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Corporations

Webinar: Stop Corporate Surveillance In Schools

September 15, 2018 Staff, Classroomsnotcomputers.org , ,
Our goal in this webinar is twofold. First, we will provide an overview of the campaign webpage resources and actions, as well as invite you all to share actions you are taking against corporate surveillance in your school/community. We hope by the end of the discussion, each of you will have an idea for an action you can take, or a connection with others you have made that can help you organize in your area. Second, following this discussion we have saved time to invite Alison McDowell to hold a 15 min Q and A about her latest powerful video called “Life on the Ledger.”

Taxpayers Are Footing The Bill For Sky-High CEO Salaries

September 4, 2018 By Sam Pizzigati, Otherwords.org , , ,
Politicians often gab about the “private sector” and the “public sector,” as if these two categories of economic activity operated as two completely separate worlds. In reality, these two sectors have always been deeply intertwined. How deeply? Every year, the federal government spends about half a trillion dollars buying goods and services from the private sector. State and local government contracts with private-sector enterprises add hundreds of billions more. And private-sector companies don’t just receive contracts from our governmental entities. They receive all sorts of subsidies — billions upon billions of dollars in “corporate welfare.” Where do all these dollars come from? They come from us, America’s taxpayers. Without the tax dollars we provide, almost every major corporation in the United States would flounder.

How SLAPP Lawsuits Are Letting Corporations Steal The Truth

September 1, 2018 Matt Stannard, Occupy.com , , ,
All his life, Pete Kolbenschlag has been fighting for the Commons against wealthy people and corporations who want to own and destructively exploit nature. “Change happens all the time,” he told me, “and will long after you have shed the mortal coil. Shape what you can now in a positive direction.” Pete was my best friend's housemate when I first met him 20-ish years ago in Salt Lake City. He was already a troublemaker, heading up major environmental actions in Utah and networking with activists and organizations around the West. He lives in Colorado now, and runs Mountain West Strategies, providing support to groups struggling to protect land and natural resources in Rocky Mountain states. He’s still a troublemaker.

Engineers Say “No Thanks” To Silicon Valley Recruiters, Citing Ethical Concerns

August 29, 2018 By Jeremy Hsu, Spectrum.ieee.org , , ,
Anna Geiduschek usually has no time to respond to recruitment emails that arrive in her inbox each week. But Geiduschek, a software engineer at Dropbox, recently made a point of turning down an Amazon Web Services recruiter by citing her personal opposition to Amazon’s role in hosting another tech company’s service used by U.S. government agents to target illegal immigrants for detention and deportation. "I'm sure you're working on some very exciting technical problems over there at AWS [Amazon Web Services], however, I would never consider working for Amazon until you drop your AWS contract with Palantir," Geiduschek wrote in her email response, which she shared on Twitter. Tech companies such as Amazon, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft have faced growing internal unrest from employees who raise ethical concerns about how the companies deploy their high-tech services and products.

How Energy Companies And Allies Are Turning The Law Against Protesters

August 23, 2018 Nicholas Kusnetz, Insideclimatenews.org , , ,
The activists were ready for a fight. An oil pipeline was slated to cross tribal lands in eastern Oklahoma, and Native American leaders would resist. The Sierra Club and Black Lives Matter pledged support. The groups announced their plans at a press conference in January 2017 at the State Capitol. Ashley McCray, a member of a local Shawnee tribe, stood in front of a blue "Water is Life" banner, her hair tied back with an ornate clip, and told reporters that organizers were forming a coalition to protect native lands. They would establish a rural encampment, like the one that had drawn thousands of people to Standing Rock in North Dakota the previous year to resist the Dakota Access Pipeline. The following week, an Oklahoma state lawmaker introduced a bill to stiffen penalties for interfering with pipelines and other "critical infrastructure."

