Corporatism

Before Shooting Of Civilians In Iraq, A Warning On Blackwater

July 3, 2014 James Risen, www.nytimes.com Educate! Blackwater, Corporatism, Corruption, Iraq, Wars and Militarism

Just weeks before Blackwater guards fatally shot 17 civilians at Baghdad’s Nisour Square in 2007, the State Department began investigating the security contractor’s operations in Iraq. But the inquiry was abandoned after Blackwater’s top manager there issued a threat: “that he could kill” the government’s chief investigator and “no one could or would do anything about it as we were in Iraq,” according to department reports. American Embassy officials in Baghdad sided with Blackwater rather than the State Department investigators as a dispute over the probe escalated in August 2007, the previously undisclosed documents show. The officials told the investigators that they had disrupted the embassy’s relationship with the security contractor and ordered them to leave the country, according to the reports. After returning to Washington, the chief investigator wrote a scathing report to State Department officials documenting misconduct by Blackwater employees and warning that lax oversight of the company, which had a contract worth more than $1 billion to protect American diplomats, had created “an environment full of liability and negligence.” “The management structures in place to manage and monitor our contracts in Iraq have become subservient to the contractors themselves,” the investigator, Jean C. Richter, wrote in an Aug. 31, 2007, memo to State Department officials.

Dear Libertarians: The Radical Violent Revolutionaries Are Winning

July 2, 2014 Dennis Trainor Jr, www.PopularResistance.org Resistance Report Corporatism, Democracy, Government, Resistance Report, Wars and Militarism

This may be a shock to those who have heard me say, in some of me less than kindler, gentler moments, that Libertarians are Ayn Randian Regressives who more often that not parrot faux liberty talking points literally spoon fed them by some Koch Brothers inspired think tank, talking points that in fact serve as a pillar that upholds the empire of the ruling elite even as they espouse to tear it down. The truth is, however this view ignores the fact that on the surface, we agree on many issues- Libertarians and I. While the two party duopoly spins a narrative that wants us to believe that we are on opposite sides of a linear spectrum, outliers, freaks, a fringe minority, the fact is that those in all 3 branches of government represent a ruling class whose worldview and means of pursuing it are in fact the minority view, the radical, fringe view. The radical violent revolutionaries are already in power.

American Revolutionaries | Acronym TV 009

July 2, 2014 Dennis Trainor Jr, www.PopularResistance.org Resistance Report Corporatism, Freedom of Speech and Assembly, Government, Occupy, Police abuse, Protest, Wars and Militarism

Adam Kokesh, who recently served four months in prison in connection with an Independence Day incident in which he videotaped himself loading a shotgun in Freedom Plaza, near the White House, sits down with Dennis to discuss Libertarianism, performance art in protest, and the book he wrote in prison, Freedom. In part 2 of the show, Eleanor Goldfield, the front woman of the band Rooftop Revolutionaries, joins Dennis to discuss the movement to get Money out of Politics, and her new venture Art Killing Apathy.

Supreme Court Backs Koch-Funded Anti-Union Case

July 2, 2014 Mike Hall, www.aflcio.org Educate! Corporatism, Labor, Law, Unions, Worker's Rights

In a 5-to-4 decision today, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Illinois home care workers who benefit from higher wages and better working conditions that their union negotiated for—but who choose not to join—do not have to pay their fair share of the cost of the union’s bargaining for and representation of all workers. Text STRENGTH to 235246 to fight back against these attacks on working families. The suit was filed in 2010 by the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation, an extreme anti-worker group whose funders include billionaires like the Charles Koch Charitable Foundation and the Walton Family [of Walmart] Foundation. But the suit was dismissed first by a federal district court and then again on appeal by the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. The Supreme Court agreed to hear it in October. Said AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka: The extreme views of today’s Supreme Court aimed at home care workers aren’t just bad for unions—they’re bad for all workers and the middle class. But the attacks on the freedom of workers to come together are nothing new. They are part of an onslaught from anti-worker organizations hostile to raising wages or improving benefits for millions of people. These attacks are a direct cause of an economy in which middle-class families can’t get a break because their wages have stagnated and their incomes have declined.

Homeowners Still At Risk Of Foreclosure Demand Action

July 1, 2014 Peter Dreier, www.talkingpointsmemo.com Resist! Corporatism, Finance and the Economy, Foreclosure, Housing

The Occupy movement started on Wall Street and now its sibling, the grassroots movement to restore community wealth, has come to New York City. On Wednesday, a broad coalition of community activists joined with four allies on the New York City Council to draw attention to the epidemic of foreclosures and to call for immediate action to help rescue homeowners who are drowning in debt. At a press conference at City Hall, they released an eye-opening report, Thousands of Homeowners Still Drowning in Underwater Mortgages: How Toxic Loans Keep Fueling Foreclosures and the Need for Eminent Domain, designed to jump-start a campaign to address the problem. The report, sponsored by New York Communities for Change and the Mutual Housing Association of New York, reveals that tens of thousands of New York City homeowners are still at risk of foreclosure, because their mortgages are underwater and the banks aren't providing any relief.

