more easily and safely leech?

Death of the Republican blogosphere

Instapundit, John Hawkins, and a number of right-wing bloggers consider why some consider the right-wing blogosphere to be on the decline:

[A] funny thing happened in 2002-2003 — the left side of the
blogosphere took off and eclipsed the Right side of the blogosphere.
Liberals ferociously loathed George W. Bush, just as conservatives had
detested Clinton, and they went online to congregate and get the
information they needed to fight back. Soon, the liberal blogs were
considerably bigger than the conservative blogs….although, and this is
an often overlooked caveat, there were still a number of significant
conservative websites, with large audiences, that many people don’t
consider to be “blogs:” Lucianne, The American Spectator, WorldnetDaily, Newsmax, etc.

So, since that was the case, when Barack Obama got into power, you’d
have expected that traffic on the Right side of the blogosphere would
have surged just as it did on the Left side of the blogosphere in the
early Bush years.

That didn’t happen.

Sure, there were a few outliers that took off: Hot Air, Redstate, and the Breitbart empire
for example, but most conservative blogs have either grown
insignificantly, stayed the same size, or even shrank. Most bloggers on
the right side of the blogosphere haven’t increased their traffic
significantly in years. Moreover, the right side of the blogosphere as a
whole is definitely shrinking in numbers as bloggers that have had
trouble getting traction are quitting and fewer and fewer bloggers are
starting up new blogs.

And Legal Insurrection laments the link-stinginess of the corporate blogs that have largely taken over both Left and Right alike.

I wish the reality weren’t so true that the days of collaboration and mutual support are waning. It’s nearly impossible to get a link out of the new big names in
conservative media.  It’s not even a conservative blogosphere anymore,
it’s for-profit and non-profit corporate media which are protective of
eyeballs.

I think there are several problems.  The first is the increased amount of corporatization among the blogosphere. Pajamas Media is the primary culprit here, but Gawker Media is also to blame. Once Nick Denton and Roger Simon showed that it was possible to monetize a blog or ten, pecuniary interests rapidly came to the fore. Suddenly everything had a price tag, links were worth money, and everyone’s behavior naturally became just a bit more self-centered and mercenary.  The H/T soon went the way of the dodo.

And everyone became increasingly afraid of offending the bigger dogs and getting cut off from the all-important link flow. For example, I used to be a regular guest on the Northern Alliance Radio Show. That stopped not long after I criticized Michelle Malkin for her shoddy research failure and thereby offended the Powerline guys, even though I remained on good terms with the Fraters Libertas.  I suspect this desire to curry favor is why the outliers that took off in terms of popularity have so little chili; they’re basically the blogosphere equivalent of the mainstream media whores.  Face it, Dana Loesch isn’t any smarter now that she’s a Breitbart bimbo than she was when she called herself Mamalogues(TM) and I was kicking her around in response to her various lunacies.

An even more important factor is the sapping of right-wing energy by thirteen straight years of relentless betrayal of conservative principles by the Republican Party. Libertarian realists like me are still going strong, since we never expected any better, but how much enthusiasm can conservatives expect to muster in support of nominal leaders like George W. Bush, John McCain, and Mitt Romney?  The political enthusiasm simply isn’t there anymore.  It’s not so much the right-wing blogosphere that is dying as the Republican one.

It may be worth noting that the Right also tends to fear controversy and mainstream criticism far more than the Left, not always without cause.  I’m a bit more controversial than the average blogger, and as a result, have an unusually small number of incoming links in relation to the readership.  Consider this fact: McRapey’s Whatever has between 30 to 40 percent less traffic than VP+AG these days, but Alexa shows 4,713 incoming links there, nearly 3,500 more than VP’s 941 and AG’s 315.  I’m not complaining. I’m  clear that readers will find their way here whether they are encouraged by others to do so or not. But the difference is noticeable.

Being an aggregator, Instapundit is one of the few bloggers who still links religiously to others. I’ve attempted to follow his example and I never cite any information from any blog without linking directly to it. But I don’t really bother with a blogroll per se anymore, because I have neither the time nor the interest to keep track of them as they spring up, post for a few months, or even a few weeks, and then fade away. 

