Have fun when it rains bombs on your head! and don't say I didn't warn you!
AgentR11 wrote:He who can put whoever he wants in jail.. runs the show.
In China. That would be Xi.
Double dog dare any "Western Banker" to go to China and stomp on Xi's turf. Such a banker would be in prison pajamas being beaten by a $2/day moron for the rest of his life, before he could type the letters "I want". No. You go to China, setup in Shanghai, you will play by Xi's rules, or you will leave, or you will spend the rest of your life in prison. Those are your three options.
onlooker wrote:Have fun when it rains bombs on your head! and don't say I didn't warn you!
How to respond? First of all if what you said about Western banking transferring tech what tech do you mean? Computers, servers is that it. Why do you think for years China was stealing our technology so they could have the tech acumen themselves. We do not "own" anything over there. They are in ideal position, having the gold, having the technology, having a enthusiastic alliance. They know very well how bankrupt the West is and are prepared to take full advantage of it as they are NOT bankrupt. As for the above quote, my goodness get serious, do you think China can start WWIII? We can debate what the US is or is not at this point, but one thing is certain they maintain a robust nuclear deterrence capability and probably will for quite some time. So unless China is looking to destroy itself , US and all the planet, I will not be ducking for cover any time soon.
Yeah, I guess Xi somehow transferred US manufacturing to China decades ago too. He hypnotized the US elites from thousands of miles away.
StarvingLion wrote:Guess what happens next. The PRC bombers show up over the USA. Thats why the USA coal industry was run into the ground, the nuclear industry run into the ground, all for the complete bullshit of renewables that you suckers bought hook line and sinker. No more industrial base to defend itself.
Have fun when it rains bombs on your head! and don't say I didn't warn you!
China's anti-corruption forces have been aggressively hunting down officials hiding in the West, and it turns out they're also trying to root out supposed corruption at foreign companies doing business in China.
Multinational corporations with Chinese outposts have become increasingly aware that the Chinese government will investigate them for corruption — sometimes during unnanounced early-morning raids.
Dawn raids of foreign firms' offices are common during corruption investigations, corporate attorney Nathaniel Edmonds told Business Insider. Officials from China's Administration of Industry and Commerce (AIC) show up unannounced and search desk drawers, computers, files, lockers, safes, and even vehicles for documentation that could support a corruption investigation — and incriminate the firm, as Reuters has written.
In the last few months of 2014 alone, China's government reportedly investigated Microsoft, Qualcomm, and Daimler. In September, UK pharmaceutical company GSK paid a record $489 million fine to China for allegedly bribing doctors to prescribe its drugs, Reuters reported.
Whereas senior executives of foreign firms were once given VIP treatment in China, they are now being subjected to prolonged questioning by Chinese investigators.
In recent weeks, the Chinese authorities have been singling out foreign firms in various industries around the country, harassing them for allegedly breaking the country’s antitrust laws, conducting spot inspections of their hard drives and reportedly busting them without due process.
Mr Li said that a group of ten Japanese car-parts firms has been slapped with fines totalling 1.24 billion yuan ($200m), the largest antitrust penalty ever imposed in China.
A couple of days before, it was revealed that the NDRC had found Daimler, a German carmaker, guilty of using its market power to inflate the price of spare parts illegally. This comes on the heels of raids on the offices of foreign luxury carmakers.
Foreign technology firms also complain about their treatment. The State Administration for Industry and Commerce (SAIC), another agency looking after competition law, recently raided the offices of Microsoft. It is hard to see how the American software giant could abuse its market power given that it has so little: most copies of its products in use in China are pirated. The NDRC is also conducting a monopoly-pricing probe of Qualcomm, an American telecoms-equipment firm.
These investigations come after crackdowns in 2013, which saw Chinese regulators impose record fines of $242m for market abuse. At the start of last year, the NDRC fined foreign manufacturers of liquid-crystal display panels. A few months later, the agency noisily found half a dozen manufacturers of baby formula guilty of “resale-price maintenance”.
