Corporations

Maine Campaign Against War And Corporate Rule Nears Climax

March 15, 2018 W. T. Whitney, Counterpunch.org Resist! Corporations, Inter-Imperialist Rivalry, Maine, Wars and Militarism

Maine legislators have a hot potato in their hands. But they don’t seem to be feeling any pain. On March 6, their Taxation Committee, controlled by the Democratic Party, voted 8-2 to send LD 1781 to the floor with an “ought-to-pass” recommendation. That bill calls for Maine to provide Bath Iron Works (BIW) with a $60 million tax credit extending over 20 years. The proposed legislation would renew a previous 20 – year, $60 million tax exemption that ended in 2017. In return for the bill’s approval, BIW promises to invest $100 million in its Bath shipyard and maintain a workforce of at least 5000 employees until 2023. BIW is owned by General Dynamics, the nation’s fourth largest defense contractor. The company located in Bath, Maine – population 8303 – currently builds Arleigh Burke and Zumwalt class destroyers.

Corporations Profiting From Water Infrastructure Crisis

February 22, 2018 By Elizabeth Nussbaumer, Foodandwaterwatch.org Educate! Corporations, Crisis, Infrastructure, Profit, Water

Here are some numbers to start. In 2014, 64 percent of bottled water was, essentially, filtered tap water -- up from 51.8 percent in 2009. From 2010 to 2014, total federal funding for public water infrastructure fell from $6.9 billion to around $4.4 billion. In other words: as funding for safe public water fell 37 percent, bottled water companies were able to increase sales of what was basically just tap water under the guise that it was “safer.” Even though the U.S. government requires stricter safety monitoring of tap water than for bottled water. When Congress doesn't fund water infrastructure, Nestlé wins. And this is something they spend millions doing. The International Bottled Water Association, Nestlé Waters NA, Nestlé USA and Coca-Cola lobbied Congress on issues including bottled water, water infrastructure...

Lawyers Who Fight Corporate Predators For The People

February 17, 2018 Ralph Nader, Nader.org Resist! Corporations, Corruption, Law

I first heard about William M. Shernoff in the mid-nineteen seventies when he was pioneering a field of law known as insurance bad faith litigation. That ‘bad faith’ occurs is when insurance companies deny legitimate claims or try to use deceptive fine print clauses to escape policy coverage. He was starting to collect both compensation for his clients and large punitive damages when the evidence showed insurance companies were imposing these abuses on many thousands of their customers. One day I called Attorney Shernoff and said that if he would match my $25,000 donation, we could start the National Insurance Consumer Organization (NICO) headed by the former Federal Insurance Commissioner, J. Robert Hunter, the pro-consumer actuary who served under both Presidents Ford and Carter.

Corporate Theft Of $100 Billion Annually From Africa

February 13, 2018 Patrick Bond, Counterpunch.org Educate! Africa, Corporations, Corruption

A brand new World Bank report, The Changing Wealth of Nations 2018, offers evidence of how much poorer Africa is becoming thanks to rampant minerals, oil and gas extraction. Yet Bank policies and practices remain oriented to enforcing foreign loan repayments and transnational corporate (TNC) profit repatriation, thus maintaining the looting. Central to its “natural capital accounting,” the Bank uses an “Adjusted Net Savings” (ANS) measure for changes in economic, ecological and educational wealth. This is surely preferable to “Gross National Income” (GNI, a minor variant of Gross Domestic Product), which fails to consider depletion of non-renewable natural resources and pollution (not to mention unpaid women’s and community work).

Leaked Trump Infrastructure Plan: Blueprint For Corporate Subsidies

January 30, 2018 Pete Dolack, Counterpunch.org Educate! Corporations, Corruption, Money in Politics, New Economy

The Trump administration’s plans to rebuild infrastructure in the United States have been leaked, and it appears to be as bad as feared. At least three-quarters of intended funding will go toward corporate subsidies, not actual projects. It is possible that no funding will go directly toward projects. There’s no real surprise here, given that President Donald Trump’s election promise to inject $1 trillion into infrastructure spending was a macabre joke. What is actually happening is that the Trump administration intends to push for more “public-private partnerships.” What these so-called partnerships actually are vehicles to shovel public money into private pockets. These have proven disastrous wherever they have been implemented, almost invariably making public services more expensive. Often, far more expensive.

Corporate Powers Are Stealing Online Identities, Posting Fake Comments To Push For Consumer Law Repeals

January 16, 2018 By Steven Rosenfeld, Alternet.org Educate! Consumerism, Corporations, Hacking, Legislation

Forget Russian fake news for a moment. Another extremely consequential privacy-breaching, identity-theft hack is undermining our democracy and almost certainly being perpetuated by corporate America. A pattern of cyber deception is appearing across the federal government in the nooks and crannies of the process where White House directives or Congress’ laws are turned into the rules Americans must abide by—or in the Trump era, are repealed. Hundreds of thousands of comments, purportedly made by Americans, have come in over the electronic transom to at least five different federal agencies calling for an end to Obama-era consumer protections and other regulations that impede profits, a series of investigative reports by the Wall Street Journal found. Except, the people who supposedly sent these comments never did.

