CORPORATIONS
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see CORPS 2 are of trump
see isdc arbitration
see bad actor
See ceo/inequality and corp personhood, also industries
4/19 tag crps
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https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/how-big-business-bailed-out-nazis
How Big Business Bailed Out the Nazis
A tragic tale of what can go wrong when profits are entangled with politics.
Ciara Torres Spelliscy
The views expressed are the author’s own and not necessarily those of the Brennan Center for Justice.
Considering the outcome of this year’s presidential primaries, where the best-financed candidates were defeated, I’ve been asked repeatedly whether corporate money in politics really matters. And I’ll grant, corporate money so far mostly gone to losing candidates. But history may give us some greater perspective on how corporate money in politics can prove decisive.
It’s a largely forgotten piece of history, but in 1932 the German Nazi Party was facing financial ruin. How did the Nazis move from being broke to being in control of the German government just a year later? The Nazi Party was bailed out by German industrialists in early 1933.
The industrialists who led the way were two huge German firms, I.G. Farben and Krupp. Leaders of both of companies were among the few civilians who were later charged with war crimes at the Nuremberg Tribunals after World War II. These trials placed the story of their financial and moral support of the Nazis into the historical record. Krupp was a huge arms manufacturer. I.G. Farben was a vast chemical company which made everything from Bayer aspirin to Zyklon B, the poison used in the gas chambers.
According to The Arms of Krupp, the Nazi Party was essentially bankrupt in late 1932. Joseph Goebbels, who would later become the Minister of Propaganda, complained, “[w]e are all very discouraged, particularly in the face of the present danger that the entire party may collapse….The financial situation of the Berlin organization is hopeless. Nothing but debts and obligations.”
Regardless of the party’s financial problems, Hitler was named Chancellor in late January 1933. He called for elections in early March. With less than two weeks left before the vote, Herman Goering sent telegrams to Germany’s 25 leading industrialists, inviting them to a secret meeting in Berlin on February20, 1933. Attending the gathering were four I.G. Farben directors and Krupp chief Gustav Krupp. Hitler addressed the group, saying “private enterprise cannot be maintained in a democracy.” He also told the men that he would eliminate trade unions and communists. Hitler asked for their financial support and to back his vision for Germany.
According to Robert Jackson, the former Supreme Court Justice and chief U.S. prosecutor at Nuremberg, “[T]he industrialists…became so enthusiastic that they set about to raise three million Reichsmarks worth about [$30 million today] to strengthen and confirm the Nazi Party in power.”
Gustav Krupp was the first executive to speak at the Berlin meeting, and pledged one million marks. As the United Nations summarized in a 1949 report, Krupp was a key financier for the Nazi Party, including through his corporation:
It was clear from the evidence that Gustav Krupp embraced Nazism shortly prior to the seizure of power by the Nazi Party and continued his allegiance thereafter.He played an important part in bringing to Hitler’s support other leading industrialists and through the medium of the Krupp firm… from time to time made large scale contributions to the [Nazi] Party Treasury.
Hitler awarded Krupp the title of Fuhrer of Industry later in 1933.
Krupp acted in concert with other businessmen, including the directors of I.G. Farben, then Europe’s largest corporation. I.G. Farben’s full name was Interessen Gemeinschaft Farbenindustrie Aktiengesellschaft which translates to “Community of Interest of the Dyestuffs Industry, Incorporated” or as one of the Nuremburg prosecutors, Josiah DuBois Jr. in his book, The Devil’s Chemists, put it, the name was “like the cross between a service club and Easter eggs.” But what I.G. Farben did with the Nazis was no laughing matter, including using slave labor at a specially-constructed plant at Auschwitz called Monowitz.
In the opening of the tribunal against the directors of I.G. Farben, prosecutor U.S. Gen. Telford Taylor stated: “The indictment accuses these men of major responsibility for visiting upon mankind the most searing and catastrophic war in human history. It accuses them of wholesale enslavement, plunder, and murder.”
At the February meeting, the I.G. Farben executives gave the Nazis 400,000 marks, and a total of 4.5 million marks by the end of 1933, according to The Crime and Punishment of I.G. Farben. This infusion of corporate cash saved the Nazi Party from financial disaster. The rest, as they say, is history — tragic, tragic history.
As the book Hell’s Cartel explains, the history of the German industrialists’ support of Hitler shows “what can go wrong when political objectives and the pursuit of profit become dangerously entwined.” One can only surmise what might have happened if the businessmen had simply said “no” to Hitler that night.
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milton friedman effected transformation max profit for shareholder, but buyback undermines that BS? i just read 5 22 no longer responsible for making a good product, civic responsibility?
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amid the ongoing war in Ukraine and the world’s response to Russian aggression, energy prices have been understandably top-of-mind for both news media and the general public. Gas prices reached another record high on May 10, setting off a new round of cable news coverage that coincided with President Joe Biden’s speech on the same day about his administration’s attempts to arrest inflation.
Although cable news shows covering these stories performed an adequate job of explaining how the price consumers pay at the pump is determined by a range of different factors in a globalized market, they also allowed the fossil fuel industry to escape accountability for its role in raising prices, despite the fact that oil companies are intentionally restraining oil production in order to return record profits for shareholders.
Cable news rarely connected record fossil fuel industry profits to record gas prices
CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC aired a combined 48 segments about record gas prices on May 10, with CNN (23) and Fox (19) airing the majority. Although MSNBC had the fewest segments (6), anchorKaty Tur was the only person across all 48 cable news segments who connected record gas costs with record fossil fuel industry profits.
On the May 10 episode of Katy Tur Reports, she asked Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm about “price gouging” by the fossil fuel industry, saying: “The president said he'll focus on oil companies taking advantage of the situation. The CEO of a major oil company said they saw record prices. Do you see price gouging as part of the problem here?"
[vid ]
this basic context should be part of the broader cable news coverage of gas prices.
Other cable news segments on May 10 took pains to emphasize how the war in Ukraine, European Union sanctions on Russian oil, demand rebound since 2021, and yearly summer trends have contributed to the steep rise in gas prices and could lead to future, record increases.
However, cable news analysis that day almost entirely left out a key driver of high energy prices: the fossil fuel industry.
Although the specific role the industry played in driving the most recent record gas prices is still being puzzled out by economists, Big Oil has been credibly accused by environmental activists of profiteering from economic instability caused by the war in Ukraine. In fact, multiple outlets published stories about record oil company profits just a few days ahead of the breaking news about record gas prices on May 10, including this from Fortune:
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, subsequent sanctions on Russia and the exit of Western oil and gas companies from the country sent prices soaring, and fossil fuel companies are reaping the rewards.