ALEC Serves As A ‘Dating Service’ For Politicians And Corporations

July 1, 2014 NPR, www.npr.org Educate! ALEC, Corporatism, Money As Speech, Politics

A batch of recently leaked to The Guardian has revealed new insights into the goals and finances of the secretive group called ALEC. The American Legislative Exchange Council is a group that brings together state legislators and representatives of corporations. Together, they develop model bills that lawmakers introduce and try to pass in their state legislatures. Through these model bills, ALEC has worked to privatize public education, cut taxes, reduce public employee compensation, oppose Obamacare and resist state regulations to reduce global warming gas emissions. "ALEC is like an incubator of predominantly conservative legislation," Guardian correspondent Ed Pilkington tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross. "The vast majority of the model bills are conservative in their inception and those bills then spread right across America." ALEC is sort of almost a dating service between politicians at the state level, local elected politicians, and many of America's biggest companies. It brings them together much as a dating service would do. It sits them in rooms behind closed doors where three times a year they come together to think about what should be the next wave of state-based legislation and they have presentations from the companies that say what they would like to see done legislatively in states right across America.

Leaked Text Shows Trade Agreements Rolling Back Corporate Regulations

July 1, 2014 Carey L. Biron, www.mintpressnews.com Educate! Corporatism, Free Trade Agreements, Regulation, Wikileaks

A leaked negotiating text is offering the public its first glimpse into global trade negotiations, led by the United States and European Union, for a new agreement on the international trade in services — data services, business services, financial services, insurance and the like. Civil society groups have been expressing concerns since the talks, around what is known as the Trade in Services Agreement, or TISA, began a year ago. Yet because the negotiations have been held in secret, watchdog groups have never been able to base their analyses on anything concrete. Now that they can, many are warning that the results appear to be even more problematic than they expected. “The leaked TISA text is worse than I could have imagined — it’s pretty shocking,” William Waring, a trade expert with Friends of the Earth U.S., a watchdog group, told MintPress News. “It goes to show that Mike Froman, the current U.S. Trade Representative and a wealthy former Wall Street banker, is trying to undercut existing and especially proposed regulatory safeguards put in place in the United States and around the world in response to the 2007 financial panic and the great recession that followed.”

Corporations Gag Whistleblowers To Hide Wrongdoing

July 1, 2014 Scott Higham and Kaley Belval, www.washingtonpost.com Educate! Corporatism, Law, Nuclear Energy, Whistleblowers

In November 2012, the U.S. Department of Energy asked contract employees at the Hanford plutonium processing plant in Washington state to take an unusual oath. The DOE wanted them to sign nondisclosure agreements that prevented them from reporting wrongdoing at the nation’s most contaminated nuclear facility without getting approval from an agency supervisor. The agreements also barred them from using any information for financial gain, a possible violation of federal whistleblower laws, which allow employees to collect reward money for reporting wrongdoing. Donna Busche reluctantly signed the agreement. “It was a gag order,” said Busche, 51, who served as the manager of environmental and nuclear safety at the Hanford waste treatment facility for a federal contractor until she was fired in February after raising safety concerns. “The message was pretty clear: ‘Don’t say anything to anyone, or else.’ ”

Inequality Is Not Inevitable

June 30, 2014 Joseph E. Stiglitz, www.opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com Educate! Bankers, Capitalism, Corporatism, Inequality, Money As Speech, Politics

AN insidious trend has developed over this past third of a century. A country that experienced shared growth after World War II began to tear apart, so much so that when the Great Recession hit in late 2007, one could no longer ignore the fissures that had come to define the American economic landscape. How did this “shining city on a hill” become the advanced country with the greatest level of inequality? One stream of the extraordinary discussion set in motion by Thomas Piketty’s timely, important book, “Capital in the Twenty-First Century,” has settled on the idea that violent extremes of wealth and income are inherent to capitalism. In this scheme, we should view the decades after World War II — a period of rapidly falling inequality — as an aberration. This is actually a superficial reading of Mr. Piketty’s work, which provides an institutional context for understanding the deepening of inequality over time. Unfortunately, that part of his analysis received somewhat less attention than the more fatalistic-seeming aspects.

UN Votes Transnationals Cannot Violate Rights, US Refuses

June 28, 2014 Thalif Deen, www.ipsnews.net Educate! Corporatism, International Law, Transnationals, UN

The United States and the 28-member European Union (EU) have assiduously promoted – and vigourously preached – one of the basic tenets of Western multi-party democracy: majority rules. But at the United Nations, the 29 member states have frequently abandoned that principle when it insists on “consensus” on crucial decisions relating to the U.N. budget – or when it is clearly outvoted in the 193-member General Assembly or its committee rooms. "The division of the votes clearly shows that the countries who are host to a lot of TNCs, such as the EU, as well as Norway and the U.S., are against this proposal." -- Anne van Schaik That’s exactly what happened Thursday at the U.N. Human Rights Council (UNHRC) in Geneva which adopted, by majority vote, a proposal to negotiate a legally-binding treaty to prevent human rights abuses by transnational corporations (TNCs) and the world’s business conglomerates. But following the vote, the United States and the EU, have warned they would not cooperate with an intergovernmental working group (IGWG) which is to be established to lay down ground rules for negotiating the proposed treaty. Stephen Townley, the U.S. representative in the HRC, told delegates: “The United States will not participate in this IGWG, and we encourage others to do the same.”