And the future may be more troubling than the past. David Yang of IHS, a consulting firm, warns foreign multinationals that more investigations are coming in the construction, telecoms, waste-management and banking sectors.
The annual statistics disclosed by the antitrust agencies since 2008 (when China’s anti-monopoly law came into force) are opaque and incomplete. But they show that the Chinese regulators have also targeted domestic firms, ranging from drinks manufacturers and gold retailers to salt producers. China’s antitrust regulators are growing more confident and seem likely to issue more rulings that will upset foreign firms.
China’s tax officials plan to step up efforts to collect taxes from multinational corporations in the latest of a series of moves in the last year, mostly against Western companies. The activities have included police raids on the headquarters of companies’ China operations and heavy fines under antimonopoly law.
The State Administration of Taxation said that it would be looking in detail at how companies move money and allocate costs among their Chinese operations and their overseas businesses. Although such a review could also be applied to the many Chinese businesses that have set up holding companies in the Cayman Islands and elsewhere to avoid taxation, accountants said the main target of the latest initiative appeared to be foreign-owned firms.
“The focus right now is multinationals’ paying their fair share of taxes,” said Howard Yu, a corporate tax partner at PricewaterhouseCoopers in Beijing. He added that the Beijing office of the national tax agency had set up an international division with an emphasis on auditing multinationals.
The tax agency announced its plans in a statement posted on its website Tuesday night; the statement was reported by state news media outlets in identical or nearly identical articles on Wednesday. China Daily, a state-run newspaper, included a warning, ascribed to an unidentified “expert in the field,” that “multinationals, especially small foreign companies, should pay extremely high attention to their regulation compliance, as failure to do so would lead to huge losses.”
China became a net exporter of investment last year, by some measures. Christopher Xing, a China tax partner in the Hong Kong office of KPMG, said the tax agency was likely to scrutinize some of the Chinese companies setting up operations overseas.
“China is also concerned about Chinese multinationals engaged in unfair practices,” he said.
On Sunday, China became the latest country to impose a so-called anti-avoidance rule, giving broad authority to the tax authorities to block corporate transactions they deem to be aimed more at avoiding taxes than conducting business.
Andrew Choy, a partner at Ernst & Young, said the rule made foreign companies nervous because unlike in countries like Australia, Canada and the United States, it was nearly impossible in China to challenge the tax authorities’ decisions in court.
MNCs must become more closely attuned to the role they are expected to play at this stage of the development of China’s economy. They are under increasing scrutiny by the Chinese government, so it is all the more important for them to understand their “face,” or status, in China — how they are perceived and thus how they should act.
In China, few things are worse than losing face. The concept has two bases: social prestige and moral integrity. The two factors are interdependent in that social status implies certain expectations about one’s behavior and that the face one is accorded by others will depend on how well one lives up to those expectations. This applies as much to organizations as to individuals. Although MNCs still are very well placed, their lofty status brings with it high expectations about their integrity. The higher they are in the hierarchy of corporations, the higher the expectations. China expects to benefit from the MNCs’ positive influence on the nation’s business environment and practices. (See “The Factors Determining an MNC’s ‘Face.’”) A loss of face casts a long shadow over the MNCs’ competitiveness and hence their future in China. To gain respect and face, global behavioral standards must be pursued.
An increasing number of American businesses say they feel unwelcome in China after the country's government began a crackdown on monopoly pricing and corrupt business practices, according to a new survey.
The American Chamber of Commerce, or AmCham, surveyed its members and released the results on Tuesday, showing that about 60 percent of its members feel less welcome in China compared to 41 percent last year, the Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday.
It also said that U.S.-based companies operating in China are finding it difficult to adapt to the Asian country's shift from a state-led model that relied heavily on exports and investment to a model based on services and domestic demand.
AmCham’s annual survey is the latest to suggest that foreign investors are increasingly wary of the aggressive tactics adopted by Chinese industry regulators.
The AmCham survey shows that while many U.S. companies in China remain profitable, fewer businesses are reporting a substantial growth in profits and many are scaling back expansion plans as revenues from their Chinese operations slow down, the report added.