While Poverty & Inequality Grow Theft By The Wealthy Not Prosecuted In The US

July 27, 2018 Rick Claypool, Public Citizen , ,
In the “tough on crime” story President Donald Trump likes to tell about himself, he’s a “law and order” tough guy fighting to save “the forgotten men and women” from the scourge of “American carnage.” But even as the Trump administration ramps up “zero-tolerance” policies against street crimes and immigration, it has gone soft on enforcement policies that protect Americans from lawbreaking corporations. “Corporate Impunity,” a new Public Citizen report, finds that in 11 of 12 agencies led by a Trump administration official for most of 2017, total monetary penalties imposed on corporate violators plummeted. At the Department of Justice (DOJ), penalties against corporate offenders plunged by 90 percent.

Technology Giants Hold Censorship Meeting With US Intelligence Agencies

June 29, 2018 Will Morrow, Wsws.org , ,
The New York Times and Washington Post this week published reports of a private meeting last month between eight major technology and social media corporations and the US intelligence agencies, to discuss their censorship operations in the lead-up to the November 2018 mid-term elections. The meeting was convened at Facebook's Menlo Park, California, headquarters on May 23, and was attended by representatives from Amazon, Apple, Google, Microsoft, Snap, Twitter and Oath, owner of Yahoo! and a subsidiary of the telecommunications giant Verizon, along with agents from the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security. The Post described the meeting, organized at the request of Facebook, as a “new overture by the technology industry to develop closer ties to law enforcement.”

Professional Societies: Corporate Service, Or Public Services For You!

June 6, 2018 Ralph Nader, Nader.org , ,
They call themselves non-profit professional societies, but they often act as enabling trade associations for the companies and businesspeople who fund them.  At their worst, they serve their paymasters and remain in the shadows, avoiding publicity and visibility.  When guided by their better angels, professional societies can be authoritative tribunes for a more healthy and safe society. I am referring to the organizations that stand for their respective professions – automotive, electrical, chemical and mechanical engineers; physicians; architects; scientists; and accountants.  The people working in these occupations all want to be members of a “professional” association, not a “trade” association.

How U.S. Taxpayers Fund The World’s Most Profitable Corporations

May 15, 2018 David DeGraw, Informationclearinghouse.info , ,
May 13, 2018 "Information Clearing House" -  We were trying to think of an issue that could possibly be more significant than $21 Trillion in taxpayer money disappearing from the Pentagon. While it is very hard to fathom something more significant than $21 Trillion, the only thing we could come up with is the lack of Return on Public Investment that American taxpayers get…As American taxpayers, did you know that we have been major investors in many of the world’s most profitable corporations? Yes, significant Research & Development of technology, done by the Pentagon through our public investment via taxpayer funding, has been handed over to global private corporations and foreign countries, for their profit. Global weapons manufactures, foreign countries and most of Silicon Valley’s largest companies have been gifted trillions of dollars worth of technology, at our expense, for their profit.

Corporations Should Have To Hear From Their Owners

April 26, 2018 By Fran Teplitz, Otherwords.org , ,
When we think about ways to pressure corporations to improve their practices, we may think of petitions, street demonstrations, boycotts, or social media campaigns. Yet there’s another way that’s been used effectively for decades. It involves those who stand to gain from keeping companies healthy over the long term. It’s called shareholder action. Surprised? Shareholders, who are part-owners of the companies in which they invest, can use their investor status to pressure companies to be better corporate citizens. You’re a shareholder if you buy stock in a company. While not usually in the limelight, people who care about the social and environmental impacts of the companies in which they invest have helped improve corporate conduct for decades.

Venezuela Arrests Two Chevron Executives In Ongoing Anti-Corruption Probe

April 24, 2018 By Cira Pascual Marquina, Venezuelanalysis.com , , ,
Caracas, April 18, 2018 (venezuelanalysis.com) – Two Chevron employees were arrested in the Venezuelan city of Puerto La Cruz on Monday, as part of the Bolivarian government’s ongoing anti-corruption drive. Begun last September, Venezuela’s hardline campaign against corruption and influence peddling has led to legal action against dozens of employees and executives in the state oil sector, but these are the first arrests targeting personnel from a private foreign company. According to sources interviewed by Reuters, agents of the Bolivarian Intelligence Services (SEBIN) raided PetroPiar’s Puerto la Cruz offices, located in the northeastern Venezuelan state of Anzoategui, to make the arrests. PetroPiar is a 70/30 joint venture between state oil company PDVSA and Chevron, the largest US oil company operating in Venezuela today.

