Yoshida Kenko, Tsure-Zure Gusa
I just can’t make up my mind about this.
Is it the figment of an idealist monk’s imagination, the factual description of how things happened in Medieval Japan or a wise advice coming from a great teacher?
Archives for category: cooperation
The ‘Panama Papers’ rekindled the public interest in the subject of ‘what legitimate goal could anyone have in setting up a company in a fiscal paradise?’.
Taxes, stupid!
Actually it’s quite simple.
Let’s pretend you are an alien from the outer space who has a business idea backed up by enough capital and you want to put it in practice somewhere on Earth. Aren’t you going to shop around for the best environment you might find? So that your business would have optimal conditions to grow? And when the business ripens wouldn’t you want to be able to cash on it – and end up with as much money as possible?
Rather conflicting demands, isn’t it?
First you want an ‘operational base’ with relatively low costs but secure and full of whatever amenities your business might need in order to thrive. Next you’ll need fast access to a market where to sell your wares. Last but not least it would be important for you to incorporate your business in such a way/place that you’ll end up pay the least amount of tax, both while operating the business and after the cash out moment.
While all these are legitimate demands there are a right and a wrong way to meet them.
I’ll refrain myself to discussing exclusively about the tax part, the rest being relatively easy to balance.
In this respect you can choose to incorporate the business in the same place you have selected for your operational base and pay whatever taxes are due in that place, under the rationale that those taxes cover the cost of doing business there and are nothing but a compensation for benefiting from the conditions present there at the time. After all, when you have chosen a particular place as the home of your business you have entered into an informal arrangement with that place. It lets you make good use of whatever is there to be used – exactly the things that convinced you to select that particular place, and expects you to fulfill your side of the bargain. Provide enough compensation so that that place can continue to be a good place to conduct business and, if possible, improve itself. Pay the local taxes.
Or, equally legitimate, use two different places for each thing. Organize your operational base where it would work best and incorporate your business in a place where you’ll be able to pay as little tax as possible.
And here’s the catch. No matter where you incorporate your business you’ll still have to pay some taxes in the place you have chosen as your operational base.
Then why bother?!? you might legitimately ask.
Since this is not an accounting dissertation I’ll just tell you that there might be serious financial advantages in making this choice, not the least of them having to do with the cash out moment.
And this is the very point where some people get greedy. They try to avoid altogether the taxes tied to the ‘operational base’ – by employing various semi, or even completely i-legal stratagems, and by doing so completely transform the very nature of the entire operation.
From one of fiscal optimization to one of money laundering.
There are a lot of rationalizations for this course of action. From ‘the state is a thief that uses force in order to part me from the fruit of my efforts!’ to ‘why give it to the state since the money will be squandered by the inefficient government?’.
Now let’s please remember where we started from.
OK, you are not an ‘alien from the outer space’ but what’s stopping you from conducting your business where ever you want on the face of this Earth? (My bad, this question is not valid for exactly everybody, there still are countries that don’t allow for people, or capital, to exit freely, but I’m sure you get my drift)
Oh, you like it where you are but you hate paying taxes and/or you’re disgusted by the way the government handles its finances!
Then let me remind you of two things.
First, you probably live in a democracy. Speak up. Make your concerns known. Loudly. Make sure you are listened to. Vote wisely.
Secondly, you are probably fed up not only by the fact that in your country taxes are really high but also by how little you get back in return.
Well… that’s because there are so many people who do not pay their fair share and that your government has to take more from those who do pay in order to make the ends meet.
Savvy?
Favorability: People in the News, Gallup, April 2, 2016
Source: AP
So, it looks like that the concerned Democrats – those who bothered to show up for the preliminaries, and specially the ‘super delegates’, are going to send Hilary Clinton to compete on the national stage, despite her constant ‘negative favorability’ and despite the fact that Sanders is constantly improving his chances – both favorability and ‘never heard of’ scores are slightly better now than they were at the start of the year. Furthermore, Sanders is the one who can ‘grow naturally’ – simply by making himself known – while Clinton needs to convince the voters that their erstwhile opinion about her was mistaken. An almost impossible feat, given the length of her public career…
On the Republican side things are even stranger.
