By Jay BakerStealing, warming, polling and ignoring the most collectivist, environmentally wacko-ist, prurient and warmonging fakeries of the week’s fake news.
A new definition of ‘stealing’
Among the favorite shibboleths of the socialist globalists and their mindless drones is that corporations are inherently evil organisms that go about plundering resources and gathering all wealth for themselves to the exclusion of all others, and that only government can rein in that plunder.
Pablum such as this exists because Keynesian economists and other economic illiterates produce studies that make little sense except to other Keynesian economists and economic illiterates. Because they’re dry, boring and written in passive language and contain a lot of numbers, few people actually read them. Nevertheless, those studies are used by globalist socialist reporters in the mainstream media to create false narratives about how evil corporations are plundering the masses and only government can save them from that plunder.
Well, another one of those studies is out and it claims that U.S. corporations are stealing $180 billion from the rest of the world every year, as RT explains it. The paper, The Exorbitant Tax Privilege, was co-written by Thomas Wright of the UK and “one of the world’s top authorities on tax havens,” Gabriel Zucman of the Department of Economics at UC Berkeley.
And how are U.S. corporations stealing from the rest of the world? By using all legal means — created by governments — at their disposal to retain their profits. Or, as the collectivists call it, parking money in offshore in tax havens. (At this point I have to ask, if Zucman is “one of the world’s top authorities on tax havens,” how much money does he have stashed away in them himself?)
As Wright and Zucman note, the tax rate paid by U.S. multinationals that don’t deal in oil has fallen from 35 percent to 20 percent since the early 1990s. The tax rate paid by U.S. oil companies to foreign governments has fallen from an average of 70 percent before the 1991 Gulf war to 45 percent. That may reflect “a return on military protection granted by the United States to oil-producing states,” they say.
According to RT, “The study’s authors estimated that almost half of the difference between US returns and foreign returns can be attributed to abnormally low tax rates for American multinationals, thanks to US power and tax havens. Tax privilege translates into about $180 billion per year, or almost one percent of US GDP, the research concluded.” (But I thought they just said, it reflects “a return on military protection granted by the United States to oil-producing states.” Somebody’s confused.)
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez must use Wright and Zucman or their acolytes as her economic advisers.
This codswallop explains perfectly the collectivist mindset. Collectivists believe that what they have is theirs. But they also believe that what you have is theirs and it should be used to fund their pet projects and the leftovers distributed by them to everyone equally, whether they’ve earned it or not. And if you want to keep what you’ve earned for yourself to use as you see fit, then the collectivist believes you’re a thief.
The study and the RT analysis of it both fail to note that those “tax havens” (so-called) are a product of governments determining which tax rates are best policy for their own countries and people. They also fail to note that it is a country’s tax policies and regulations that control the market, pick winners and losers and create monopolies that are to blame for the creation of wealthy kleptocrats and insanely profitable multinational corporations.
But of course, globalists socialists want one world government so that all countries have the same tax rates and the same standard of living. Well, the same for everyone except for the ruling class, which are never held to the same laws, policies and standards as the people and always have a better standard of living.
Who cares about the Inuits?
Polar bears, those cute but not-so-cuddly seal crunchers that environmentalists love to love even though they would rather eat an environmentalist as listen to him lament their condition, became the “face” of the global warming cultists because “kids relate to polar bears so enormously” and little skulls full of mush are easily manipulated by propaganda that tugs on their emotions.
Ever since AlGore climbed off the masseuse he was he was groping and trying to bang against her will and decided that creating films and making speeches duping people into believing the world was coming to an end was more profitable than acting like “a sex-crazed poodle,” the polar bear has been used by global warmists as a measuring stick for how near we are to the end-times.
They especially like those photographs of polar bears riding sea ice, using them to imply the poor bears have gotten trapped on an ever-shrinking block of ice rather than using them as a resting place from swimming and catching seals and fish.
In fact, we get polar bear stories every few months, like this one from The Guardian, claiming that, “Polar bears could be sliding towards extinction faster than previously feared, with the animals facing an increasing struggle to find enough food to survive as climate change steadily transforms their environment.”
The notion that polar bears are sliding toward extinction is poppycock. And a new report produced by the government of Canada posits that hunting bans have allowed polar bear populations to increase so much that they now threaten native Inuit populations.
Inuits are the indigenous people of the Arctic regions of Greenland, Canada and Alaska. Throughout their history the Inuit have lived alongside polar bears, using them for food and their pelts for clothes — they currently kill close to 600 bears a year — so they should have a good idea about the status of polar bear populations. They claim that polar bear numbers are much higher than officials say, but complain their own observations are ignored.
And polar bears and people don’t mix. Just three months ago a Canadian man was mauled to death by a polar bear near Hudson Bay. And polar bears eat seals, which once was the cause-du jour for the environmentalists after photos were published showing Inuits knocking the brains out of baby seals.
Of course, the environmentalist wackos don’t care about a few Inuit natives, or tourists, or seals (anymore) for that matter. They’d pick the bear any day even though the bear would eat them the first chance he got.
Trump’s trailing in latest polls
A new poll published in the deep state’s propaganda arm, The Hill, is out that seems to indicate a majority of voters believe President Donald Trump should face a primary challenger in 2020. A Republican pollster — engaging in a feat of doublethink that would make Big Brother blush — claims the results are bad news for Trump.
According to the poll that was conducted by Hill.TV and the HarrisX polling company Nov. 9-10 and involved questioning 1,000 voters, 72 percent of the respondents said they wanted Trump to face a primary opponent. So how is that not bad news?
The poll was made up of 37 percent of people who leaned Democrat or were strong Democrats. Only 32 percent of those polled identified as leans Republican or strong Republican. The remaining 29 percent were independents.
Why are Democrats and independents who didn’t vote for Trump last time even included in the poll? The only ones who count are Republican voters. Among Republican voters, 57 percent said he shouldn’t face a challenger in 2020. Republican pollster Conor Maguire told The Hill “There seems to be a lot of Republicans that are really not sold on reelection.” The term “a lot” must have a different meaning inside the beltway.
Fifty-seven percent may not be “a lot” to establishment Republicans, but it’s more than enough for Trump to beat any GOP challengers, especially those mentioned as being “potential primary opponents to Trump”: Ohio Governor John Kasich (who couldn’t garner above a couple of percent in the 2016 primary); Senator Ben Sasse of Nebraska; and Senator Jeff Flake(y) of Arizona (who would have lost his own primary in Arizona had he possessed the gonads to run).
MSNBC is fake news
We’ve often said that fake news is as much about what the mainstream media choose to not cover as it is about what it actually covers. MSNBC proves the point.
When July 2, 2018 passed, one year had transpired since the most-watched anti-Trump channel had mentioned the war on Yemen. During that same time, Stormy Daniels, the porn actress attempting to sue Trump, was mentioned in 455 separate news segments.
Apparently to MSNBC and it’s audience of empty-heads, the role the U.S. plays in enabling Saudi Arabia to bomb Yemen and supporting it with ground troops, equipment and logistics — which has led the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people and rampant disease and starvation among Yemeni children – is less important than whether the president may have used his own money to pay off a whore.