A survey conducted by the European Chamber of Commerce earlier this year reportedly showed that about 61 percent of European companies, which have done business in China for more than 10 years, feel that the country is getting more difficult to operate in.
The European Chamber of Commerce said in August that it heard “alarming” accounts from European companies of intimidation tactics used by Chinese officials to force foreign-owned companies to accept the penalties handed out by Chinese authorities without being allowed full hearings in court, according to the Journal. Chinese authorities have also advised foreign companies not to challenge the investigations, and warned them against seeking legal or government assistance, the report said.
Chinese officials have reportedly defended their actions saying that the crackdown targets both domestic and foreign companies. According to them, the country is investigating companies under an anti-monopoly law, which came into effect six years ago, for reasons similar to those used by governments in the U.S. and Europe in previous decades.
Last month, Chinese industry regulators levied fines of about $202 million (1.24 billion yuan) against 12 Japanese auto-part makers on charges of alleged price manipulation.
German automotive giants Bayerische Motoren Werke AG (ETR:BMW), Volkswagen AG's (ETR:VOW3) Audi AG (ETR:NSU) and Mercedes-Benz parent Daimler AG (ETR:DAI) are also awaiting penalties following similar probes, and have responded to the investigations by cutting prices of their products in China.
Technology giants Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) and QUALCOMM, Inc. (NASDAQ:QCOM) too are being investigated for indulging in alleged monopolistic activities though both companies have said they abide by Chinese law and are cooperating with investigators.
Western multinational companies also say they are facing attacks on their business practices and reputation from Chinese state media, which could destroy their businesses.
U.S.-based food processor OSI Group LLC’s China business collapsed after a Shanghai television station reported abuses at the company’s local plant. Six OSI employees were later arrested and the company apologized. And though the allegations have not yet been proven, several of OSI's major customers in China, including Burger King Worldwide Inc (NYSE:BKW) and Yum! Brands, Inc. (NYSE: YUM), which runs the KFC and Pizza Hut chains, have refused to buy their products. McDonald's Corporation (NYSE:MCD) suspended OSI supplies to its 2,000-plus outlets in China.
About seven years ago, China was the No. 1 investment destination for a majority of U.S.-based companies. However, this year’s survey showed only 20 percent of respondents were interested in investing in China with an increasing majority looking at other foreign destinations for direct foreign investment, the Journal reported, citing the AmCham survey.
Cid_Yama wrote:
China jails their own businessmen and government workers who are found engaging in corruption. With high profile trials, many of them sentenced to death. For things corporate types around here would consider par for the course.
Over the last three years, the Chinese government has punished 33 multinational corporations for violating the nation’s environmental laws and regulations, according to Ma Jun, director of the nongovernmental Institute of Public & Environmental Affairs. Ma’s announcement in September came as a surprise to many, as the Chinese public has tended to assume that multinational companies abide more strictly by the law than some in fact do.
The exposed companies include subsidiaries of world-renowned corporations such as American Standard, Panasonic, Pepsi, Nestle, and 3M. They were punished mainly for discharges of substandard waste water and for unauthorized construction activities that occurred in the absence of proper environmental impact assessments.
When researchers at Ma’s institute began building a database to map China’s water pollution earlier this year, they used data from the websites of various Chinese environmental protection authorities. During the process, they came across a list of multinational corporations that had been cited for environmentally harmful activities for the years 2004–06.
Ma, who once worked as an environmental consultant for multinationals in China, was shocked by the discovery. “Those enterprises have been talking about corporate responsibility, yet they could not even abide by the law,” he says.
Mr. Zhao, an authority with the Jilin Provincial Environmental Protection Bureau agrees that, “Multinational corporations have relaxed their environmental standards in China.” And according to Lo Sze Ping, campaign director of Greenpeace China, the “words” of multinationals are often better than their deeds. To address their wrongdoings, companies are more willing to invest in public relations than in actually cleaning up the manufacturing process, he says.