British petroleum company Shell announced their quarterly profits on Thursday, posting a record $9.1 billion in earnings. That’s compared to $6.4 billion in the fourth quarter of 2021.
Although Shell posted the highest profits, other major oil companies also announced major gains.
BP announced it hit $6.2 billion in first quarter earnings, up from the $4.1 billion reported last quarter. French oil major TotalEnergies also reported a $9 billion profit in the first quarter, up 32% from the last quarter of 2021. U.S.-based Chevron reported $6.3 billion in earnings, up from $5.1 billion last quarter.
A Time magazine article published May 11 was even more stark in describing how oil companies plan to use their windfall profits to line their own pockets, instead of making investments to ease the pain at the pump:
For the most part, major oil companies aren’t going to pour these billions of dollars into climate-mitigation investments like carbon capture technologies. Nor have they signaled any immediate intention to bolster oil production, despite calls from heads of state to do so. Their inaction has spurred U.S. and European countries, which are under pressure to keep fuel affordable, to release oil reserves and replace Russian crude oil and liquid natural gas from other sources. Despite those government efforts, oil prices have stayed above $100 per barrel, sustaining an influx of money to fossil fuel companies that are passing it on to stockholders and investors in the form of increased dividends and share buyback initiatives that drive up companies’ share values.
One analysis from the Wall Street Journal found that the nine largest U.S. oil producers spent 54% more in share repurchases and dividends in the first quarter than they invested in new oil developments. Similarly, a recent report covering the 20 largest U.S. oil companies published by the environmentalist organization Friends Of The Earth and consumer watchdog organizations Public Citizen and BailoutWatch, tallied $56 billion in new share buyback authorizations in the roughly seven months since last October, compared with $11 billion announced in the nine months before that.
Not only is the fossil fuel industry dragging its feet on actions that could potentially alleviate high energy costs for American consumers, but it also continues to profit from the global instability caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. In fact, the industry has a long and sordid history of exacerbating geopolitical conflicts for its own profit.
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https://www.c-span.org/video/?466960-1/after-words-steven-greenhouse
after Words with Steven Greenhouse
Steven Greenhouse talked about his book, Beaten Down, Worked Up: The Past, Present, and Future of American Labor, on the challenges facing American workers. He was interviewed by Representative Andy Levin (D-MI).
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Nestlé is trying to crush a tiny town of less than 2,000 people. All to keep sucking their most precious resource -- water.
Right now, Nestlé is pumping 250 gallons of water a minute or more than 350,000 gallons every single day from Osceola Township. Bottling it up, and selling it off for massive profit. And guess how much Nestlé pays?
Just $200 a year. Yes, you read that right.
But the community of Osceola is fighting back: it’s gearing up to appeal a court decision that outrageously let Nestlé take more water from the tiny township.
This tiny community is up against the might of Nestlé. Its legal costs are spiralling and Nestlé is still trying to bully it into backing down.
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https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/corporations-may-take-credit-environmental-action-their-lobbying-shows-true-story
Today most large companies like Exxon Mobil, Ford and GM issue slick reports extolling their efforts to conserve resources, use renewable energy or fund clean water supplies in developing countries. This emphasis on efforts to curb environmental harm while benefiting society is called corporate sustainability.
Once uncommon but now mainstream, this show of support for a greener and kinder business model might seem like a clear step forward. But many of these same companies are quietly using their political clout, often through industry trade associations, to block or reverse policies that would make the economy more sustainable. And because public policy raises the bar for entire industries, requiring that all businesses meet minimum standards, lobbying to block sound public policies can outweigh the positive impact from internal company initiatives.
This kind of corporate hypocrisy – what we calltalking green while lobbying brown – is a form of greenwashing, in which companies trumpet their good deeds while hiding their efforts to block progress. As the past and present presidents of the Alliance for Research on Corporate Sustainability, we are concerned that this greenwashing may delay by years or even decades steps that might solve sustainability problems, such as slowing the pace of climate change or ending the ocean plastic pollution crisis.
Sounding good yet lacking impact
We and our colleagues in the alliance have documented many business initiatives that fall short of the impact they claim. One of the best known was the chemical industry’s **Responsible Careprogram, created after an explosion at Union Carbide’s plant in Bhopal, India,killed thousands of people in 1984. Strategy professors Andy King and Mike Lenox showed that participants actually made less progress in reducing their emissions of toxic chemicals than did nonparticipants. That prompted the industry to overhaul the program.
Or consider the Climate Challenge program. The Energy Department created this now-defunct partnership between business and government to encourage electric utilities to voluntarily reduce their greenhouse gas emissions. When one of us teamed up with Management Professor Maria Montes-Sancho to evaluate its track record, we found that there was no difference overall between participants and non-participants in their emissions reductions.
Both of thesevoluntary initiatives failed to solve environmental problems, so why were they created?
In the case of Responsible Care, chemical industry documents show that one of the program’s main goals was preempting tighter regulations. Likewise, public statements the electric utility industry and the Energy Department made indicate that they formed Climate Challenge to stave off new regulations.
Even though these and other voluntary initiatives accomplish little of substance, they help call attention to the good steps industries appear to be taking instead of the environmental damage they are causing – which is exactly how greenwashing works.And following the Trump administration’s plan to spike the Clean Power Plan, a federal rule that would have limited air pollution from power, utilities have essentially avoided federal climate regulation to date.
Talking green while lobbying brown
As we and our colleagues explain in an upcoming article in the business journal California Management Review, it is easy to get away with greenwashing in part because it’s hard to detect what companies lobby for in the U.S., as there is no requirement to disclose the positions they espouse.
“Despite the statements emitted from oil companies’ executive suites about taking climate change seriously and supporting a price on carbon, their lobbying presence in Congress is 100 percent opposed to any action,” Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, a Rhode Island Democrat, lamented in Harvard Business Review.
Exxon Mobil’s hypocrisy may not be surprising given the company’s long history of funding climate deniers. However, it is far from alone in talking green while lobbying brown. Indeed, even companies with much stronger records on sustainability than Exxon do this, often through industry trade groups.Exxon Mobil has clearly engaged in this doubletalk. The corporation declared in its 2016 Corporate Citizenship Report that “climate change risks warrant action by businesses, governments and consumers, and we support the Paris Agreement as an effective framework for addressing this global challenge.” Yet the nonprofit group InfluenceMap recently found that Exxon was one of the top three global corporations in lobbying against effective climate policy.
For example, Ford said in its 2017 sustainability report that “we know climate change is real, and we remain committed to doing our part to address it by delivering on CO2 reductions consistent with the Paris Climate Accord.” GM’s sustainability report stated that “General Motors is the only automaker on the 2017 Dow Jones Sustainability Index for North America, and is also on the World Index.”