Trump gathers more and more delegates while his ‘negative favorability score’ becomes slightly even ‘more negative’, Cruz gets a second lease on life despite his ‘unfavorable’ score increasing dramatically while Kasich, the least favored by the hard core Republicans, climbs nationally from +4% to + 18% in 4 short months. And if you look closely almost all new opinions on him, those that have been developed during the last 4 months, have been in his favor.
One of my Republican friends said “I can’t speak for the other candidates, but people support Cruz because they believe in what he believes, and feel that sometimes it’s more important to stand up for what’s right, rather than what’s popular.“.
OK, I can understand that. The despondent and/or exasperated use Trump as a banner for their state of mind while the hard core, value toting, Republicans hope that by backing Cruz they will somehow bolster those values.
But let’s see what some ‘significant Republicans’ have to say about the matter.
Scott Walker, Governor for Wisconsin and ex candidate, being interviewed on WTMJ’s Charlie Sykes Show:
““If you’re someone who is uneasy with the frontrunner, right now there’s really only one candidate—I think if you’re just looking at the numbers objectively, Ted Cruz, Sen. Cruz, is the only one who’s got a chance other than Donald Trump to win the nomination,” Walker said in the Wednesday interview on WTMJ’s Charlie Sykes Show. “Statistically, my friend Gov. Kasich can not.””
Then there is Lindsay Graham, Republican Senator for South Carolina and ex candidate who endorsed Jeb Bush when dropping from the race:
“Graham said there are other candidates he likes better, but he doesn’t think they can win. “I prefer John Kasich; Cruz is not my first pick by any choice,” the South Carolina senator explained. “But I don’t see how John Kasich can mount the opposition that Ted Cruz can to stop Donald Trump from getting 1,237” (the number of delegates needed to secure the nomination).
Graham has made it abundantly clear that he really doesn’t like Cruz at all. In January, he said Cruz has “exhibited behavior in his time in the Senate that make it impossible for me to believe that he could bring this country together,” adding that choosing between him and Trump is “like being shot or poisoned — what does it really matter?” Last month, he joked about Cruz’s general unpopularity among his colleagues, saying, “If you killed Ted Cruz on the floor of the Senate, and the trial was in the Senate, nobody would convict you.””
The way I see it, these guys, the Republican ‘apparatchiks’, are more concerned about derailing Trump than with promoting the more suited candidate among the trio. Suited for Presidency, that is.
source: Huffpost Pollster
So, according to the polls compiled by Huffington Post, Sanders would lick the entire Republican field – if allowed to compete, while the Republican candidates are stacked, at least for now, according to the ‘who has the least chances on the national front’ criterion.
?!?
Does any of this make any sense? Any at all?
Here’s my Republican friend again: “In the case of Clinton, despite her unfavorability in the polls, there’s a sense in the Democratic Party that it’s her “turn.” ”
Some others think she is ‘in cahoots’ with the ‘big business’… “Family charities collected donations from companies she promoted as secretary of state“… Coming from Wall Street Journal this is a powerful allegation indeed…
But at least in this camp things are unfolding, lets say, ‘naturally’. The guys with vested interests (the super delegates, for example) are acting according to those interests while the rank and file Democrats are slowly (too slowly, maybe?) finding out what’s going on.
What really baffles me is what’s happening on the Republican side.
Some of the rank and file have adopted ‘the Donald’ as their mascot despite the obvious fact that he doesn’t belong, at all, in politics. He might have been a successful business man – read chock full of money, but the way he made that money disqualifies him from holding office. Does ‘eminent domain‘ ring any bells with you? Not to mention his antics on the public stage: “Excuse me”, ‘I’m the best thing that could happen to America!’
Are all these people delusional or are they so fed up with what’s currently going on in America that they can’t see the trees because of the forest (is on fire)?
