highfidelity Forum Posts (2,287)

RE: Hello!!! I am new to the EU forum....

Algarion seen you before somewhere

:EU: Forums

RE: Would you date a Muslim?

I have been connected to Middle Easterns for ages, ok they are Muslims ... but first of all they are Persons.!
I know very humble people of great greaciouse manners and hospitality - I call friends Palistinian Intellectuals of incredible insight - they allways looked up to us for many reasons - we destroyed that trust and hope to be just egual brothers and sisters - not them !!!

verymad: ::verymad:

RE: do american people love people as much as british people do..? or do they just love money?

RE: do american people love people as much as british people do..? or do they just love money?

hey somewhere in Kentucky.. dont´ya know it all helps

RE: do american people love people as much as british people do..? or do they just love money?

fergot to mention the equality of all humans and the peace needed in so many parts of the world - since we all lost the saying in it

RE: do american people love people as much as british people do..? or do they just love money?

I would like to grab that moment of the Thread and sent out

RE: What dose Europe think of America???

"The other major purpose of offshore is for tax evasion, estimated to reach another $500 billion a year.

"They have sophisticated mechanisms. There's transfer pricing. A company sets up a trading company offshore, sells its widgets there for under market price, the trading company sells it for market price, the profits are offshore, not where they really were generated.

"Two American professors, using customs data, examined the impact of over-invoiced imports and under-invoiced exports for 2001. Would you buy plastic buckets from the Czech Republic for $973 each, tissues from China at $1874 a pound, a cotton dishtowel from Pakistan for $154, and tweezers from Japan at $4,896 each!

"U.S. companies, at least on paper, were getting very little for their exported products. If you were in business, would you sell bus and truck tires to Britain for $11.74 each, color video monitors to Pakistan for $21.90, and prefabricated buildings to Trinidad for $1.20 a unit.

"Comparing all claimed export and import prices to real world prices, the professors figured the 2001 U.S. tax loss at $53.1 billion.

"Or a company sets up subsidiaries in tax havens ­ to "own" logos or intellectual property. Like Microsoft does in Ireland, transferring software that was made in America, that benefited by work done by Americans, to Ireland so Microsoft can pay taxes there (at 11%) instead of here (at 35%). Why is Ireland getting the benefit of American-created software? It's legal. We need to change the law.

"When logos are offshore, the company pays royalties to use the logo and deducts the amount as expenses. But the payments are not taxed or are taxed minimally offshore where they are moved. When Cheney ran Halliburton, it increased its offshore subsidiaries from 9 to at least 44.

"Half of world trade is between various parts of the same corporations. Experts believe that as much as half the world's capital flows through offshore centers. The totals held offshore include 31 percent of the net profits of U.S. multinationals.

"The whole collection of tax scams is why between 1989 and 1995, of US and multi-national corporations operating in the United States, with assets of at least $250 million or sales of at least $50 million, nearly two-thirds paid no U.S. income tax.

"In 1996-2000, Goodyear's profits were $442 million, but it paid no taxes and got a $23-million rebate. Colgate-Palmolive made $1.6 billion and got back $21 million. Other companies that got rebates in 1998 included Texaco, Chevron, PepsiCo, Pfizer, J.P. Morgan, MCI Worldcom, General Motors, Phillips Petroleum and Northrop Grumman. Microsoft reported $12.3 billion U.S income in 1999 and paid zero federal taxes. (In two recent years, Microsoft paid only 1.8 percent on $21.9 billion pretax U.S. profits.)

"During the 1950s, U.S. corporations accounted for 28 percent of federal revenues. Now, corporations represent just 11 percent.

"Those unpaid taxes can buy a lot of politicians and power. When Nixon needed money to pay the Watergate burglars, he got it from some corporate offshore bank accounts.

"The system has given the big banks and corporations and the super-rich mountains of hidden cash they use to control our political systems.

"

RE: What dose Europe think of America???

Further going on now World Wide Corporate - will suck us all dry by bloodthirthy Corporations and Hedge Funds going Offshore, subsidised by our Governements with our Tax money are ....

" The Biggest Scam in the World "

Lucy Komisar of the Tax Justice Network-USA (taxjustice-usa.org) spoke at the Conference on Taming the Giant Corporation last week about "Closing Down the Tax Haven Racket." Her words were so compelling that the rest of this column is devoted to excerpts from her presentation:

"The tax haven racket is the biggest scam in the world. It's run by the international banks with the cooperation of the world's financial powers for the benefit of corporations and the mega-rich. ost Americans, including progressive activist Americans, don't know what I'm going to tell you. And that's part of the problem.