Yet as Alliance for Automotive Manufacturers members, Ford and GM both lobbied the Trump administration to weaken fuel economy standards – a strong tool for reducing vehicle emissions.
More political transparency needed....
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ref
carbon top 50:
https://influencemap.org/report/Corporate-Carbon-Policy-Footprint-4274a464677481802bd502ffff008d74
New research from UK think tank InfluenceMap identifies the 50 companies most influential in shaping climate and energy policy around the world. Some of these (like ExxonMobil) are in opposition while others (like Apple and Unilever) are championing ambitious national-level policy to support their decarbonization plans. All, as major corporations, play a major role in policy-making globally both directly and through their trade associations, the research finds.
Estimating the impact a company has on climate change purely based on its greenhouse gas emissions may be incomplete, according to research. For some companies an equally, if not more, important impact could be their influencing of climate-related public discourse and policy from governments around the world. This may be the case for the politically powerful oil majors. For example, last month Harvard researchers found that ExxonMobil has misled the public over multiple decades on climate, a factor not currently reflected in mainstream financial climate metrics.
- 35 of these of the 50 most influential are actively lobbying against climate policy. They include companies in the fossil fuel value chain, heavy energy users, electric utilities with large amounts of coal generating capacity.
- On the other side, 15 of the 50 most influential are pushing for an ambitious climate policy agenda, favouring renewable power and electric vehicles. They include signatories to the RE100 initiative committing to buying 100% renewable power and renewable energy generators.
InfluenceMap's research shows the group of active and pro-climate companies has expanded noticeably in the last two years since the Paris Accord and the 2016 US election. This trend will likely continue as more large corporations around the world make the case to governments for an ambitious and consistent climate-related policy pathway to help them meet their decarbonisation goals cost effectively.]
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non-compete // indentured, union hist
http://www.alternet.org/labor/indentured-servitude-returns-america
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https://www.stopcorporateabuse.org/
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http://www.alternet.org/environment/fortune-500-companies-tell-trump-dont-abandon-paris-climate-agreement
First, it was a full-page ad in The New York Times signed by companies such as Apple, Morgan Stanley and Unilever. Then came the letter from 214 institutional investors with a combined $15 trillion in assets. By May 9, Tiffany & Co. had tweeted a message of support, in its signature robin's egg blue.
"We're still in," began the famed jeweler's campaign to back the Paris climate agreement.
imgBrokered in its namesake city in 2015 to establish global emissions-reduction targets and limit rising average temperatures, the Paris Agreement is one of many Obama-era efforts in the crosshairs for U.S. President Donald Trump. It's a stance that's not going over well with some Fortune 500 companies, financiers, investors and others who say the U.S. should be doing more to expedite the growth of clean energy and other low-carbon technologies in order to mitigate the impacts of climate change.On May 9, the groups got their wish— for now—when White House spokesman Sean Spicer announced that the president had postponed his decision until after the G7 summit, slated for May 26-27 in Italy.
"We hear reports coming from inside the White House about the division among the administration," said Edward Cameron, managing director at BSR, and head of policy for corporate climate advocacy consortium We Mean Business, which formed in the run-up to the COP21 United Nations climate talks that produced the Paris Agreement; BSR is a member of the coalition. "It's very, very difficult to gauge who has the upper hand."
Although many businesses vocally supporting the Paris Agreement have been buying renewable energy or backing environmental causes for years, the at-times confusing back and forth over the future of U.S. involvement in global climate goals is no routine matter. In addition to the U.S. being a key funder of the $100 billion-a-year global climate fund planned to mitigate impacts in developing countries, those urging Trump not to back out of the deal say that the administration risks undermining its broader credibility as a political and economic powerhouse.
"The sad fact is that the Trump administration is isolating itself from the mainstream," said Aron Cramer, president and CEO of BSR. "It's isolating itself from the national security community. It's isolating itself from the business community. It's isolating itself from investors, and it's isolating itself from scientific consensus."
How we got here, though, hasn't always been easy to follow. The administration's approach to the Paris deal has shifted several times in recent days—to say nothing of other simmering environmental concerns, such as protection for federal land or funding for climate data collection.
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TRUMP:
http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/president-trumps-corporate-government
100 days into Corporate Government.
While giant corporations have for decades and on a bipartisan basis exerted far too much influence over government decision-making, we’ve never seen anything like the Trump administration.
The key officials in the federal government, starting with the president himself, come from Big Business; the administration openly seeks guidance and direction from giant corporations and corporate CEOs on policymaking; and the Trump administration is rushing to deliver subsidies, tax breaks and deregulatory gifts to the giant corporations to which the administration apparently owes its primary allegiance.
A day-by-day review of the administration’s first 100 days in office shows that virtually every day there has been a new, extraordinary grant of power to corporate interests and/or another development in Donald Trump’s get-rich-quick-scheme known as the American presidency.
America has never seen anything like this.
The corporate capture began at the same moment as the Trump presidency. Corporations that have pending business before the president — AT&T, Bank of America, Boeing, Chevron, Deloitte, JPMorgan Chase and United Parcel Service – were among the top funders of the inauguration and surrounding festivities. Giant companies and billionaires heaped more than $100 million on the festivities.
New President Trump immediately signaled his intent to deliver on the corporate wish list by signing two executive orders, one designed to start the process of destroying the Affordable Care Act and another freezing all regulatory activity for 90 days.
It’s been downhill since then.
President Trump has assembled what is probably the least qualified and certainly most corporate cabinet of all time. By way of reminder, this list includes: the former CEO of Exxon Mobil (Rex Tillerson, Secretary of State); a slew of former Goldman Sachs executives, so much so that the factions fighting for control of the administration each hail from Goldman Sachs (chief strategist Steve Bannon and top economic advisor Gary Cohn); a banker known as the Foreclosure King to run the Department of Treasury (Steven Mnuchin), an Amway heiress and Republican megadonor (Betsy DeVos); and a former state attorney general who allowed the fossil fuel industry to draft letters on attorney general letterhead on multiple occasions (Scott Pruitt, Environmental Protection Agency).
Having a corporate cabinet has apparently not satisfied Trump’s yen to hang out with the corporate elite. Trump started his first full weekday in office with a breakfast meeting with CEOs of a dozen corporations, and the meetings continue at a staggering pace. Trump is meeting with more than two CEOS every day, on average. These extraordinary gatherings, which have the explicit purpose of providing a way for Big Business to shape the administration’s policies, are supplemented by the president’s more casual interactions with corporate leaders at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Fla., where the membership fee is now $200,000.
Many of the gatherings reflect the administration’s interest in giving special consideration to the views of specific corporate sectors, such as airlines, health insurance corporations, pharmaceutical corporations, and theautomotive industry. One of every five of the corporate executives who met with the Trump administration within the first 100 days represented the banking or financial sector.