Duke University Gets Corporate Mining Gift To Help Exploit Indigenous People Of Peru

January 9, 2018 By Gary G. Kohls, Transcend.org Educate! Corporations, Higher Education, Indigenous Peoples, Mining, Peru

3 Jan 2017 – Below are two articles that nicely illustrate the cunning methods that ALL multinational mining, exploration, drilling, energy extractive or oil transporting corporations use to try to sanitize what in reality are greedy designs to enrich corporate stakeholders by raping, stealing, exploiting and permanently polluting the land, water and air that really has always belonged to the indigenous people and who simply want to protect what has always been theirs.The first article illustrates how an otherwise respected major educational institution like Duke University (of Durham, North Carolina) could be easily bamboozled by financial enticements from an exploitive corporation.

Why We Shouldn’t Fall For Members-Only Unionism Trap

December 27, 2017 By Chris Brooks, Portside.org Strategize! Corporations, Labor, Propaganda, Unions

One of corporate America’s next big goals might surprise you: passing legislation to prevent unions from having to represent workers who don’t pay dues. This is just the latest of many business-friendly labor law reforms proliferating across the country. Over the past decade, the Republican Party has ascended to become the dominant political force in the U.S. government, controlling two-thirds of state legislatures, a majority of governorships, both houses of Congress and the White House. Conservatives also make up a majority on the Supreme Court. This growth in power of the GOP has also given rise to a new slew of anti-union legislation. States in over half the country have passed open-shop laws, euphemistically referred to as “right-to-work.”

European Union Trying To Prevent UN Treaty On Corporations And Human Rights

December 21, 2017 Staff, stopcorporateimpunity.org Resist! Corporations, European Union (EU), Human Rights, United Nations

According to our sources, the European Union (EU) delegation to the United Nations General Assembly’s Fifth Committee, which deals with budgetary matters, is trying to eliminate the financing of the Human Rights Council’s intergovernmental working group (IGWG) mandated to draft a legally binding instrument on transnational corporations (TNCs) and human rights. It is worth recalling that the intergovernmental working group, set up under Human Rights Council Resolution 26/9 adopted in June 2014, is tasked with creating a mechanism at the international level to allow victims and affected communities access to justice in the face of human rights violations committed by TNCs.

State AGs Suing FCC For Putting ‘Corporate Profits Over Consumers’

December 16, 2017 ByJake Johnson, commondreams.org Resist! Corporations, FCC, Lawsuit, Net Neutrality, Profit

"The FCC's vote to rip apart net neutrality is a blow to New York consumers, and to everyone who cares about a free and open internet," New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman—who is also investigating the flood of fake comments that "corrupted" the agency's policymaking process—said in a statement announcing his intent to sue. "The FCC just gave Big Telecom an early Christmas present, by giving internet service providers yet another way to put corporate profits over consumers." Soon after Schneiderman's announcement on Thursday, more than a dozen other state AGs followed suit, with both red and blue states joining the public repudiation of FCC chair Ajit Pai's plan.

Israel And US Hide Corps Supporting Israeli Settlements

December 12, 2017 Marjorie Cohn, truth-out.org Educate! Corporations, Israel, Nationalism, US Imperialism

In December 2016 the United Nations Security Council passed a resolution reaffirming that Israel's Jewish settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT) are illegal and calling on Israel to stop settlement activities in the OPT. Resolution 2334 says the settlements have "no legal validity," calls them "a flagrant violation under international law," and demands Israel "immediately and completely cease all settlement activities." Nine months earlier, the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC), in Resolution 31/36, had ordered the Office of the High Commissioner of Human Rights to "produce a database of all business enterprises" that "directly and indirectly, enabled, facilitated and profited from the construction and growth of the settlements." The database was scheduled for release in December 2017. Meanwhile, the Israeli and US governments have been trying to prevent that list -- which reportedly includes at least 150 local and international companies -- from becoming public. "We will do everything we can to ensure that this list does not see the light of day," Israel's UN ambassador Danny Danon told The Associated Press. US State Department spokesperson Heather Nauert said, "We just view that type of blacklist as counterproductive."

