US Politics: Getting Rid of the Senate

[Commodore]

Sure. If the legislative branch of the federal government wasn't completely broken.

how is it broken? nothing inhibiting them from passing such a law if they wanted to

Terms of employment should be agreed to willingly by the parties involved, not forcibly imposed by outside entities.

[Fez]

Spending bill passed.

Shame that. There were a lot of Republican policy riders* in it and seemingly no Democratic ones. The only things Democrats can point to is that it actually reallocates spending along priorities the Departments/Congress want, rather than just being a straight-up auto-pilot CR, and that they prevented a lot of other Republican policy riders.

*Chief among them some pretty major rollbacks of banking and cleanwater regulations.

ETA:

how is it broken? nothing inhibiting them from passing such a law if they wanted to

Don't be obtuse, of course there is.

[Swordfish]

Swordfish,

I think the problem I have with it is that it seems like the Court is letting Amazon have their cake and eat it. If these security screenings are not integral to the nature of the job, then how can it be okay to fire said employees for not enduring them?

yeah. That's a really good question. I'm not sure. I think it's a really, really gray area.

You'd think they would have just come up with a way to make it faster and avoided this whole mess to begin with.

[aceluby]

Terms of employment should be agreed to willingly by the parties involved, not forcibly imposed by outside entities.

That's just fucking stupid. We've already tried that approach and it doesn't work because employers have the power to exploit employees, and generally do when given the chance.

[YoungGriff89]

In the context of labor laws and regulations, would companies like Burger King moving their headquarters to Canada to avoid US taxes make them subject to whatever labor laws Canada has? For example, the Canadian government is suing (or at least trying to) Wal-Mart for shutting down a store after the workers voted to unionize. If you're a foreign company wouldn't that mean you have to play by a foreign government's rules?

[Maltaran]

In the context of labor laws and regulations, would companies like Burger King moving their headquarters to Canada to avoid US taxes make them subject to whatever labor laws Canada has? For example, the Canadian government is suing (or at least trying to) Wal-Mart for shutting down a store after the workers voted to unionize. If you're a foreign company wouldn't that mean you have to play by a foreign government's rules?

I would assume labour law applies based on where you work, rather than where your company is based - otherwise all the multinationals would move their HQs to China so they didn't have to follow minimum wage restrictions and suchlike.

So in your example, it would only be the employees at the HQ who switch from being under US to Canadian law.

[YoungGriff89]

And since the corporate tax portion applies to the corporate headquarters it's best to have that in a place where the taxes are lower. What assurance could they possibly have though that within the next few years they won't be paying the same amount or more in corporate taxes as ordered by the Canadian government? I mean aren't taxes overall higher in Canada since there's access to universal healthcare and what not? I find it funny a corporate power house could pay much less in corporate taxes than in the US long term. I guess it depends on whether or not the Canadian government starts losing government funding as a result of corporate taxes being so low.

[Swordfish]

And since the corporate tax portion applies to the corporate headquarters it's best to have that in a place where the taxes are lower. What assurance could they possibly have though that within the next few years they won't be paying the same amount or more in corporate taxes as ordered by the Canadian government? I mean aren't taxes overall higher in Canada since there's access to universal healthcare and what not? I find it funny a corporate power house could pay much less in corporate taxes than in the US long term. I guess it depends on whether or not the Canadian government starts losing government funding as a result of corporate taxes being so low.

The burger king deal is a lot more complicated than just 'avoiding taxes'. There's no way to really answer any of your questions until you understand the situation. Maybe do some googling and learn more about it and then come back.

[YoungGriff89]

The burger king deal is a lot more complicated than just 'avoiding taxes'. There's no way to really answer any of your questions until you understand the situation. Maybe do some googling and learn more about it and then come back.

Well since everything I'm finding about it suggests that in the merge or buy out of Tim Hortons, Burger King's actions are a page out of the Walgreens playbook maybe you could break down the deal into a more coherent explanation?

[Mlle. Zabzie]

In the context of labor laws and regulations, would companies like Burger King moving their headquarters to Canada to avoid US taxes make them subject to whatever labor laws Canada has? For example, the Canadian government is suing (or at least trying to) Wal-Mart for shutting down a store after the workers voted to unionize. If you're a foreign company wouldn't that mean you have to play by a foreign government's rules?