It’s not just meetings and personnel. The Trump administration is off to a roaring start on delivering the goodies to Big Business.
It has taken care of its Dirty Energy friends. By executive order, Trump overturned Obama measures to block the Keystone and Dakota Access Pipelines. A few days later, the Army Corps of Engineers granted Energy Transfer Partners the final permit it needs to complete the Dakota Access Pipeline. It has also put in place measures to speed approval of other pipelines and fossil fuel projects, and is expected in the coming days to announce measures to upend the Environmental Protection Agency.
In March, Trump announced a review – plainly aimed to be a roll back – of auto fuel efficiency standards. Just a few years ago, a U.S. government bailout saved the Big Three automakers from utter collapse. The modest reciprocity the government demanded was industry agreement to higher fuel efficiency standards – its most important move to reduce the emission of greenhouse gasses. Now the auto industry and the Trump administration are colluding to abrogate the deal. Consumers will be swindled in the process; the fuel economy rules that Trump is reversing were projected to save Americans up to $5,700 for every car they purchase, and $8,200 for every truck.
Trump has issued an executive order aimed at undoing President Obama’s Clean Power Plan – his signature effort to reduce climate pollution from coal powered plants; the administration is debating pulling the United States out of the Paris climate agreement; and administration officials have banned the use of the term “climate change.” EPA Chief Scott Pruitt and his minions are delivering a host of other gifts to polluters, such as inaugural $1 million donor Dow, notably including a refusal to ban a brain-damaging pesticide.
The administration is taking care of its Wall Street friends (meaning those who remain outside the administration). Trump has signed executive orders aimed at unraveling the Dodd-Frank Wall Street reform law (“We expect to be cutting a lot out of Dodd-Frank,” the president told JPMorgan Chase’s CEO Jamie Dimon and other CEOs in January) and repealing an Obama administration Labor Department rule requiring financial advisors to give advice based on their customers’ best interests. The Labor Department rule, if adopted, will save consumers $17 billion a year in rip-off fees and bad advice. Contemplated changes in Dodd-Frank rules, the Wall Street Journal reports, will enable the six biggest banks to return $100 billion of reserves to shareholders. A staggering gift to the shareholders – at the cost of making the financial system far, far more unstable, insecure and prone to another 2008-style meltdown.
Although its prospects are dim, Trump proposed a cruel, sadistic and military-industrial-complex-fawning budget, featuring $54 billion in increased spending on weapons and war, with gouging cuts to spending on everything from environmental protection to Meals on Wheels....
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Since Republicans have spent so long telling their constituents that climate change is not a serious threat, they are in no position to do anything about it in government.
This leaves the Democrats with the responsibility to pass as much legislation to lessen the impact of climate change and deal with its consequences. Since Republicans insist on vetoing nearly all legislation concerning the threat, it is likely that if Hillary Clinton is elected, she will have to follow Obama's footsteps and implement policy through executive actions.
Conservative media and politicians may not be the only reasons why Americans are so divided about the climate: Corporate groups are also hedging their bets and throwing investment behind both sides, an investigation by Reuters found.
Some of the country's most vocal corporate supporters of Obama's environmental programs have been found to be funding some of the most ardent anti-climate change politicians in Washington. Among these companies are PepsiCo, Dupont and Google, Reuters said on Tuesday.
Though companies often split their campaign donations to both parties, arguing for both sides of a particular issue may be a problem, the head of the Investor Responsibility Research Center Institute Jon Kukomnik told Reuters.
"There really needs to be a process that looks at these issues … at C-suite and board levels on a periodic basis," he said.
Of the 35 biggest U.S. companies which signed on to Obama's American Business Act on Climate Change Pledge last year, 25 of these companies are supporting Congressional climate deniers by helping to fund their campaigns.
These climate deniers include North Dakota Republican Congressman Kevin Cramer, who once argued the Earth was getting cooler and not warmer, and Oklahoma Republican Sen. Jim Inhofe, who once held up a snowball in the Senate to prove that global warming is not occurring.
Other companies which signed the environmental pact and then gave political donations to climate deniers are Mondelez, Google,AT&T, Verizon and GE.
Only GE responded to Reuters' requests for comment, saying it supports "elected officials based on a wide range of issues." The company insists it has been "outspoken about the need to address climate change."
Sen. Inhofe said businesses might have signed the environmental pact because it appeared politically expedient to do so at that moment.
"These are competitive companies, and the board might have said, 'Look, right now it might be a popular thing to join this, and there's no downside since we're not really committing to anything,'" he said.
However, investors may want companies to be more committed to environmental sustainability, Lauren Compere of Boston Common Asset Management said.
"No company wants to be perceived as espousing progressive climate policies on the one hand, while funding climate deniers on the other," she said.
http://www.ecowatch.com/companies-drive-climate-denial-1998224867.html
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http://www.globalpossibilities.org/stark-new-evidence-on-how-money-shapes-americas-elections/
...
Eccentric gazillionaires or big corporations driving elections?
Their paper closes by examining the notion that right wing politics in America has been driven by donations piling up from eccentric entrepreneurs like investor and conservative mega-donor Foster Friess — the sort of people who are widely imagined to populate the Forbes 400 list of wealthiest Americans – rather than mainline big business corporations, such as those on the Fortune 500 list.
On the contrary, the researchers find that “a simple count of firms and investors on Forbes show that the largest American corporations support Tea Party Congressional candidates and organizations supporting the movement, such as Freedom Works, at much higher rates than Forbes 400 members. Even making due allowances for Dark Money, the difference is substantial.”
Evidently American big business firms are not centrist, as many pundits would have it. As Ferguson and his colleagues put it, “Stories that the steady rightward drift of the American political universe is somehow the work of exceptionally ideological individual entrepreneurs are huge over-simplifications. If the center is not holding in American society — and it rather plainly is not — America’s largest companies are as implicated as anyone else; indeed, perhaps more so.”
This state of affairs explains why economic inequality has grown into a crisis, with social unrest amplified by economic distress. Because of this money-driven system — which has been getting worse since 1970s up to the current dysfunctional mess — when the rich don’t feel like paying taxes, we all suffer. Infrastructure collapses, schoolchildren and sick people suffer, and hard-working citizens are robbed of their fair share of the country’s prosperity and end their lives struggling keep body and soul together....
