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Thought Trump did well today. He's still a fucking idiot, but he can read a script written by people smarter than him. Those same people told him to keep it short, which helped.

Troy wrote: Thought Trump did well today. He's still a fucking idiot, but he can read a script written by people smarter than him. Those same people told him to keep it short, which helped.

Just imagine if he had felt that way 3 months ago.

Asshole testifying to assholes.

Dems attacking Barr for politicizing his role and carrying out things for the president's agenda is hilariously hypocritical after 6 years of Eric Holder. And let's not forget how the IRS was politicized under Obama.

I think it's closer to say the IRS was weaponized.

GORDON wrote: I think it's closer to say the IRS was weaponized.

At least now it's been so neutered that rich people can evade all the taxes they want?

The IRS should pretty much only care about looking at rich people.

GORDON wrote: The IRS should pretty much only care about looking at rich people.

And yet... they barely are.

GORDON wrote: The IRS should pretty much only care about looking at rich people.

And corporations.

Taxes on products/services/entities just get passed down to customers. Hit the rich people running/owning the corporation.

GORDON wrote: Taxes on products/services/entities just get passed down to customers. Hit the rich people running/owning the corporation.

True.

I would very, very, very much like laws that stipulate a company's board, past and present members, can be found criminally responsible for crimes committed by a company.

Leisher wrote:

GORDON wrote: Taxes on products/services/entities just get passed down to customers. Hit the rich people running/owning the corporation.

True.

I would very, very, very much like laws that stipulate a company's board, past and present members, can be found criminally responsible for crimes committed by a company.

I mean.. sometimes true. Varying degrees of true.

Let's go with mostly true.

Leisher wrote: I would very, very, very much like laws that stipulate a company's board, past and present members, can be found criminally responsible for crimes committed by a company.

Boards rarely get in trouble for anything, as far as I can remember. Managers can be held responsible to some degree.

TheCatt wrote: Boards rarely get in trouble for anything, as far as I can remember.

Thus my desire for the laws.

Want to keep companies from polluting, price gouging, illegal hiring practices, and so on? Make the decision makers liable criminally.

Leisher wrote:

TheCatt wrote: Boards rarely get in trouble for anything, as far as I can remember.

Thus my desire for the laws.

Want to keep companies from polluting, price gouging, illegal hiring practices, and so on? Make the decision makers liable criminally.

The managers are really the decision makers. Boards... well, depends on the company, but often are not heavily involved. Specially large public companies.

Consequences would make them pay more attention.

GORDON wrote: Consequences would make them pay more attention.

Exactly.

I'm not saying they're criminally responsible no matter what.They need to be aware of laws being broken to be responsible (with caveats...if a company was committing a crime and the board was found to not know once, but then the company is caught doing the same thing, lock 'em up. It should be their responsibility at that point to ensure that same crime isn't being repeated.). But yes, everyone from the intern who knowingly breaks the law in the name of the company's business, ordered to or not, to every single person up the chain aware of what's going on and not stopping/reporting it should be held responsible.

Not just criminally for the employees either. I think there should be a financial motivation to be ethical. For example, if your company was caught selling defective products or polluting the environment and you are found to have been aware and approved it, you should bear some financial responsibility for the damages.

Also, I think the corporation itself should be far more significantly punished to the point where shareholders should be demanding proper behavior as they would lose money if the company was acting illegally or irresponsibly. Not just a monetary fine, but maybe a drop in credit rating, some kind of stock market punishment, etc.

And I'm mainly just talking about polluting, tax evasion, use of illegal software, corporate espionage, intentionally circumventing patents, purposely selling defective products, price gouging, and other such crimes that are a detriment to the environment and/or consumers.

Left to their own devices men will be greedy and take advantage of others. Capitalism is awesome, but there are too many tools available to corporations to "break the system" so that the market cannot dictate things to them. I just want the playing field leveled so corporations, particularly the folks running them, have fewer tools to get around "the rules".

A situation should not be possible where a car company takes no action about a design flaw that they KNOW has resulted in death and will result in more because the better choice financially is to just wait to be sued.

Doesn't bring up Russian bounties on call with Putin.

You'd think the conversation would have started with that.

Trump pulling 15K troops from Germany.

Loads of reasons given in the article, including that Germany still isn't paying their promised 2% of NATO costs.

The dumbest part is how we're going to be paying billions for the move. Why not simply raise the money via tariffs and tell Germany as soon as they pay up the tariffs will be lifted?