"Tax havens, also known as offshore financial centers, are places that operate secret bank accounts and shell companies that hide the names of real owners from tax authorities and law enforcement. They use nominees, front men. Sometimes offshore incorporation companies set up the shells. Sometimes the banks do it. Often someone will use a shell company in one jurisdiction that owns a shell in another jurisdiction that owns a bank account in a third. That's called layering. No one can follow the paper trial.

"Offshore is where most of the world's drug money is laundered, estimated at up to $500 billion a year, more than the total income of the world's poorest 20 percent. Perhaps another $500 billion comes from fraud and corruption.

"Those figures fit with [International Monetary Fund] numbers that as much as $1.5 trillion of illicit money is laundered annually, equal to two to five percent of global economic output.

"Wall Street wants this money. The markets would hurt, even shrivel without that cash. That's why Robert Rubin as Treasury Secretary had a policy, as Joseph Stiglitz told me, not to do anything that would stop the free flow of money into the US. He was not interested in stopping money laundering because the laundered funds ended up in Wall , maybe in Goldman Sachs where he had worked, or Citibank, where he would work.

"Attempts to find laundered funds are usually dismal failures. According to Interpol, $3 billion in dirty money has been seized in 20 years of struggle against money laundering -- about the amount laundered in three days.

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RE: Do you believe that men

you can leave your head on..

or was it hat

RE: Do you believe that men

good for you - as long as you´re single

RE: Do you believe that men

there are quite a few fathers who bring up their kids alone and have a full time job -

they realy know what you´re are talking about - Yummi -
is one of them - he is missing on here for quite some time now-
wonder found a wonderful lady . hope he is fine ..

RE: Things guys like to do!

Still.... I miss the guy´s telling what they like to do ?

to: "help to ward off depression and anxiety, in todays modern society a lot of these things have been replaced by sports. do you think this is enough??

there has been nothing clear spilled out yet

RE: Things guys like to do!

ohooooooooo... this thread has been filling up my
flower box with a new assorted collection

RE: Do you believe that men

I dont like complicated rigid setups -
you see we live in an other century now - men like to be independent too.. they like shared responsability - they like a partner who is equal in all -

and it would be enough if he would place his head into my bed instead of heading the household

RE: Do you believe that men

wanted to say something cheeky .. but

will not shock pearl

RE: What dose Europe think of America???

I had to resourse on past and copy - but this is a piece coming out of the American Northeastern University

so be sure there are plenty of scared people out there who know only to well what is going on

RE: Things guys like to do!

Heavens nooooo.... no corporated one -

and my organic garden has soo much weed and nessles as well as snails ... what did you think

RE: Things guys like to do!

Heavens nooooo.... no corporated one -

and my organic garden has soo much weed and nessles as well as snails ... what did you think

RE: Hello all, I'm Hennery A Real Live California Guy...

Because I personally invited him many times to do so

His contributions are interesting and we love a multicultural discussion on CS !

Others will follow - even if some got eliminated by the CS - SS

RE: What dose Europe think of America???

//:

So the United States is not the greatest country in the world, better than all other countries in every possible way. What if this carefully guarded secret were to spill out? What if Dan Rather, America's favorite news anchor, were to open the CBS Evening News tonight with the announcement that some great think tank in Washington, preferably a conservative think tank, after years of carefully investigation, involving the best brains in the social sciences, had discovered that the United States "isn't after all the greatest country in the world, better than all other countries in every possible way?" Would this be another devastating blow to America's self-confidence, greater than that caused by the carnage of 9-11? Would Americans show up for work the next day or the day after? Why bother if you are not living in the "world's greatest country?" How would the President respond to this national catastrophe? What would he do to restore American confidence in their greatness? Invade Canada? Colonize Antartica? Or perhaps, ship the entire population of the Northeast to Mars?

Most Americans may well be relieved at this revelation. It was what they had suspected all along, but could never gather the pluck to tell the corporate lackeys--masquerading as leaders--who kept telling them otherwise. And now that this ruse had been exposed, perhaps, Americans will start asking the tough questions, start reclaiming their lost rights, and start rebuilding a democracy of all the people, for all the people and by all the people. Once this questioning starts, perhaps Americans will also start looking into all the ways in which their country--especially their government and corporations--impoverish their neighbors around the world, neighbors they, as Christians, should love, not reduce to poverty, dependency and misery.