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https://hightowerlowdown.org/article/shareholder-hegemony/
Reinventing business “ethics”: How corporate honchos gave themselves cover to be as rapacious as they wanna be
February 1, 2016
Shareholder primacy
Attention class! Here’s our word of the day: “Hegemony.” Can you say heh-jeh-meh-nee, boys and girls? The word describes a situation in which some force (a group, a creed, a strongman, an ideology, etc.) becomes the domineering power over a society. Think of a gang of schoolyard bullies. Like them, various kinds of hegemonies have arisen throughout history to rule local, national, and even global “schoolyards,” shoving other interests aside and subordinating the whole community to their will.
Today, we Americans (and indeed, most people around the world) are facing an especially virulent, plutocratic version of this overbearing power. It’s called Shareholder Hegemony.
Cartoon by Brian Duffy
Never heard of it? No surprise. It is rarely mentioned by the mass media, not taught in our schools, and politicians almost never it bring to public attention. Also, it can’t be seen, for it’s not an incarnate hegemony, like an emperor, church, cartel, or occupying army. Rather, it’s an ideological concept, really nothing more than a figment of the corporate imagination. And yet, during the past three decades, it has become the preeminent force shaping everything from economic and political inequality to global climate change and your civil rights.
Shareholder hegemony is a doctrine asserting that the first, foremost, and only moral obligation of corporate executives is to maximize the profits of their shareholders. Absurd? Yes. What about customers, workers, communities, suppliers, the environment, the nation, the common good, and all the other legitimate interests directly impacted by corporate decisions? “Not our problem,” the proponents say, “for our strict duty is to do whatever it takes to make as much money as we can for those who own our stock—everyone else be damned.”
This grotesquely shriveled ethical standard has been fabricated and foisted on us by a tiny group of insiders who comprise what amounts to a cult of Machiavellian corporatists. They number only a few thousand people, including CEOs, board members, in-house lawyers, Wall Street money managers, lobbyists, right-wing think tank ideologues, and business school deans. Yet, collectively, these elites have become the formulators and promulgators of the corporate order that now dominates our nation of 323 million supposedly sovereign people.
The recent ascendancy of corporate supremacy in America is not happenstance. It has come over us incrementally during the past 30 years or so by the deliberate design of moneyed interests. Key to their steady rise has been the corporate cult’s use of rhetorical flimflammery to make our society accept their fantastical “shareholder über alles” tale as something real, something we should believe and adopt as a core governing principle.
Their big breakthrough came in 1970, when their ideological mumbo jumbo received a veneer of academic legitimacy from the University of Chicago’s reigning guru of laissez-faire economics, Milton Friedman. He embraced shareholders-above-all as an absolute truth: “Do corporate executives, provided they stay within the law, have responsibilities in their business activities other than to make as much money for their stockholders as possible?” he asked, before he answered unequivocally, “No, they do not.”
It’s the law
Surely Friedman snickered when he added that sly qualifier “provided they stay within the law.” As we’ve all learned, corporations write the law, routinely dumping millions of dollars a year into lobbyists, lawyers, legislators, and judges to ensure that the definition of what’s legal will stretch like a giant prophylactic over practically any corporate sin.
Indeed, in an amazing demonstration of the cult’s manipulative magic, by the mid-1990s it had elevated its shareholders-first postulation into such widespread public use that it was perceived as law: Enough professors, CEOs, lobbyists, reporters, et al. had repeated the phony notion of shareholder primacy so often and so emphatically that they managed to weasel it into America’s vast and vacuous trove of conventional wisdom.
Not only had they created a lie that wouldn’t die, but they beefed up its hegemonic punch by proclaiming that corporate managers are legally bound to act to harm workers or any others if those actions financially benefit shareholders. Even many progressives were caught up in the powerful riptide of this “legal obligation” excuse. Watchdog Ken Jacobson notes in a 2012 Alternet article that our solidly progressive friend, Sen. Al Franken, hornswoggled by the corporate claim, once declared: “It is literally—literally—malfeasance for a corporation not to do everything it can to maximize its profits. That’s a corporation’s duty to its shareholders.”
Subsidizing malfeasance (with your taxes!)
Headlines periodically blare that this regulator or that has imposed a jaw-dropping assessment on some corporate criminal … [read more]
In fact, there is no legal basis for ranking stock prices and corporate owners above any other interest. No national law requires it, nor does any state law. More tellingly, not even one corporate charter has been found that so much as mentions a duty of executives to increase stock prices to maximize stockholder profits. To the contrary, until the 1970s, when the cultists started pushing their radical (and ridiculous) model of “shareholder capitalism,” a more humble corporate culture preached and practiced “managerial capitalism,” to balance the drive for profits with the needs of various other constituencies. Jacobson cites a 1943 “credo” penned by Robert Wood Johnson, founder of Johnson & Johnson, designating five groups to be served: Customers were first, workers second, managers third, and communities fourth. Shareholders, he declared, were the “fifth and last responsibility” of the company.
Johnson also wrote that, while “business must make a sound profit,” much more is required from corporate executives:
“We must be a good citizen—support good works and charity, and bear our fair share of taxes. We must maintain in good order the property we are privileged to use. We must participate in the promotion of civic improvement, health, education, and good government…”
:{:{}:
In another excellent report on the fallacy of shareholder supremacy, written two years ago for The American Prospect, business journalist Steven Pearlstein noted the abrupt shift that the Business Roundtable had made in its definition of corporate responsibility. In the 1980s, the Roundtable (a lobbying collective for large US corporations and banks) formally recognized the important “symbiotic relationship” that the corporate community enjoys with the larger community from which it benefits. The group publicly acknowledged the “responsibility” of corporations to provide “first of all” quality goods and services at fair prices, as well as providing jobs and building the economy.}:
By 1997, however, the Roundtable’s statement of corporate purpose withered from serving the public good to serving shareholders alone. Singing from Friedman’s one-note hymnal, the group decreed: “The principal objective of a business enterprise is to generate economic returns to its owners.” As for everyone else: Adios, chumps.
"The issue isn't just jobs. Even slaves had jobs. The issue is wages." --Jim Hightower
Follow @HightowerNews
Shareholders made me do it
What we have here is a massive and pernicious corporate fraud, perpetrated in the name of common shareholders, but that is, in fact, aimed at enthroning avaricious corporate executives as America’s true sovereigns. “Shareholder primacy” is nothing but a naked power play, a fictional construct to rationalize the most selfish, anti-social behavior of profiteering corporations.
Want to offshore middle-class jobs? Bust unions? Gouge consumers? Crush small businesses? Swindle poor people? Poison a town’s water or Earth’s climate? Cut your taxes to zero? Abandon communities? Steal elections?
Corporate officials are doing all of these things to us every day, but by enshrouding their devious ploys in the fog of our culture’s conventional wisdom and by inventing the ethical imperative to maximize shareholder profit, they’ve given themselves cover to be as rapacious as they wanna be. “Yes, it has some unfortunate consequences,” the barons say of any particular perfidious act, “but our fiduciary obligation mandates such actions.”