That is not what is going on with Burger King (the reporting is absolutely abysmal on that deal (total side note)) and also betrays a common misunderstanding as to how multi-nationals are organized. First, BK and TH are combining. TH is pretty much as Canadian as you can get. It's not like BK just up and decided "no noes, we don't like 'murica any more, we are moving to Canada". Instead, in the combination, they decided for various reasons, most of which I would reckon have as much to do with Canada as the US to make the parent company of the combined group a Canadian company. Where the parent company of a corporation is incorporated and where its corporate HQ is located can, and often is, in two different jurisdictions. This is particularly true where you have a jurisdiction in question like the US that is not residence/domicile taxation based. A description of the actual transaction is in this link: http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1345111/000119312514327621/d780785d8k.htm; and the actual Transaction Agreement: http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1345111/000119312514327621/d780785dex21.htm

Separately, BK's US operations will continue to be subject to US laws. BK US will in fact still be a US company. There are, I am sure, loads and loads of subsidiaries, and each one has legal personality and will be subject to the laws of the jurisdiction in which it is organized and the jurisdictions in which it operates. I don't know that Canada can reach into the US, through the corporate veil to regulate the activities of a corporate person incorporated in and subject to the laws of another sovereign nation. There may be treaty type things that they can do, and I'm certainly not a labor law expert, but reaching into another country's subsidiaries operations in that other country would seem. . .odd.

ETA: YoungGriff, several threads back I started a little primer on inversions, so you could look at that. I will try to put a little summary in later if I have time, but first of all (1) the Walgreens deal didn't go through for lots of complicated reasons that I don't have time to type up and (2) there are a lot of other inversions where it totally made sense and (3) given the new IRS guidance, inversions are a lot more difficult now. Suffice it to say that the BK deal is different in kind from those sorts of deals.

[Shryke]

The Integrity Staffing Solutions v. Busk case really highlights the deplorable state of American labor law.

I will say that legally, in terms of statutory construction, it's probably the "correct" decision. Not only is it a unanimous decision, but even the Obama administration filed a brief supporting Integrity Staffing Solutions. Here's an article on why that might have been the case. Basically, to file an Amicus (friend of the Court) brief, the organization filing the Amicus has to provide a "Statement of Interest" explaining why they would be impacted by the decision. The Administration stated that, basically, they have a lot of employees covered under the Fair Labor Standards Act who have to go through security screenings. Meaning, in effect, the government doesn't want to have to pay employees for going through these security screenings either. The Court's opinion is also completely consistent with a Department of Labor opinion letter from 1951 on the Portal to Portal Act.

Yeah, I think it's a terrible outcome but everything I've read says it's the legally correct decision. This problem is on congress and the US's shitty labour laws.

I don't know about the rest of you, but I'm generally ok with less legislating from the bench.

[TerraPrime]

Was there a separate Opinion despite the unanimous vote? I didn't see any mentioned so sounds like there was just 1?

[YoungGriff89]

ETA: YoungGriff, several threads back I started a little primer on inversions, so you could look at that. I will try to put a little summary in later if I have time, but first of all (1) the Walgreens deal didn't go through for lots of complicated reasons that I don't have time to type up and (2) there are a lot of other inversions where it totally made sense and (3) given the new IRS guidance, inversions are a lot more difficult now. Suffice it to say that the BK deal is different in kind from those sorts of deals.

Thanks for that insight. I really don't know a whole lot about this particular subject but the concept of a business entity skirting around taxes by moving its headquarters to another nation is something that I feel needs checks and balances. I ask from the checks and balances stand point and not the "corporations are evil" stand point. If a company is getting vilified for something it's not actually doing wrong, then that kind of distracts you from things they may actually be doing wrong.

[Commodore]

the concept of a business entity skirting around taxes by moving its headquarters to another nation is something that I feel needs checks and balances.

the threat of moving is the check and balance

[YoungGriff89]

the threat of moving is the check and balance

Exactly what made me suspicious of the motives and logic of moving to Canada for lower taxes in the first place: The taxes by and large aren't lower. The labor regulations aren't necessarily less stringent than those in the US.

Name one country in the world you know for a fact would cave to big business interests faster than the United States. Name one westernized country where full time workers live in poverty. I'd say the US has had a little too much checking and balancing.

[Commodore]

Exactly what made me suspicious of the motives and logic of moving to Canada for lower taxes in the first place: The taxes by and large aren't lower. The labor regulations aren't necessarily less stringent than those in the US.

So why do you think they moved?

Name one country in the world you know for a fact would cave to big business interests faster than the United States.

Given the US has the highest corporate tax rates in the industrialized world, all of them.

[YoungGriff89]

Given the US has the highest corporate tax rates in the industrialized world, all of them.

On paper maybe. And why should the corporations get the protections of the government without paying for them? I have a feeling you're going to go in a "lower the corporate tax rate to 0%" direction.

[NestorMakhnosLovechild]

Was there a separate Opinion despite the unanimous vote? I didn't see any mentioned so sounds like there was just 1?

