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Corporations

The Illusion Of Freedom

By Chris Hedges for Truth Dig - The seizure of political and economic power by corporations is unassailable. Who funds and manages our elections? Who writes our legislation and laws? Who determines our defense policies and vast military expenditures? Who is in charge of the Department of the Interior? The Department of Homeland Security? Our intelligence agencies? The Department of Agriculture? The Food and Drug Administration? The Department of Labor? The Federal Reserve? The mass media? Our systems of entertainment? Our prisons and schools? Who determines our trade and environmental policies? Who imposes austerity on the public while enabling the looting of the U.S. Treasury and the tax boycott by Wall Street? Who criminalizes dissent?

Afraid Of Food Activists, Big Food Using Dirty Tricks

By Martha Rosenberg for Counter Punch - Officially, Big Food is not worried about the small number of “fringe” food activists who object to cruel, unhealthful and environmentally destructive products. But unofficially, it is a different story. American Egg Board CEO Joanne Ivy stepped down in apparent disgrace this fall when a 2013 email she wrote to a consultant saying the board was accepting “your offer to make that phone call to keep Just Mayo off Whole Foods shelves,” was revealed. Just Mayo is an egg-free and vegan product from San Francisco start-up Hampton Creek. Whole Foods still sells it.

Co-Conspirators To Crime Of The Century: The Oil Industry Knew

By Neela Banerjee for Inside Climate News - The American Petroleum Institute together with the nation's largest oil companies ran a task force to monitor and share climate research between 1979 and 1983, indicating that the oil industry, not just Exxon alone, was aware of its possible impact on the world's climate far earlier than previously known. The group's members included senior scientists and engineers from nearly every major U.S. and multinational oil and gas company, including Exxon, Mobil, Amoco, Phillips, Texaco, Shell, Sunoco, Sohio as well as Standard Oil of California and Gulf Oil, the predecessors to Chevron, according to internal documents obtained by InsideClimate News...

Merger Perpetuating GMOs, Squeezing Farmers And Consumers?

By Staff of IPA - AP is reporting: “Dow Chemical and the DuPont Co. announced Friday that they are merging in a $130 billion chemical industry megadeal. “The merger would combine two companies that sell agricultural products to millions of farmers around the world, and make a variety of chemicals for consumer and industrial products ranging from electronics, automobiles, and household goods to building materials and safety equipment. “The two companies will form DowDuPont, then separate into three independent publicly traded companies focused on agriculture, material science and specialty products.”

New Report Tallies Cost Of “Walmart Model” Economy

By Dave Johnson for Campaign For America's Future - Some call this the “Walmart Model.” One result of this model is that the six “Walmart heirs” are so wealthy from inherited stock that they have more wealth than 42 percent of all Americans combined. That figure is from 2012. It may be worse now. The billionaires created by stripping the rest of our wages (and taxes needed to fund our government) use the wealth gained from this model to influence our government and keep the game going. For example, the Walton heirs helped fund a drive to repeal inheritance taxes.

Polluters’ Paradise

By Staff of Corporate Europe Observatory - Proposed special rights for corporations in EU trade deals such as CETA and TTIP threaten to prevent the necessary energy transition to tackle climate change. Polluting corporations are already using the dangerous investor privileges in trade and investment deals to challenge progressive energy policies. Read the full report in English, French and Spanish. Avoiding catastrophic climate change is the defining challenge of our time. If we are to have a chance of preventing extremely dangerous levels of global warming, much of the world’s fossil fuels – oil, coal and gas – must be left in the ground, unexploited.

Rise Of Illegitimate Authority Of Transnational Corps.

By Susan George for Truth Out - Everywhere you look you find masses, droves, gangs of unelected, unaccountable, profit-oriented indi­viduals, corporations and new institutions surfacing everywhere, making official policy in areas ranging from public health to food and agriculture; from taxes to finance and trade. Some are lob­byists for particular private companies or for entire industries, others executives of the world's largest businesses, often with a turnover much greater than the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of many of the countries where they operate; more and more often, the entities they have created have become quasi-governmental bodies cooperating across national frontiers.

Eight Large Corporations Penalized $1 Billion Or More

By Editor of Corporate Crime Reporter - Eight large corporations and their subsidiaries have each been penalized more than $1 billion for environmental, health and safety cases brought by federal regulatory agencies since 2010. The corporations with the most penalties are: BP ($25.4 billion), Anadarko Petroleum ($5.2 billion), GlaxoSmithKline ($3.8 billion), Johnson & Johnson ($2.4 billion), Abbott Laboratories ($1.5 billion), Transocean ($1.4 billion), Toyota ($1.3 billion) and Alliant Energy ($1.0 billion). The penalty total of all entries in Violation Tracker is about $60 billion.