This turns America’s sense of justice topsy-turvy. Prosecutors, legislators, and the media are condoning destructive corporate actions when the “shareholders-made-me-do-it” legal defense isn’t actually in the law.
This is an immoral scam of, by, and for the 1-percenters (and particularly the multi-millionaires dwelling in the rarified air of the top tenth of 1-percenters). The concept of shareholder hegemony is intended to rig the system for them and against middle-class and poor people. For anyone who wonders what’s behind our society’s ever-widening chasm of inequality, here it is: the intellectual framework for imposing corporate and public policies that enrich the few by directly impoverishing the many.
But wait [ALERT: SHOCKING REVELATION COMING UP]–the term shareholder hegemony is itself a fraud. The vast majority of shareholders have no power at all over the decisions of corporate officials. None! Maybe you own a bit of stock through a mutual fund or pension plan, but a mosquito in the boardroom would get more attention from the bosses than you. The idea that shareholders form the bulwark of “corporate democracy” is a hoax. In fact, in 2014, some 45 percent of Americans owned zero stock in any form, and the vast majority of those who do own stocks exercise no control over corporate decisions.
Wear it like you mean it.
Gear for progressive populists in the Lowdown store.
The only shareholders who actually matter are (1) huge institutional investors, (2) manipulative global speculators, and (3) hedge-fund raiders holding billion-dollar stakes in a company. Oh, and there’s one more group that matters most: a corporation’s top executives and board members. Their gluttonous paychecks, bonuses, and perks are almost entirely based on the price of the company’s stock. So their primary financial incentive is to inflate the stock price by any means necessary, including cutting wages, firing workers, hiding profits in Cayman Island tax havens, defrauding small investors, and otherwise jacking up the value of their own stocks by afflicting pain on others.
Thus, “shareholder” hegemony is actually a hegemony of executives, directors, and big investors who are perverting the whole economic system to cause our society’s rivers of income and wealth to flow uphill into their coffers. Adding to the irony, the insiders who promote the fiction of shareholder primacy have simultaneously built walls, moats, and barricades around their fiefdoms to keep shareholders at bay and prevent the putative “owners” of the corporation from having any substantive impact on how, and for whom, it is run. See, for example, how furiously they fight to prevent shareholders from having any say in how much the CEO is paid.
The corporate cult has “fixed” our economic and governing systems in the same sense that veterinarians use the term—they have neutered the rightful power of the people themselves to be sovereign over (or at least to have a meaningful say in) the decisions that affect their lives. So let’s admit where we are: America, the Land of Opportunity, is presently a land ruled by opportunistic plutocrats.
Bosses behaving badly
Corporate World has never been a pristine place. After all, no matter how well manicured a CEO is or what product the corporation is peddling, the work comes down to grubbing for money. Lots
and lots of money. And there have always been rascals at the top willing to run over anyone and any law to grab an extra dollar bill.
But it’s no longer a matter of some rogues in the system skimming, stiffing, and otherwise stealing from workers and customers. The system itself has gone rogue. The self-bestowed imperative to maximize stock prices at all cost has radically warped executive suite ethics, scrapping what Pearlstein calls “norms of behavior that once restrained the most selfish impulses of economic actors.”
THE BRAT. Martin Shkreli, the 32-year-old former CEO of Turing Pharmaceuticals, is such an arrogant, creepy, self-serving narcissist that even Donald Trump called him “a spoiled brat.” Shkreli launched Turing last year, but rather than developing new medicines, he simply bought the rights to Daraprim, a 62-year old, effective treatment for a parasitic disease that can be fatal to fetuses and patients with HIV and cancer. Shkreli’s only improvement to this life-saving drug was to “enhance” the profit he could extract it. How? By abruptlyincreasing its price by 5,000 percent—from $13.50 per pill to $750! Public outrage at this over-the-top greed erupted worldwide, but the brat blithely said that if given a do-over: “I probably would have raised the price higher,” explaining that, “my investors expect me to maximize profits.”
Disgusting, yes, but give Shkreli points for candor. The soulless punk is only doing what the chieftains of most mainline, brand-name corporations are also doing without broadcasting it—namely, supplanting America’s democratic commitment to “we” with their ignoble ethos of “me.” As a result, bad executive behavior is no longer shocking; rather, it’s the ordinariness of corporate nefariousness that is so stunning these days.
Even more stunning than the daily parade of malfeasance is the attitude of Rich People’s Entitlement that fuels it, such as:
Pfizer Pflees America.To dodge paying taxes to the country that has nurtured its success, the drug giant recently moved its corporate domicile to the notorious tax haven of Ireland. Of course, its executives will remain headquartered in the good ol’ USA to take advantage of the tax-supported benefits they enjoy here. It’s a case of Pfizer pfleecing the American people in order to further enrich its big shareholders (which notably include the scurrilous top executives who plotted the scam).
Big Oil Fracks Democracy. Nearly 60 percent of voters in Denton, Texas, supported a 2014 people’s initiative to ban any more drilling of destructive fracking wells in their city limits. No worries, though—last year, Exxon et al. simply got Gov. Greg Abbott and the gutless Texas legislature to suspend democracy by retroactively preempting (think about that convoluted concept!) the right of local citizens to “interfere” with frackers. Abbott, richly funded by Big Oil and other moneyed powers, declared that the state must prevent the people’s democratic authority from infringing on a corporation’s right to profit.
Georgescu to the Rescue! Peter Georgescu, the former head of one of the world’s largest corporate advertising empires, is rallying billionaires to reverse income inequality in America, fearing that “social unrest” could (horror of horrors) lead to “oppressive taxes” on the superrich. To avert that, he proposes that CEOs start paying decent wages. But, alas, he concedes, few will do this, because it would cut into shareholder profits. So Peter, a bold thinker, is a man with a plan to loosen the corporate purse strings: Have government provide subsidies to corporations so they can pay more to workers.
Not COOL. Corporations aren’t called special interests for nothing. When such oligarchic meat packers as Tyson Foods were unable to stop Congress from passing (and our courts from approving) COOL—the country-of-origin labeling law that tells consumers where their meat comes from—they ran off to a very special, corporate-run tribunal set up by the World Trade Organization. Sure enough, this kangaroo court (unavailable to consumers, farmers, and other people’s interests) decreed last year that COOL was a “technical barrier” to free trade, so the US either had to repeal the law or face billions of dollars in trade sanctions. Just before Christmas, Congress and the White House repealed COOL, meekly surrendering to what is, in effect, a corporate claim of sovereignty over the will of the people.