Alfred Tennyson wrote:We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
This was never said officially before! “They gave money to save German and French banks, not Greece,” Paolo Batista, one of the Executive Directors of International Monetary Fund told Greek private Alpha TV on Tuesday. Batista strongly criticized not only the euro zone and the European Central Bank but also the IMF and the Fund’s managing Director Christine Lagarde for defending Europe much too much..
So all the whinging about Greece "freeloaders" is naturally retarded spew. Greece propped up German and French banks and got saddled with the bill. It should send the bill to Germany and France.
Thousands of protesters waved Greek flags as they marched from the Central Bank to the Dáil on Saturday afternoon in solidarity with Greece.
“Athens Athens we’re with you, we’re against the Troika too,” the crowd chanted as it made its way through Dublin city centre, ahead of Greek’s referendum on austerity measures on Sunday.
Co-ordinator of the Greek Solidarity Committee Ronan Burtenshaw said the issue isn’t Greece against Europe, but a battle between “ordinary people across Europe against our elites”.
“We say absolutely and clearly from Dublin today that we stand on the side of democracy, and democracy means No. Democracy means OXI”.
The theme of the march was “We say No too,” which organisers said expressed the “common battle against austerity in both countries.”
Irish rugby player Trevor Hogan spoke to the crowd at the Central Bank about the “right wing austerity vultures” in the Irish government and the EU, and thanked the people of Greece “for exposing the lies and ripping that mask off the EU’s face”.
“The quote that drives me in my life and always keeps me going is Desmond Tutu when he said that to be neutral in times of injustice, is ultimately to be on the side of the oppressor”.
Mr Burtenshaw of the Greek Solidarity Committee said that the demonstration in Athens on Friday was the “biggest act of defiance yet seen to the rule of the Troika in Europe”.
“Today in Dublin, along with marches in Spain, Portugal, Italy, France and Germany, we will show that ordinary people across the continent stand with them, for a meaningful democracy and against endless austerity”.
Tens of thousands of people have taken part in anti-austerity demonstrations in London’s Trafalgar Square, Leeds, Liverpool, Bristol and Edinburgh.
The biggest march was in London, where thousands of people attended a rally outside the Bank of England before marching to the Houses of Parliament.
Union leaders and celebrities including Russell Brand and Charlotte Church have addressed crowds, while protests also took place in Liverpool and Glasgow.
The London rally was also addressed by Northern Ireland's Deputy First Minister Martin McGuinness, former Coronation Street actress Julie Hesmondhalgh and Labour leadership hopeful Jeremy Corbyn.
The final speaker to address the crowds in London's Parliament Square was comedian and activist Mr Brand, who said he wanted a society that was better for "all of us".
"I thought fame and fortune would make me valuable. I found out that it is empty," he said. "I am going to spend the rest of my life belonging to community, embracing community and helping in whatever way I can."
Len McCluskey, general secretary of the Unite union, said: "If they think they won the war of austerity on 7 May they'd better think again."
Sinn Fein's Mr McGuinness said he would fight "right-wing Thatcherite policies", telling crowds his party would say an "unambiguous, unqualified, uncompromising 'no' to this new Tory government".
Earlier, Labour leadership contender Jeremy Corbyn said austerity was a "cover" for deepening inequality.
The MP told BBC Radio 4's Today programme his party had been wrong to accept the Conservatives' "cuts agenda" during the general election campaign.
"Britain has become a more unequal society, is becoming a more unequal society, and austerity is a cover for actually deepening that level of inequality," he said.
The protest was organised by protest group the People's Assembly, which said 250,000 people attended.
Thousands of people also attended the rally in Glasgow, organised by Scotland United Against Austerity.
SeaGypsy wrote:Does a TV show 'Life on the Dole' play in the US? Talk about needing austerity FFS, an episode recently showed a 'single dad' obese with about 15 kids to 4 different troglodytes, whining his ass off about social security being capped at something like £1200 a week. He went & claimed disability which is uncapped, got the £200 a week restored which he lost under the cap. Absolute morons pumping out babies as money factories is an absurd but common consequence of the current system.
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