Some others have gone ‘back to basics’ and try to revive what they consider to be the ‘sound Republican values’ – I’m speaking now about those who support Ted Cruz, if you didn’t figure that out by yourselves.
But what are these ‘hard core Republican values’?
How come some of Cruz’s followers are blaming Lincoln for being the first ‘statist’ in American history – not for abolishing slavery but for imposing that measure by force to the unwilling Southern States.
And how come those values have come to be embodied in someone so ‘popular’ among his Senatorial colleagues that “If you killed Ted Cruz on the floor of the Senate, and the trial was in the Senate, nobody would convict you.” ?
And isn’t it strange that so many Republicans are so mesmerized that they are willing to give up almost any chance of electing a Republican President?
OK, I can understand that way of thinking being used by ‘lay people’. But what is the real meaning of ‘pundits’ rallying behind the ‘value laden’ Cruz when it is obvious that Kasich is in a way better position on the national front?
Could it be that these pundits are more concerned about their own careers than with the fate of the Republican party? And even about the Republican values?
Farfetched?
Are you sure? Don’t you see that by energizing their constituencies into a frenzy they are simply building Republican (local) fortresses for their own use, leaving the rest of the (national) Republicans out to dry?
Well, I was under the impression that Conservatism was about maintaining a common way of life, not about conserving privileges.
I still believe that.
“Middle income or middle class?
OK, so even those who rely heavily on money as an indicator for who belongs to the middle class concede that there are other connotations to the concept.
Let’s consider the situation from a functionalist point of view. As in how the members of various social strata react to the day to day challenges of the normal life.
‘Day to day’ meaning not only ‘normal’ things – waking up and brushing your teeth – but also things that we wish will never happen, although all of us know they are ‘normal’ occurences. A car accident, a broken leg or even having three children in one go when you were praying for one.
Usually the wealthy take them in one stride, those belonging to the middle class manage to cope – sometimes welcoming some help from their friends, relatives or even insurance company, while the really poor almost certainly sink under the burden. But not always.
Sometimes even the wealthiests loose it when faced with adversities they were not accustomed with while some of the poorest find it in themselves to rise from the ashes.
Then how about setting a slightly different system of ‘classes’: the extremely resilient, the ‘middle class’ and the very fragile?
As a rule of thumb it’s true that a certain amount of wealth does miracles when some resilience is needed so, roughly, these two classifications look more or less the same, but, on a qualitative rather than quantitative level, we are speaking of two different things here.
When we are speaking of ‘money’ we are dealing mainly in ‘resources’ while when we’re speaking about resilience we have to take into account the attitude of the concerned individuals. It is true that the above mentioned attitude is, more often than not, heavily influenced by the affluence of the respective individuals but the function is hardly a direct one.
Based on these considerations – and on my personal experience of dealing with people, I’m going to propose the following synopsis.
The ‘resilient’ are those convinced they are able to cope, more or less on their own, with almost everything life can throw at them. Unfortunately some of them grow ‘spiritual callouses’, simply because they have never experienced any real hardships.
Or because they have over-compensated after dealing with those hardships, sometimes after succeeding to do so without receiving significant outside help.
The ‘fragile’ are those who, by lack of material resources, spiritual stamina or both, behave more like leafs driven by the wind than like masters of their own fate – as every human being should.
By now you’ve probably figured out that ‘my middle class’ is composed of individuals who have a certain degree of resilience but who, on the other hand, are perfectly aware that there are things on this world that they wouldn’t be able to face on their own.
In a sense, possession of money – or other resources, ‘encourages’ an individual to reveal his true nature.
If a person is naturally inclined to grow ‘callouses’ then being ‘insulated’ from the outside world by a thick wad of money will provide him with enough space to let those callouses grow but if his skin is ‘in the game’ then those callouses will be constantly shaven while interacting with his peers.
But if the stakes of the game are very meager – and the insulation provided to the players by their respective possessions is practically nonexistent, then instead of growing callouses most of the players will be rubbed raw during the intercourse. Mind you, neither the ‘stakes of the game’ nor the ‘individual possessions’ need to necessarily be of a strictly material nature.