This hegemony of corporate profiteers is crushing the life out our democratic ideals. An ethos of “anything goes” now rules at nearly all major corporations, and those self-enriching princes of plutocracy are extending their unethical and hegemonic control over the rest of us. Greed has taken America’s true ethics prisoner, and moneyed elites now call the devil “partner.” That’s the core immorality that we progressive populists must defeat.
Do something!
Here are two good reads that flesh out the intellectual shenanigans behind the rise of “shareholder hegemony.” Share what you learn with friends and neighbors!
“When Shareholder Capitalism Came to Town,” by Steven Pearlstein, in The American
Prospect (prospect.org). Pearlstein, a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for The Washington Post, traces the notion of shareholder primacy back to its roots—and digs up the fraud.
http://prospect.org/article/when-shareholder-capitalism-came-town
In “The Myth of Shareholder Capitalism,” two business school profs note that in a survey of 34 corporate directors (each of whom sits on an average of six Fortune 200 boards), 31 “said they’d cut down a mature forest or release a dangerous, unregulated toxin into the environment in order to increase profits. Whatever they could legally do to maximize shareholder wealth, they believed it was their duty to do.” The authors decry, “the election of directors who, frankly, don’t know what their legal duties are.” Nor their moral ones
https://hbr.org/2010/04/the-myth-of-shareholder-capitalism
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see rfk2/koch4
The crowd roared. But Kennedy wasn’t finished yet.
“These are the apocalyptical forces of ignorance and greed. These are the four horsemen from the book of Revelations herding humanity toward a dystopian nightmare of their creation. Koch Industries is not a benign corporation. It’s a suicide pact for creation. It’s the archetype of ‘disaster capitalism.’ It’s the command center of an organized scheme to undermine democracy and impose a corporate kleptocracy that will allow these greedy men to cash in on mass extinction and the end of civilization.”
Kennedy went on to explain, “These men claim in their rhetoric to embrace a theology of free market capitalism. But if you look at their feet instead of listening to the seductive noises that issue from their mouths and their phony think tanks, the truth is clear. These men hate free markets. They want a system of cushy socialism for the rich and a savage, merciless capitalism for the poor. The real purpose of their ‘think tanks’ they created and fund—like the Heritage Foundation and the CATO Institute—is not to promote free market capitalism, but to gin up the philosophical underpinnings for a scheme of uncontrolled corporate profit taking. And the press, consolidated as it is into private monopolies, and relieved of social obligation are on the carbon and pharma pay role and in full cahoots with the scheme. They don’t love markets—they despise them. The Koch Brothers’ purpose in purchasing our political system is to engineer monumental subsidies and market failure, which are their formulae for profit. And the winds, the storms, the floods, the heatwaves, the fires and the melting continents that they cause, the cities that they drown, the refugees they drive from their lands all provide new opportunities for profit and authoritarian control.”
Kennedy shared a story about the commercial fisheries on the Hudson River, among the oldest commercial fisheries in North America. He began his career as an environmental lawyer representing these fishing families. He explained how the fisheries regulated themselves as a sustainable industry for more than three centuries.
“The fishermen had a business model that worked,” he said. But then General Electric “used its political clout to cheat the free market and to arrange vast subsidies for itself by externalizing its costs and dumping its toxins into the river. In this way, GE privatized the fish in the Hudson River. New York’s constitution says that we, the people of New York State, own the waterways of the state and we own the fish in the Hudson. But we don’t own them anymore. The General Electric Company owns every fish in the river because they privatized them. They put their toxins in our fish and our cash in their pockets.
“While we own to fish legally, we can’t use them. GE has liquidated a public asset for cash and profit. All those men and women who made their living on the river and lived decent lives—they are all out of work and out of luck and General Electric has liquidated their assets and their livelihoods for corporate profit.”
He went on to explain; “Now the coal industry has done the exact same thing to every freshwater fish in America.” The National Academy of Science found dangerous levels of mercury in every American freshwater fish. The mercury is mainly coming from coal fired power plants. Since there is no known safe level for mercury consumption, the fish are no longer suitable for public consumption and are effectively privatized. “King Coal has privatized every fish in America by putting toxic mercury in every filet,” he said.
“Whether we recognize it or not, we are all locked in a life and death struggle with these corporations over control of our landscapes and political sovereignty,” Kennedy said. “If a foreign nation did to our country what the coal and oil barons do every day, we would consider it an act of war! They poison our rivers and aquifers, steal our fish, flood our cities and trample our democracy. They are pilfering our values, robbing our culture, impoverishing our lives, sickening our children and stupefying our minds with pollution. They subvert our heritage by privatizing our patrimony. They are turning America into a colonial economy.
“Under the colonial model multinational corporations exploit weak political systems to commoditize and privatize a nation’s resources. A robust democracy would never allow a foreign company to plunder the nation’s natural resources, poison her landscapes and subjugate her people. So colonialism requires the multinationals to weaken and capture the indigenous political system of the target nation. They do so by making alliances with local oligarchs with military and intelligence apparatus and conservative religious organizations and buying off the media. All these indigenous elites get a share of the profits in exchange for allowing the theft of their country’s resources. Pollution is not just theft—it is treason. The Koch brothers are not just America’s biggest polluters—they are thieves and they are traitors to our country and their crimes against America and humanity have made them the richest men on Earth.
“The colonial model results in the evolution of an upper class with massive wealth and political power, the elimination of the middle class and the exponential increase of an impoverished class who eke a declining meagre living from the barren polluted moonscapes left behind by greed and pollution. And, when you have a wealthy class and a poor class and no middle class, you get extreme political division. The role of one political party devolves into a single minded mission of protecting the perks and power of the wealthy class and the rights of corporations to rape the land and enslave the people.”
This is why, as Kennedy explained, we have another precedented divide between Democratic and Republican parties in this country. Since tax breaks for billionaires and unregulated pollution are not potent vessels for populism, the corporate kleptocracy must steal elections, eliminate poor voters from the rolls, lie about the issues and employ propaganda and all the lowest alchemies of demagoguery, including appeals to religious and patriotic symbols and dividing the electorate using bigotry, greed, and racial and religious prejudices—the “wedge” or “cultural war issue,” according to Kennedy.
Even using these techniques, as Kennedy says, the policies they advocate are so viscerally unpopular that their hold on the voting public is always remaining tenuous. “Politics,” Kennedy explained “Is driven by both money and political intensity. Since they don’t have reliable ground troops, they must overwhelm the system with their money.” For this reason, “The hostile takeover of our democracy by polluting corporations and our country’s transition into a colonial economy is completely reliant on the financial floodgates opened by Citizens United.”