How Corporate Power Killed Democracy

December 8, 2017 Richard Moser, counterpunch.org Educate! Corporations, Democracy, Fascism, State

By Richard Moser for Counter Punch - The rise of Corporate Power was the fall of democracy. Over the long haul, US politics has revolved around a deep tension between democracy and an unrelenting drive for plunder, power and empire. Granted that our democracy has been seriously flawed and only rarely revolutionary, yet the democratic movements are the source of every good thing America has ever stood for. Since the mid-1970s, when the corporations fused with the state, a new imperial order emerged that killed what remained of representative democracy. Not only would corporations exercise public authority as only government once had, but government would coordinate and serve corporate activity. Power and profits became one and the same. Corporate power has replaced democracy with oligarchy and justice with a vast militarized penal system. Instead of innovative production, they plunder people and planet. To achieve this new order, elections and the economy had to be drained of any remaining democratic content. Both Democrats and Republicans were eager to have at it. By the 1990s “Third Way” Democrats like Bill Clinton abandoned what was left of the New Deal to try to outdo the Republicans as the party of Wall Street. The Republicans pioneered election fraud on a national scale in 2000, 2004, and 2016; a lesson the Democrats learned all too well by the 2016 Primary. Neither major party wants election reform since free and fair elections would threaten the system itself.

New Tool For Preventing Workplace Deaths

October 31, 2017 Russell Mokhiber, corporatecrimereporter.com Organize! Capitalism, Corporate crime, Corporations

By Russell Mokhiber of Corporate Crime Report - The database catalogues state criminal prosecutions against companies and individuals whose actions caused a worker’s death or serious injury. The database contains information on 75 incidents in 16 states that have led to criminal charges and provides additional related materials. “Every state has laws on the books that allow for criminal prosecution of employers who cause a worker’s death or serious injury,” said the Center’s Katie Tracy. “But it’s common for district attorneys to leave anything that happens in the workplace up to OSHA, even if prosecution is clearly warranted, and even though OSHA’s penalties are severely limited. It’s time for prosecutors to take workplace cases more seriously.” “Our database highlights instances in which states have pursued such cases over the past several decades to seek justice for workers and their families and to hold employers responsible for their actions,” Tracy said. “Until now, such information has been scattered across the Internet and not terribly useful to advocates and researchers.” The Crimes Against Workers database includes data on past and current cases, as well as a range of other materials, such as case files, court decisions, media clips, and advocacy resources. The database also contains information about advocacy campaigns in pursuit of criminal charges, some of which have resulted in an indictment and some of which have not.

Cutting Corporate Taxes Will Not Boost American Wages

October 30, 2017 Josh Bivens, www.epi.org Educate! Corporate tax, Corporations, New Economy, Taxes, Wages

By Josh Bivens for EPI - Bivens and Blair (2017) explain in detail how the theory for corporate tax cuts as a wage-boosting tool breaks down in the face of real-world data. This report provides a quick overview of this theory and then highlights how its predictions compare with real-world data. The theory is the following: First, corporate income tax cuts boost post-tax profits, which then boost the returns to owning stocks or bonds. These higher returns induce households to spend less and save more, and this increased supply of savings pushes down the cost of borrowing, or interest rates. Lower interest rates then induce firms to borrow more to finance new plants and equipment, and this raises productivity by giving workers more and better tools to work with. Second, competitive labor markets force employers to reward workers for their productivity increases buy paying them higher wages. This theory provides a number of empirical propositions regarding the effect of corporate tax changes on wage growth that can be tested with real-world data. The data show that many of the key predictions will almost surely fail. Before looking at the specific weak links in the causal chain, we review evidence relating to the overall claim that lower tax rates will boost productivity growth and wage growth.

Only Nonviolent Resistance Will Destroy Corporate State

October 19, 2017 Chris Hedges, www.truthdig.com Educate! Corporations, Nonviolence

By Chris Hedges for Truth Dig - The encampments by Native Americans at Standing Rock, N.D., from April 2016 to February 2017 to block construction of the Dakota Access pipeline provided the template for future resistance movements. The action was nonviolent. It was sustained. It was highly organized. It was grounded in spiritual, intellectual and communal traditions. And it lit the conscience of the nation. Native American communities—more than 200 were represented at the Standing Rock encampments, which at times contained up to 10,000 people—called themselves “water protectors.” Day after day, week after week, month after month, the demonstrators endured assaults carried out with armored personnel carriers, rubber bullets, stun guns, tear gas, cannons that shot water laced with chemicals, and sound cannons that can cause permanent hearing loss. Drones hovered overhead. Attack dogs were unleashed on the crowds. Hundreds were arrested, roughed up and held in dank, overcrowded cells. Many were charged with felonies. The press, or at least the press that attempted to report honestly, was harassed and censored, and often reporters were detained or arrested. And mixed in with the water protectors was a small army of infiltrators, spies and agents provocateurs, who often initiated vandalism and rock throwing at law enforcement and singled out anti-pipeline leaders for arrest.

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