When the United States, an admirable country in many respects, collectively aspires to inclusiveness, both inside and outside its borders; when the United States places people--people everywhere--before the profits of its corporations; when the United States aspires to be the best country--under a scale of humane values--not merely the greatest; when the people of the United States want for the world what they want for themselves; then, and only then, will the world embrace Americans as their own, a good people, even a generous people, contributing more than their share to the human struggle to make our world a better place for everyone.

RE: What dose Europe think of America???

;//

If we measure compassion "toward fellow citizens" in terms of income inequality--conventionally measured by the Gini index--we get the same result. The US has the largest value for the Gini index amongst developed countries.
By what available metric is the American political system "generous" to weaker segments of its own society?

In measuring US compassion towards other countries, take the more lenient view, not listing the invasions launched, regimes changed, the bombs dropped, coups instigated or sanctions imposed against the 'salt of the earth.' Instead, compare the funds allocated to 'foreign aid,' the index by which Americans most often measure their generosity towards poor countries. The total funds allocated by the United States to 'foreign aid" amounted to 0.11 percent (note the position of the decimal) of its gross national income. That is easily the lowest ratio for the twenty-four members of Development Assistance Committee of the OECD. On the ground, matters are much worse.

Nearly one-third of this aid goes as grants (no obligation to pay back) to another developed country, Israel, to buy the most advanced weaponry in the US arsenal.

So the United States is not the greatest country in the world, better than all other countries in every possible way. Why have I labored to establish this rather obvious result? There is a deep, two-way connection between these claims of superiority, of uniqueness, and the efforts by the American establishment to obfuscate the inequities inside the United States and to justify the inequities it helps to create and sustain outside its borders.

Every time America's 'leaders' speak of the "world's greatest country," behind the backs of their constituents, many, perhaps most of them are scheming to build more prisons and fewer schools, to hire more policemen and fewer teachers, to train more secret agents and fewer scientists, to fund more WMDs and fewer life-saving drugs; they are being wined and dined by Corporations who are monopolizing the media, denuding our rights, placing their profits before our lives, our children, our safety, and the natural beauty of the world we live in. In their myopic pursuit of power, these politicians would rather build the "world's greatest country" (if only they could) but populated with an impoverished, uneducated and unhealthy population, supine and undemanding of their rights.

Every time America's 'leaders' boast of the "world's oldest democracy," and of exporting democracy to the world, I can see peasants expropriated; workers shot, tortured and jailed; people's revolutions overthrown, crushed by American force, guile and lucre all across the Periphery; all to protect the unrestrained right of American Corporations to make money. Every time these mandarins proclaim that the United States is the "last great hope of earth," people all across the Periphery take cover, for they know that these words will be followed, as they have been in the past, by napalm bombs, by landmines, by cruise missiles, by daisy cutters, by shards of steel planted in their children's eyes. The people of the Periphery are all too familiar with the rhetoric of the "world's oldest democracy." They will not be deceived.

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RE: What does Europe FEEL about Australia

You know Honey-Dragon, I just might jump on a flying maschine any given day - if it comes to it nothing is far away ..

RE: Time--- Energy--- Space

and I was led to the impression we where discussing personal relationships ..
coming to that conclusion because being on a Single Connecting Site..

RE: What does Europe FEEL about Australia

Since I do not know how general Europe feels about Australia .. I got to rely on my own feelings.. also because I never been there, all I know is from documentaries about different subujects, places like the Gran Barrier Reef, differnt Cities the Outback and so on of Australia.

Herewith I must admit I know nothing much, all Australians I met where extreemly friendly people, fantastic people when sailing the world, and that they seem very attached to the UK and have a multicultural enviroment..

In my sailing times I wanted always to reach the harbour of Sydney by sailing boat.. but regretingly - I never ventured into the waters of Southern Pacific..

RE: Time--- Energy--- Space

Dragoncito - did you not ferget LOVE - giving it all a meaning ?

RE: Do you have a nervous habit

that does certainly not count

RE: Things guys like to do!

- AMONG OTHERS - ahaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa........

even better to know what are the other things..

let us find out about them then ...???

RE: Things guys like to do!

Well is´nt it enough that "these things make men feel good, and help to ward off depression and anxiety," ???? &

RE: Has anyone

sooooo romantic

RE: Things guys like to do!

sounds wonderful...

need my car fixed

plenty of firewood for next winter got to be done

and I dont mind game or fish for dinner

I will keep the beacon in a safe place ..

no its never enough ... he should be able to repair the house and look after the weed in the backyard ..