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PAD.MA - short for Public Access Digital Media Archive - is an online archive of densely text-annotated video material, primarily footage and not finished films. The entire collection is searchable and viewable online, and is free to download for non- commercial use.
We see PAD.MA as a way of opening up a set of images, intentions and effects present in video footage, resources that conventions of video- making, editing and spectatorship have tended to suppress, or leave behind. This expanded treatment then points to other, political potentials for such material, and leads us into lesser-known territory for video itself... beyond the finite documentary film or the online video clip.
The design of the archive makes possible various types of "viewing", and contextualisation: from an overview of themes and timelines to much closer readings of transcribed dialogue and geographical locations, to layers of "writing" on top of the image material. Descriptions, keywords and other annotations have been placed on timelines by both archive contributors and users. At the moment, PAD.MA has 865 "events" on video, mostly from Mumbai and Bangalore. This adds up to 15 days 13 hours 26 minutes 15 seconds of fully transcribed video footage, which we expect to grow to more than 400 hours by early 2010.
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For those who don’t know about it, tax repatriation is one of the all-time long cons and also one of the most supremely evil achievements of the Washington lobbying community, which has perhaps told more shameless lies about this one topic than about any other in modern history – which is saying a lot, considering the many absurd things that are said and done by lobbyists in our nation’s capital.
Here’s how it works: the tax laws say that companies can avoid paying taxes as long as they keep their profits overseas. Whenever that money comes back to the U.S., the companies have to pay taxes on it.
Think of it as a gigantic global IRA. Companies that put their profits in the offshore IRA can leave them there indefinitely with no tax consequence. Then, when they cash out, they pay the tax.
Only there’s a catch. In 2004, the corporate lobby got together and major employers like Cisco and Apple and GE begged congress to give them a “one-time” tax holiday, arguing that they would use the savings to create jobs. Congress, shamefully, relented, and a tax holiday was declared. Now companies paid about 5 percent in taxes, instead of 35-40 percent.
Money streamed back into America. But the companies did not use the savings to create jobs. Instead, they mostly just turned it into executive bonuses and ate the extra cash. Some of those companies promising waves of new hires have already committed to massive layoffs..
It was bad enough when lobbyists managed to pull this trick off once, in 2004. But in one of the worst-kept secrets in Washington, companies immediately started to systematically “offshore” their profits right after the 2004 holiday with the expectation that somewhere down the road, and probably sooner rather than later, they would get another holiday.
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Companies used dozens of fiendish methods to keep profits overseas, including such scams as “transfer pricing,” a technique in which profits are shifted to overseas subsidiaries. A typical example might involve a pharmaceutical company that licenses the rights or the patent to one of its more successful drugs to a foreign affiliate, which in turn manufactures the product and sells it back to the U.S. branch, thereby shifting the profits overseas.
Companies have been doing this for years, to incredible effect. Bloomberg’s Jesse Drucker estimated that Google all by itself has saved $3.1 billion in taxes in the past three years by shifting its profits overseas. Add that to the already rampant system of loopholes and what you have is a completely broken corporate tax system.
And the whole thing is predicated on that dirty little secret – the notion, long known to all would-be major corporate taxpayers, that there would come a day when there would be another tax holiday.
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Could you imagine what the Tea Party would be saying right now if there was a law on the books that allowed immigrants to indefinitely avoid taxes on income sent back to family members in the old country, in Mexico and Venezuela and India?
Imagine the uproar if Barack Obama, in the middle of this historic revenue crunch and "We're so broke the world is going to end tomorrow!" debt-ceiling hystgeria, decided to declare a second “one-time tax holiday” for, say, unwed single mothers, or recipients of public assistance? Middle America would be running through the streets, firing shotguns out its truck window, waving chainsaws in mall lobbies, etc.
- As it is, leading members of the Senate are seriously considering giving the most profitable companies in the world a total tax holiday as a reward for their last seven years of systematic tax avoidance.
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Democracy Now! | Headlines for July 20, 2011
- The FBI has arrested 16 people in a series of nationwide raids targeting two of the world’s most well-known hacking organizations. Fourteen of the suspects were arrested for their alleged links to a December attack on the online payment site, PayPal. The loosely-affiliated hacker activist group, Anonymous, took credit for the breach in response to PayPal’s suspension of accounts that donated money to the whistleblower website, WikiLeaks. An additional suspect was arrested for an Anonymous-linked breach of the FBI-affiliated website, InfraGard. The final suspect was arrested for allegedly lifting files from AT&T’s computer system and providing them to LulzSec, a separate hacking group with ties to Anonymous. The suspects were charged with conspiring to intentionally damage protected computers, which is punishable by a maximum of 10 years in prison. The arrests came as LulzSec reportedly breached the computer systems of News International, The Sun, The Times and The Sunday Times, all Murdoch-owned publications.
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Thursday, July 21, 2011
noted. 07/21/2011
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