US CEO Pay, Bank Profits, Corporate Cash Set New Records

April 20, 2018 Barry Grey, Wsws.org , ,
Across the United States, workers are being told by Democrats and Republicans alike that there is “no money” for decent wages, pensions or health care. Teachers from West Virginia to Oklahoma, Kentucky, Arizona and other states are rebelling against near-poverty wages and years of school cuts only to be told by the politicians and union leaders that their demands are “unrealistic” and cannot be met. But a series of reports on CEO pay, bank profits and corporate cash released over the past week reveal that corporate America and the financial oligarchy are wallowing in record levels of wealth. The Washington Post reported on Friday that, boosted by the tax cut for corporations and the rich passed in December, the biggest US firms “find themselves sitting on an Everest of cash,” with “profits pouring in faster than they can find productive ways to spend it.”

Tax Day 2018: A Bonanza For Corporations And The Military

April 19, 2018 By Lindsay Koshgarian, Truthout.org , ,
The IRS is projected to gather roughly $1.6 trillion in individual income taxes this year, and these taxes will make up almost half of the revenue of the federal government for 2017. By comparison, corporations are expected to pay $297 billion in federal income taxes. Individuals will contribute five times as much in income taxes to the federal government as corporations do. It wasn't always this way. Corporations used to pay more income taxes than individuals did. In 1943, for example, corporations contributed 40 percent of federal revenues, compared to just 9 percent today. What happened? Throughout the last half of the 20th century, individual income tax revenues kept growing. Corporate income taxes didn't keep the pace, growing much more slowly than individual income tax revenues. The corporate tax rate declined from over 50 percent in the 1950s to 35 percent as of 2017. The Trump tax plan will likely lead to a corporate income tax cut of $135 billion in 2018 alone.

The Corporate Plan To Groom U.S. Kids For Servitude By Wiping Out Public Schools

April 17, 2018 By Lynn Stuart Parramore, Alternet.org ,
West Virginia’s public school teachers had endured years of low pay, inadequate insurance, giant class sizes, and increasingly unlivable conditions—including attempts to force them to record private details of their health daily on a wellness app. Their governor, billionaire coal baron Jim Justice, pledged to allow them no more than an annual 1% raise—effectively a pay cut considering inflation—in a state where teacher salaries ranked 48th lowest out of 50 states. In February 2018, they finally revolted: In a tense, four-day work stoppage, they managed to wrest a 5% pay increase from the state. Teachers in Oklahoma and Kentucky have now revolted in similar protests. It’s the latest battle in a contest between two countervailing forces: one bent on reengineering America for the benefit of the wealthy, the other struggling to preserve dignity and security for ordinary people.

If You Want To Kill Drug Dealers, Start With Big Pharma

April 6, 2018 By Domenica Ghanem, Otherwords.org , , ,
At a recent rally in New Hampshire, Donald Trump called for the death penalty for drug traffickers as part of a plan to combat the opioid epidemic in the United States. At a Pennsylvania rally a few weeks earlier, he called for the same. Now his administration is taking steps toward making this proposal a reality. Attorney General Jeff Sessions issued a memo on March 21 asking prosecutors to pursue capital punishment for drug traffickers — a power he has thanks to legislation passed under President Bill Clinton. Time and again, these punitive policies have proven ineffective at curbing drug deaths. That’s partly because amping up the risk factor for traffickers makes the trade all that more lucrative, encouraging more trafficking, not less. But it’s also because these policies don’t address the true criminals of the opioid crisis: Big Pharma.
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