In conclusion, the ‘callously resilient’ will tend to mind to their own – simply because their sensitivity towards the outside world is dampened by their callouses, the ‘fragile’ will tend to mind to their own raw wounds while those belonging to the ‘middle class’ will be the only ones really interested in maintaining the well being of the social organism. The one to which they ‘knowingly’ belong.
Because they are the only ones with enough time/energy/resources on their hands to consider the matter, the real interest to do so and the willingness to put some effort into this endeavour.
I recently shared this meme, originally posted on FB by Black Atheists.
The broad spectrum of the commentaries made on this subject enticed me to elaborate on it.
There are people who blow people up under religious pretenses and people who blow people up under their own ‘rationale’.
This meme can be interpreted as God praising those who do not use his name when committing heinous crimes.
Who do not misinterpret religious teachings to fit their callously narrow goals.
Who do not make up self-serving nonsense simply because they have enough sleigh of mind and an audience who, for various reasons, is willing to believe anything that might provide some psychological comfort.
Who do not use religious pretexts when horribly mistreating others.
And don’t get me wrong. God doesn’t praise them for what they’re doing – there is nothing to be praised there.
He praises them for what they are not doing.
Using false pretenses, that is.
As a young adult I understood that there was no real difference between Hitler and Stalin. It didn’t matter that one of them was considered to come from the left while the other was depicted (by the communists but not exclusively) as a paragon of the right. Both of them had in common the absolute disrespect for everybody else. Each of them was convinced that only their opinions mattered and that all others were absolute morons.
That was when I started to have an inkling about what ‘the elders’ wanted to convey to us, green-horns bucking under the communist rule – which was crippling Romania at that time, when whispering:
‘there isn’t much difference between USSR and America. Their leaders want to rule as much of the world as they can grab while the ordinary people, in both countries, don’t have a clue about what’s going on’.
As I’ve become older I’ve started to figure out that the real difference between various activism-s has nothing to do with the ‘hue’ displayed on their banners. All that counts is the intensity of the sentiment that fuels them and the manner in which the activists relate to the other participants in the game.
At first glance the very notion of ‘conservative activist’ would be an oxymoron, given the fact that (most of the) conservatives define themselves as defenders of the existing order.
Who simply react, within the boundaries of the law and using the tenets of the Constitution, to whatever follies the progressive ‘liberal activists’ are trying to bring upon our heads:
“Like the American people I have watched this process for a number of years, and I fear this empathy standards is another step down the road to a liberal activist, results-oriented and relativistic world where — laws lose their fixed meaning, unelected judges set policy; Americans are seen as members of separate groups rather than simply Americans, and where the constitutional limits on government power are ignored when politicians want to buy out private companies… Call it empathy, call it prejudice, but whatever it is, it is not law. In truth, it is more akin to politics. And politics has no place in the courtroom.” (Senator Jeff Sessions (R-AL), speaking at Sonia Sotomayor’s confirmation hearings)
As usual, practice trumps theory. Regardless of whatever the theory says – and some of the pundits pretend, everybody has an agenda and everybody who has an agenda is actually an activist.
Now that we’ve successfully climbed down to the practical level let’s see what’s the real meaning of Trump backing down from his trumped up stance on torture:
Hey, wait a minute! So he actually said that ‘we should go tougher than waterboarding’ and he still has such a strong following among the ‘law abiding defenders of the Constitution’?
Well, I’m afraid things are more complicated than that.
Here’s what he says about those who trust him:
“The people, my people, are so smart…
And you know what else? they say about my people? the polls?
They say I have the most loyal people! Did you ever see that?
Where I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose any voters.”
Well, if this isn’t ‘activism’ then I don’t know what else is.
But what kind of activism is it?
I’m not asking about where it should be placed in the political spectrum! I’m just wondering how are his proponents, Trump’s people, going to relate with their fellow citizens?