These days, if someone sends me an email enthusiastically informing me that they have just launched a new blog and would love to exchange links, I don’t even bother to reply anymore.  I’ve seen far too many new blogs begin with a few enthusiastic posts, followed soon after by an apology for not having the time to post but promising that will change real soon now, then a last hurrah, after which comes the void. Blogging isn’t for everyone, but it usually requires trying it in order to learn whether it suits you or not… but I would recommend not requesting links from anyone until you’ve proven that you can do it for at least one year.

I think the corporatization of blogs makes independent that much more important, even if it is less common and less popular than it once was.  Otherwise, we might as all sit around and watch the three television stations permitted to us by our masters in the media.

Efficiently incommunicado

This is some commendable cogitation on the part of the Canadian Cincinnatus:

[W]hy was the British Empire so efficient? For there
is no doubt about it, it was. A mere thousand bureaucrats in the Colonial
Office managed an empire so large that the sun never set on it, an empire that
included a subcontinent. How was this possible?

One
reason, I think, is that the colonies weren’t informatically connected. No
phones, no text messages, no Skype, no e-mail, no conference calls, no
webinars, no meetings. Therefore, no micromanagement. For reasons of necessity,
all decisions had to be pushed down to the lowest possible levels. This not
only had the effect of minimizing bureaucracy but it also meant that the
character of the Empire’s decision makers was more solid.

Contrast with this Richard Nixon speaking to platoon leaders in the field in Vietnam.  Bureaucracy can be a killer even in very small organizations and also relates to the r/K metaphor; once the job becomes sufficiently easy and risk-free, the change almost dictates the mass entry of the Rabbit People.

One of the things that strikes the reader of Imperial British history was the youth and astounding arrogance of the men who ruled its colonies.  Their belief in their own superiority was, to a certain extent, a self-fulfilling prophecy.  My favorite example from the era was the officer who steamed something like a hundred miles upriver from his army, showed up at the gates of a garrisoned, walled city with about twenty men, and demanded its surrender.

Since it never occurred to the enemy commander whose army had previously been defeated that anyone could possibly be so insanely arrogant as to make such a demand without having his victorious army in the near vicinity, the city was surrendered at once.  And yet, it wasn’t actually crazy, it was a straightforward calculated risk based on the idea of the enemy’s interest in his own self-preservation. 

American Red Cross goes AWOL

Only now are SWPLs beginning to discover that charities that pay their executives compensation comparable with the private sector not all that concerned about actually helping people in need:

At a press conference this morning on Staten Island, a host of local
officials, including Senators Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand,
gathered to highlight the needs of the hard-hit borough in the aftermath
of Hurricane Sandy. And, although many pols spoke, no one was more
impassioned than Borough President James Molinaro, who called the Red
Cross an “absolute disgrace” and even urged the public to cease giving
them contributions.

“Because the devastation in Staten Island, the lack of a response,”
Mr. Molinaro said to explain his comment to NBC after the press
conference. “You know, I went to a shelter Monday night after the storm.
People were coming in with no socks, with no shoes. They were in
desperate need. Their housing was destroyed. They were crying. Where was
the Red Cross? Isn’t that their function? They collect millions of
dollars. Whenever there’s a drive in Staten Island, we give openly and
honestly. Where are they? Where are they? I was at the South Shore
yesterday, people were buried in their homes. There the dogs are trying
to find bodies. The people there, the neighbors who had no electricity,
were making soup. Making soup. It’s very emotional because the lack of a
response. The lack of a response. They’re supposed to be here….They
should be on the front lines fighting, and helping the people.”

Clearly Mr. Molinaro doesn’t understand how this works.  Private sector executives don’t feel the need to be there helping anyone, so why should their American Red Cross counterparts be out there either?  The function of the American Red Cross is to collect millions of dollars and then distribute that money throughout its bureaucracy.  It has nothing to do with helping anyone except themselves.  Doesn’t everyone know that?

For the record, this is NOT true of other national Red Cross organizations.  But the big name American charities make even Wall Street executives raise their eyebrows and marvel at their rapaciousness.  At least Goldman Sachs has the decency to honestly swindle its clients out of their money rather than lying about how they’re going to help disaster victims with it.