Young Students’ Solution To Corporate Rule

June 25, 2014 Staff, www.popularresistance.org Educate! Corporatism, Economics, TPP, wealth inequality

Congratulations to the 2014 economics club. After they arranged and completed an interview with former economic hit-man John Perkins, they wrote, directed, filmed and edited a successful submission for the C-SPAN documentary contest. Despite not placing in the C-SPAN competition, they received praise for their work from former assistant secretary of the treasury and editor of the wall st. journal Dr. Paul Craig Roberts, journalist and author Nomi Prins, and investigative journalist James Corbett. They even had requests from citizens in foreign countries to release it in different languages. When this video was brought to our attention, we thought it would be important to share it with our readers. The students explain the current economic and political environment in a clear and concise manner that people of all ages will appreciate. And they put forth a positive solution.

The Pacific Trade Deal, Fast Track, And The 2014 Elections

June 23, 2014 Bill Waren, www.foe.org Educate! Congress, Corporatism, Elections, fast track, TPP

Recently, I had the opportunity to appear with Ian Levitt, the host of The Daily Report on Minnesota radio station KTNF. He is conducting a series of interviews with me regarding the environmental threat posed by legislation that would “fast track” the Trans Pacific Partnership trade agreement and a similar trans Atlantic free trade agreement, which is the early stages of negotiation. The focus of our discussion was the TPP, which appears to be in the final stage of closed-door bargaining among the parties. It is a colossal trade deal in terms of its geographic and economic reach. The participants in the secretive negotiations include Japan, the communist dictatorship of Vietnam, the Sultanate of Brunei (ruled under sharia law), and eight other Pacific nations: a mixed bag in terms of observance of human rights standards, to say the least. The TPP would undercut sensible safeguards related to food safety, financial industry abuses and global warming, among many others. As I told KTNF listeners,, “a long list of special favors to the wealthy and the corporations is in this so-called trade agreement. It’s a Wall Street Bill of Rights.”

Corporate Giants On Trial For Human Rights Abuses

June 22, 2014 Andrea Tognoni, Richard Girard, Diana Aguiar and Monica Vargas, www.stopcorporateimpunity.org Create! Corporatism, Criminal Justice and Prisons, United Nations

Eight transnational corporations, including Shell, Chevron and Glencore, go on trial today in Geneva for human rights violations committed around the world. The cases will be heard in a special session of the Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal organised by the Global Campaign to Dismantle Corporate Power & Stop Impunity at the Maison des Associations between 9 am and 6 pm. Monica Vargas from ODG-Debtwatch in Barcelona, a main organizer of tribunal, stated that “The testimony that we will hear today prove that a binding treaty is sorely needed in order to provide victims of corporate crimes access to justice.” The Tribunal will examine cases that confirm that the United Nations’ present Business and human rights regime, which relies on voluntary guidelines rather than legal obligations, is woefully inadequate to deal with ongoing corporate violations.

Maasai Families Face Eviction As Geothermal Companies Take Land

June 22, 2014 Ben Ole Koissaba, www.intercontinentalcry.org Educate! Climate Change, Corporatism, Energy, Food and Agriculture

Reminiscent of what happened to the Maasai community in Narasha in 2013, Maasai pastoralists in Kedong, Akira and Suswa are glaring at massive evictions arising from a group of concessions awarded to several companies including Hyundai, Toshiba, Sinopec and African Geothermal International (AGIL) for the purposes of developing geothermal projects on the Maasai lands. According to the local communities–who claim ancestry to the land and have filed cases in Kenyan courts– African Geothermal International (AGIL) and Marine Power along with Akira I and Akira II1 have disregarded court injunctions instituted by the Maasai, proceeding to deploy their heavy machinery to their proposed project sites without due diligence or consultations with the local communities. The concession areas, which cover hundreds of thousands of acres, are home to thousands of Maasai pastoralists.

Apartheid In Detroit: Water For Corporations, Not For People

June 20, 2014 Carl Gibson, www.occupy.com Organize! Corporatism, Detroit, Water

Bill and Hillary Clinton were up to their ears in more than $10 million worth of legal debt at the end of Clinton’s tenure as president. Donald Trump was bailed out of four bankruptcies. But Detroit residents are having a basic human right – the access to water – cancelled for being late on bills of $150. In the spring, Detroit’s Emergency Manager Kevyn Orr ordered water shutoffs for 150,000 Detroit residents late on their bills. Orr is an unelected bureaucrat accountable only to Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder, who appointed Orr and several other “emergency managers” in largely poor, black communities like Detroit, Benton Harbor, Flint, and Highland Park, to make all financial decisions on behalf of local elected governments. Orr’s plan will shut off water for 1,500 to 3,000 Detroit residents each week. Neither Orr nor Homrich, the contracting company Orr hired to shut off residents’ water, answered calls for interview requests.

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