Or with the rest of the world…
And what’s the true meaning of the conservative activists coming out of the closet and assuming such an active stance? So active, in fact, that – as I said before – it is now way outside the realms of typical conservative behavior.
The explanation – as I see it – has little to do with Trump itself and everything with the present situation of the American society as a whole.
First things first.
Trump is nothing but an opportunistic bug, the real problem being how come the American Conservatives have not seen him for what he is and have not thrown him out yet.
I’ll concentrate on this from now on.
The American Conservatives, and not only those ‘loyal’ to Trump, behave as if they have been under a two thronged siege.
‘ The liberals are destroying America from within, the enemies from the outside are growing stronger and stronger yet the American Political Establishment does nothing meaningful about any of these, not even the ‘entrenched’ conservative ‘figureheads’.’
This didn’t start yesterday.
“Whenever you get a group of people together who share certain basic assumptions, there’s a natural tendency for the group to gravitate toward the most uncompromising, extreme, strident, fundamentalist, hard-core positions. Social psychologists call this tendency group polarization. It happens on juries with some regularity. It explains why the Tea Party became so insane, so deeply out of touch with the needs and views of the average American voter. And it explains why the Bush Administration invaded Iraq without an exit strategy (they stopped inviting people who disagreed with their assumptions—people like Colin Powell—to the planning meetings).” (John Faithful Hamer, From Here (2016))
But because of the internet things have gotten even worse:
“These days, any simpleminded partisan with a political ax to grind can find an online community of like-minded whack-jobs who’ll be happy to provide him with plenty of ideological ammunition (e.g., bogus stats, pre-fab arguments, etc.).” John Faithful Hamer, From Here (2016)
“Worse” not because of the ease with which these communities can grow but because too many of the members of these communities tend to give in to the apparent comfort and safety of single-mindedness.
Arguments are no longer able to penetrate the boundaries of this kind of communities.
Walls are erected to keep the odd man out. Then defended fiercely.
And this is why any attempt to cross those walls, be it aggressively or even in good faith, is too often perceived as a mortal threat by those within.
This is the mechanism through which the likes of Hitler and Stalin have managed to dominate for so long their hapless followers, by convincing them that all outsiders, all aliens, are conspiring to destroy ‘Das Vaterland’.
Fortunately the Internet works both ways. It’s true that the members of those communities can chose not to read anything else but the ideas promoted by their insiders but, just as easily, any of them can find out everything that ‘the others’ have to say about the matter.
But what if things are not (yet) as bleak as some of the media venues present them to be?
Not that all the media wants to scare the shit out of us or that all of them are politically biased. No. This happens simply because all of them want to make better ratings and because very few of them understand that ‘he who saws the wind will reap the whirlwind’. (Well, some of them might actually do it on purpose and that’s exactly what activism means but my post is more about those who let themselves be sucked into the whirlwind than about the tempest sowers).
A very short search of the Internet produced two extremely interesting ‘snapshots’.
The first, that the CPAC straw poll placed Trump no higher than the third place, should not surprise us very much. After all most of the participants are either GOP officials or young wannabees and for them Trump is akin to a ragging bull.
The second, though, is rather mind boggling.
Gallup, daily tracking
Four out of the six still running candidates nomination are perceived more or less unfavorably by the American public?
So what is this? A contest for ‘the least un-liked presidential candidate’ title? (The answer to this question might also explain why Trump has backed down on torture. He figured out that that was too much, even for him. And for ‘his people’.)
We couldn’t blame this on ‘activism’, as such – the remaining two candidates are also ‘active’, but shouldn’t we be asking ourselves about what kind of activism deserves our encouragement?
In any way, shape or form?
Well, before answering this we must consider another issue.
What brought us to the present situation, where both sides of the Political Establishment – and not only in America – are acting as if they want to tear everything apart instead of doing their best to make it all work together?
Later Edit
‘Conservative activism’ hasn’t been invented yesterday.
Nor by Trump’s supporters!
Just stumbled upon this meme.
It gave me the creeps.
If such an influential personality like H.L. Mencken had such a warped understanding of the democratic process what can we ask from the proverbial ‘regular guy’?