There is. It's just over two pages. It's Sotomayor's concurrence with just Kagan joining her. They thrust of it appears to be Sotomayor joining in the Court's opinion based on narrower grounds. I honestly don't know enough about the issue to say for sure, but it looks like the majority opinion is taking a more expansive view of the kinds of things an employer can make you go through without compensation, and Sotomayor is trying to keep it strictly limited to these non-work-essential security screening procedures that were addressed in the 60+ year old Department of Labor opinion.

[Ramsay Gimp]

And why should the corporations get the protections of the government without paying for them?

Talk about a loaded question.

[awesome possum]

Dear America,

You're fucking stupid. This is what you get. This is what you deserve.

On Tuesday, Congressional leaders struck a deal to avert another government shutdown and put off our next completely avoidable, 100% self-imposed budget crisis until next September.

...

If you’re a Congressperson looking to sneak through something shady, the omnibus budget bill is the perfect opportunity since 1.) It’s 1600 pages long and very easy to hide things in, and 2.) Congress kind of has to pass it or the government shuts down. Again.

So naturally, there are a whole lot of shady things in there.

Let's take a look, shall we?

1) $479 Million for warplanes that the Pentagon didn't ask for

Congressional appropriators ordered four more F-35 joint strike fighters at a cost of $479 million dollars, even though the Pentagon didn’t ask for them. The F-35 program has a long, sordid history of running behind schedule and over budget, and is on track to cost American taxpayers more than $400 billion dollars. Despite the crazy amount of money we’ve poured into the F-35 project, it continues to run into minor technical snags like the inability to “turn, climb, or run.”

None of this has stopped Congress from continuing to fork over funding though. In what we’re sure is a completely unrelated coincidence, Lockheed Martin, the defense contractor receiving billions of taxpayer dollars to build the F-35, spent more than $28 million on political contributions and lobbying in the last election cycle alone.

Hey cool, bullshit warplanes that don't work and no one except Lockheed and the stooges who currently employ Lockheed's hand up their ass, that taxpayers have dumped $400 billion into already. Good job, Americans. You elected these dumb shits.

2) $93 million cut from the Women, Infants and Children nutrition program, aka WIC

Since those shiny new F-35s aren’t going to pay for themselves, Congress did manage to trim a few areas of the budget. For example, the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children, commonly referred to as WIC, was on the receiving end of a $93 million budget cut. WIC provides low-income mothers and children with vouchers that can be exchanged for food which meets certain nutrition guidelines, although I imagine they’ll be handing out a few less vouchers after this deal goes through.

I don't know why that pasted in all-caps. Weird. Also weird is taking food out of the mouths of poor women and children. It's not like WIC can be abused. It can only be used for things like milk, bread, fruit and vegetables. Only. But hey, gotta make room for the spending that results from those bribes... I mean campaign donations. And really, if poor people were so concerned about losing their benefits, they would have voted. So fuck them. Right?

3) Nullification of voter-backed marijuana legalization in DC

The 2014 Midterms saw voters in Oregon, Alaska, and Washington, D.C. vote to legalize Marijuanafor recreational use. Unlike in Alaska and Oregon, however, the D.C. ballot measure is subject to congressional approval. So, despite the fact that the actual citizens of Washington, D.C. voted for legalization by a margin of more than 2 to 1, anti-legalization advocates in Congress attached a rider that completely undoes the voter-backed change and keeps Marijuana illegal.

This is how much contempt Republicans have for voters. So much contempt that they're taking an initiative that won with 70% of the vote and saying, "fuck that, no thanks. Our donors from the alcohol and pharmaceutical industries aren't going to be happy if we allow a competitor into the market. So fuck you and fuck your votes. The few of you who decided to vote, that is.

4) The Bill that Citigroup wrote

The current budget deal includes a repeal of the Dodd-Frank derivatives rule that was literally written by big bank lobbyists — A leaked document obtained by the New York Times revealedthat 70 of the 85 lines of derivatives language reflect recommendations made in a piece of model legislation drafted by lobbyists for Citigroup, another bank that played a major role in the 2008 crisis and also received billions of federal stimulus dollars.

As we all know, doing their job is hard for those congress fucksticks, so why not just have a bank write the bills for them? I mean, all it's doing is saving the time of asking the banks what to put in the bill and then having to write it yourself.

5) More Big Money in Politics

In a provision conveniently located on page 1,599 of a 1,603 page document, Congress lays out donation rules that would allow individuals to give more than $300,000 directly to political parties every year. According to the Washington Post’s Matea Gold, under the new rules, one couple could legally funnel nearly $1.3 million to a party’s various account. Check out this great breakdown from Jay Riestenberg for the full ins and outs of the new rule.

Because hey, those far-right billionaire douchecanoes need something to spend their money on. And buying even more of the Congress they already own seems like a good investment.

We deserve this. We deserve all of it.