Star Wars is dead

Not that George Lucas hasn’t methodically gone about ruining his creation for decades, beginning with The Return of the Jedi and those damned Ewoks, but the sale of Lucasfilm to Disney pretty much guarantees that the franchise will never, ever, return to its erstwhile glory.  This take on the acquisition by a Slashdot commenter named Doctor Jest summed it up rather nicely:

Mark my words…. Episode 7 will be all goddamned Ewoks. And
Chewbacca will have a perm and PTSD from the final battle. Then we have
to have the token black guy/chick… forget Billy Dee Williams. We’re
getting Will Smith or his bratty little kid. C3P0 will finally come out
of the closet and admit he’s been taking it up the exhaust pipe from
IG-88 for years. R2D2 will be turned into a karaoke machine…. Luke
will become a homeless religious nut while Han Solo and Leia will have six
kids on galactic welfare… and the evil Ritt Momney will threaten to
close the youth center Han and Leia run unless the duo can field a
tiddlywinks team in time for the big tournament on Yaavin IV. Meanwhile,
the Emperor’s clones will become the universe’s ugliest choir.

Now
I know the franchise is truly dead. Thank goodness I got it on Blu Ray
before Disney got their slimy dickskinners on the franchise. Disney
fucked the Muppets… (I believe they killed Henson because he was
having second thoughts on the sale… ok, so I made that up… but
Disney’s fucking evil!)

It’s sad, because Disney used to be a wonderful organization itself.  Now it is the evil vampire squid of the entertainment world, mindlessly devouring and excreting out the stinking remnants of one entertainment franchise after another.  It was never going to happen, but imagine how much creativity could have been unleashed if George Lucas had released Star Wars under the LGPL.  Instead, we’re going to get gay Ewoks singing musical numbers and Hispanic princesses wielding lightsabers and going on intergalactic voyages with sparkly alien vampires where they defeat the evil Ritt Momney and Pand Raul in the process of learning the important lesson that the ultimate truth in life is to be tolerant of others who are different… unless they are Republicans.

A sickness in Britain

After literally years of coverups by the BBC and the police, Scotland Yard finally appears to be something about the infestation of celebrity pedophiles in Britain:

Police are on the verge of arresting up to a dozen household names accused of sex abuse but missed an incredible seven chances to trap paedophile Jimmy Savile while he was alive, it has been revealed.  Scotland Yard is to act ‘within days’ as it emerged the pervert DJ abused at least 300 people because he was allowed to rape and sexually assault victims unhindered for decades.

Savile is believed to have had accomplices and celebrities named by victims – some huge TV stars – will be quizzed over serious sex assault allegations as police warned: ‘we will come for them’.

It’s informative to compare the BBC’s general lack of interest and insistence on absolute proof before permitting any mention of the situation to the public with how it behaved when covering similar child abuse cases committed by Catholic priests.  In light of this and Penn State, we’re rapidly learning that the problem isn’t the priests per se, it is with the bureaucracies that are more interested in protecting the interests of the institution than the children with whom their members come into contact.

And, of course, it tends to support my philosophy of never trusting any man who is inordinately interested in children.  Normal adult men find children to be tedious and teenagers to be obnoxious.  They tolerate them, they don’t actively seek out their company.  It never surprises me when a trusted, much-loved man who “just loves children” turns out to be a predator, for as with Willie Sutton and his banks, pedophiles will always go where the children are.

Note too that the police have been lying about their previous inaction:  “[D]espite their action now, police blew more than half a dozen chances to arrest Savile while he was alive.  The Met, who had previously said they had no record of complaints about the pervert’s campaign of abuse, have now confessed that one woman spoke to them in the 1980s as did another lady in 2003.”

How long will it be before the FBI finally begins to overturn rocks in Hollywood and investigate the gay pedophiles infesting the film industry?

Don’t Like, don’t Want

Rather like politicians, the very last companies one should trust with one’s data are those who go to the most trouble to gather it:

When Facebook Inc. (FB) filed its proposal Feb. 1 to go public, it touted the effectiveness of ads linked to customers’ friends, citing research from Nielsen, the audience-counting company.  Barbara Jacobs, an assistant director for corporation finance at the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, was skeptical, as she and her staff vetted the filing to ensure Facebook had disclosed all material information to investors. The claim appeared to be drawn from marketing materials, not a Nielsen study, she wrote to Chief Financial Officer David Ebersman, 42.

She gave him an ultimatum: Produce the study and provide Nielsen’s consent for use of the data — or don’t use it, she wrote to Ebersman on Feb. 28. Facebook dropped the reference after initial resistance.

Facebook isn’t the most evil company in the world, but they were birthed in iniquity and things have only gone downhill from there.