Chris Hedges Interviews Kevin Zeese On The TPP

By Chris Hedges and Kevin Zeese for The Real News - Baltimore, MD. In this episode of teleSUR's Days of Revolt, Chris Hedges and organizer Kevin Zeese break down the terms of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), and detail the upcoming demonstrations organized against it. People have to rise up now, because this race to the bottom will affect every aspect–our foods will be less safe. The provisions now allow for a corporation–when food’s being inspected at the border, corporations stop the inspection if it’s going to take too long, if we have to send it in for testing to see what kind of poisons are in it. The corporations can sue to stop that.

New Yorkers Victories Against Corporate Power And Govt. Overreach

By David Morris for AlterNet - New York makes it hard for citizens to influence policy. They cannot put an issue on the state ballot no matter how many signatures they gather. Although the state constitution has a home rule provision, cities and counties lack authority to undertake some of the most basic initiatives. Even mighty New York City, with over 8 million people, must go hat in hand to Albany to request permission to reduce city speed limits, install red light cameras, open its courts at night, or raise taxes other than those imposed on property. Which makes it even more impressive that in the past few years initiatives from the bottom up have won two and a half significant victories in the face of vigorous opposition from giant corporations...

What Can We Learn On 10 Year Anniversary Of FTAA

By Aldo Orellana López and Thomas McDonagh for ALAI - This month marks the tenth anniversary of the defeat of the FTAA. What can we learn from that victory and the subsequent corporate counter-offensive in Latin America for our current global struggles against free trade and corporate power? At the 4th Summit of the Americas 10 years ago in Mar del Plata, Argentina, the proposed Free Trade Area of the Americas was pronounced dead and buried. Today, 10 years on, the Democracy Center has interviewed three prominent social leaders who successfully fought, alongside hundreds of activists and organizations from across the continent, against what was intended to be the world's largest free trade area and the greatest corporate offensive in modern history.

The Corporate Coup: Chris Hedges And Ralph Nader

By Chris Hedges And Ralph Nader for The Real News - We're filming this segment, one of two segments, in Washington with author, former presidential candidate, consumer advocate, lawyer Ralph Nader. His two latest books: The Emerging Left-Right Alliance to Dismantle the Corporate State--or Unstoppable--and then Return to Sender: Unanswered Letters to the President 2001-2015. In this first segment, we're going to talk about the corporate coup d'état which took place, when it took place, how it was orchestrated. And it was largely an attempt by corporate power to respond to the very effective mobilizing that Ralph had done in Washington on behalf of the citizenry and advocacy groups to protect workers' rights, to promote clean water, clean air, OSHA.

A Tale Of Two Retirements

By Scott Klinger and Sarah Anderson for IPS - This report, co-published by the Institute for Policy Studies and the Center for Effective Government, is the first to provide detailed statistics on the staggering gap between the retirement assets of Fortune 500 CEOs and the rest of America. Key findings: The company-sponsored retirement assets of just 100 CEOs add up to as much as the entire retirement account savings of 41% of American families (50 million families in total). The 100 largest CEO retirement accounts are worth an average of more than $49.3 million—enough to generate a $277,686 monthly retirement check for each executive for the rest of their lives.

Top 500 US Firms Keep $2.1 Trillion In Tax Havens, Study Finds

By Tom Kutsch for Aljazeera, The largest 500 U.S. companies would owe an estimated $620 billion in U.S. taxes were it not for the more than $2.1 trillion in offshore cash that most of the firms hold in foreign tax havens, according to a study released Tuesday. The report (PDF), based on an analysis of company filings to the IRS and the Securities and Exchange Commission, was authored by the Citizens for Tax Justice and the U.S. Public Interest Research Group Education Fund. It found that close to three-quarters of the 500 biggest companies by gross revenue utilize tax havens through foreign subsidiaries in countries with low tax liability, including Bermuda, Ireland, the Netherlands and the Cayman Islands. “Most of America’s largest corporations maintain subsidiaries in offshore tax havens,” the report said.

Corporate Power, Grassroots Resistance, & Battle For Food System

For most of history, farmers have had control over their seeds: saving, sharing, and replanting them with freedom. Developments in the course of the 20th century, however, have greatly eroded this autonomy. Legal changes, ranging from the Plant Variety Protection Act (1970) in the United States to the World Trade Organization’s Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS), have systematically eroded farmers’ rights to save seeds for future use. By the end of 2012, Monsanto had sued 410 farmers and 56 small farm businesses in the United States for patent infringement, winning over $23 million in settlements.

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Urgent End Of Year Fundraising Campaign

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Keep independent media alive. 

Due to the attacks on our fiscal sponsor, we were unable to raise funds online for nearly two years.  As the bills pile up, your help is needed now to cover the monthly costs of operating Popular Resistance.

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