One question haunts me.
How come so many otherwise bright people fail to grasp the obvious fact that ‘democracy’ is what happens before the voting process?
Voting itself is nothing but logistics, arithmetic and honesty. A process more or less akin to a social survey, one through which the electoral commission determines ‘the will of the people’ at a certain moment. A ‘mechanical’ process that has nothing to do with the living thing encapsulated in the concept of democracy.
…’living thing encapsulated in the concept of democracy’…
Do you think I’m exaggerating?
Then let’s go back to the Agora (the meeting place where the ancient Greeks congregated to discuss the public matters at hand) and watch carefully what happened there before each issue was decided upon.
Everybody who wanted to say something about a subject of interest had the opportunity to make his voice heard.
Yes, that’s the real essence of the democratic process! That’s why the Founding Fathers insisted so much about ‘The Freedom of Expression’. That’s why ‘the right to speak up’ comes First, before all others!
You see, the right to vote has no real meaning if the voters are kept in the dark, if they didn’t had access to all the information available prior to the deciding moment.
People will make a choice regardless of how much information they have, at a given moment, about something, precisely because they think they know everything that is to be known about that something.
That’s why people privy to more information than the ‘general public’ have come to reach the conclusion that the ‘ordinary voter’ is stupid.
Because instead of putting everything on the table and letting ‘the people’ decide in earnest, for some time now some of the ‘pundits’ have been playing a dangerous game of ‘hide and seek’.
One which has resulted in the profound distrust felt by ‘the people’ about the ‘political establishment’. And in the barely masked contempt displayed by the ‘political elite’ towards the rest of the society.
So, instead of having an open discussion about issues and an atmosphere of trust between the various segments of the social organism we have to pry bits and pieces of information from those who guard it dearly and such mutual distrust that, if we’ll look around carefully, we’ll notice that we’ve been living, for some time now, way inside ‘paranoia land’.
Can we still pretend that our societies are governed in a democratic manner? That each of us tries to shed some light over his area of expertise and by doing so contributes to all of us avoiding as many of the ‘potholes’ as possible?
‘Cause this is the real essence of democracy.
Not finding the best possible solution to every problem but avoiding the known/foreseeable potholes.
No matter how many of us will study a problem we’ll never find the best solution. After five minutes some fresh information will come about and the erstwhile ‘best’ becomes ‘obsolete’.
Compare this situation to somebody stumbling in a pitfall waiting for all of us, coming back to warn the rest and not one of us heeding to his cries…
As always things are not as simple as they seem at the first glance – otherwise we wouldn’t have had a parable to start with, would we?
Basically the drunkard is doing the only reasonable thing available to him. Searching in the lightless park would be completely pointless but what if somebody else had lost a wallet in the lighted area?
Aaron Haspel is also right. Our intellectual history consists indeed of whatever cultural artifacts have been lucky enough to survive. Considered important enough by a sufficient number of people so they helped preserve it to the present day.
Or, evidently, both!
I’d like to direct your attention to ‘Considered important enough by a sufficient number of people’.
You see, the drunkard was looking under the street lamp because ‘This is where the light is’. He was reacting rather sensibly to a real situation.
But what if the reality of something is not so easily ascertainable? What if it’s a ‘second degree’ reality, one that is constantly (re)created by human intercourse? Like people choosing which book to keep and which one to throw into a bonfire?
Or even a ‘third degree’ reality? One that is imagined by someone who tries to assess the wishes of somebody else?
You certainly guessed it. This paragraph will be about the ‘fourth degree’ reality. The one we, the voters, bring upon ourselves at the ballot box. After having carefully considered each candidate and his or her programme. Or having voted with ‘that particular one’ just because …
The point I’m trying to make here being that this ‘fourth degree reality’ is not at all ‘virtual’, in the manner the second and the third ones are. In fact this ‘fourth degree’ reality is exactly the one where we have to live. Where we are faced with the consequences of the choices we, ourselves, have made while bringing it about.
nicichiarasa 