To further make his point, Kennedy said, “So you have the Koch’s who have deployed their front group ALEC—American Legislative Exchange Council—in every state working with local legislators in the anti-American enterprise of impeding the transition to new energy by bribing and blackmailing politicians to weaken support for wind and solar and foster a hostile environment toward renewables.
“The Koch brothers understand that renewables are good for the economy, good for our security and good for democracy. They create high paying jobs, promote small businesses, create wealth, democratize our energy sector, give us local, resilient power and reduce dependence on foreign carbon that makes them for the country, but bad for the Koch brothers.
“Renewables fill the Koch brothers with fear. In order to compete, they have to rig the rules that govern energy in this country to favor the dirtiest, filthiest, most destructive, most poisonous and addictive fuels from hell over the cheap, clean, green, local and patriotic fuels from heaven. But even with market and utility rules against them, new renewable technologies are so efficient that the allow wind and solar to beat the carbon industry even in their rigged markets and slanted playing fields—the only way for carbon to survive is by massive subsidies. The Koch brothers cannot compete against renewables in a free market without their subsidies.”
A recent report by the International Monetary Fund said, global energy subsidies amounts to $5 trillion annually, with the U.S. providing $700 billion in subsidizes to big oil “the richest industry in the history of the planet,” remarks Kennedy.
“Why would we be doing that?” he asks. “The only reason we’d give subsidies to a century old industry with the biggest profits in human history is because the oil barons own our government. There is no economic reason. Carbon’s economic model is looking at the same bleak future as the horse and buggy industry faced in 1903. So what do you do when your profits rely on a fading economic model? You use your money and use the campaign finance system that consists of legalized bribery to get your hooks into a public official who allows you to privatize the commons, dismantle the market place and rig the rules to give you monopoly control,” Kennedy explained.
Free market capitalism is the most powerful economic engine ever devised. But, according to Kennedy, it must be harnessed to a social purpose, as it will drag us down the path of political oligarchy and environmental destruction. Free market rules should allow people to make themselves rich by doing good things for humanity. But under the Koch’s scheme, oilmen get rich by dong bad things to humanity, he said.
Corporations are a useful economic tool. However, “corporations should not be running our government because they don’t want the same thing for America as Americans want,” he continued. “They don’t want democracy. They want profits. They want no competition. They are corrupting our democracy. They are stealing everything that we care about in this country.
“I believe in a true free market where you can’t make yourself rich without making your neighbors rich and without enriching your community, where we properly value our national resources and where we reward efficiency. But polluters make themselves rich by making everybody else poor. They raise standards of living for themselves while lowering quality of life for everybody else. They undervalue natural resources or take them for free. And they do it all by escaping the discipline of the free market. Polluters externalize their costs to artificially lower the price of their product. The 28 environmental laws that we passed after the first Earth Day in 1970 were intended to restore true free market capitalism by forcing actors in the marketplace to pay the true cost to bring their product to market. There is a huge difference between true free market capitalism—which makes a nation more efficient, more prosperous and more democratic—and the kind of corporate crony capitalism which we have today.”
==
Robert Reich: Why Americans Are Screwed and Europeans Are Not
By Robert Reich [1] / Robert Reich's Blog
March 15, 2015
The U.S. economy is picking up steam but most Americans aren’t feeling it. By contrast, most European economies are still in bad shape, but most Europeans are doing relatively well.
What’s behind this? Two big facts.
First, American corporations exert far more political influence in the United States than their counterparts exert in their own countries.
In fact, most Americans have no influence at all. That’s the conclusion of Professors Martin Gilens of Princeton and Benjamin Page of Northwestern University, who analyzed [2] 1,799 policy issues — and found that “the preferences of the average American appear to have only a miniscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy.”
Instead, American lawmakers respond to the demands of wealthy individuals (typically corporate executives and Wall Street moguls) and of big corporations – those with the most lobbying prowess and deepest pockets to bankroll campaigns.
The second fact is most big American corporations have no particular allegiance to America. They don’t want Americans to have better wages. Their only allegiance and responsibility is to their shareholders — which often requires lower wages to fuel larger profits and higher share prices.
When GM went public again in 2010, it boasted [3] of making 43 percent of its cars in place where labor is less than $15 an hour, while in North America it could now pay “lower-tiered” wages and benefits for new employees.
American corporations shift their profits around the world wherever they pay the lowest taxes. Some are even morphing into foreign corporations.
As an Apple executive told [4] the New York Times, “We don’t have an obligation to solve America’s problems.”
I’m not blaming American corporations. They’re in business to make profits and maximize their share prices, not to serve America.
But because of these two basic facts – their dominance on American politics, and their interest in share prices instead of the wellbeing of Americans – it’s folly to count on them to create good American jobs or improve American competitiveness, or represent the interests of the United States in global commerce.
By contrast, big corporations headquartered in other rich nations are more responsible for the wellbeing of the people who live in those nations.
That’s because labor unions there are typically stronger than they are here — able to exert pressure both at the company level and nationally.
VW’s labor unions, for example, have a voice in governing the company, as they do in other big German corporations. Not long ago, VW even welcomed [5] the UAW to its auto plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee. (Tennessee’s own politicians nixed it.)
Governments in other rich nations often devise laws through tri-partite bargains involving big corporations and organized labor. This process further binds their corporations to their nations.
Meanwhile, American corporations distribute a smaller share of their earnings to their workers than do European or Canadian-based corporations.
And top U.S. corporate executives make far more money than their counterparts in other wealthy countries.
The typical American worker puts in more hours than Canadians and Europeans, and gets little or no paid vacation or paid family leave. In Europe, the norm [6] is five weeks paid vacation per year and more than three months paid family leave.
And because of the overwhelming clout of American firms on U.S. politics, Americans don’t get nearly as good a deal from their governments as do Canadians and Europeans.
Governments there impose higher taxes on the wealthy and redistribute more of the wealth to middle- and lower-income households. Most of their citizens receive essentially free healthcare and more generous unemployment benefits than do Americans.
So it shouldn’t be surprising that even though U.S. economy is doing better, most Americans are not.
The U.S. middle class is no longer the world’s richest. After considering taxes and transfer payments, middle-class incomes in Canada and much of Western Europe are higher [7] than in the U.S. The poor in Western Europe earn more than do poor Americans.
Finally, when at global negotiating tables – such as the secretive process devising the “Trans Pacific Partnership” trade deal — American corporations don’t represent the interests of Americans. They represent the interests of their executives and shareholders, who are not only wealthier than most Americans but also reside all over the world.
Which is why the pending Partnership protects the intellectual property of American corporations — but not American workers’ health, safety, or wages, and not the environment.
The Obama administration is casting the Partnership as a way to contain Chinese influence in the Pacific region. The agents of America’s interests in the area are assumed to be American corporations.
But that assumption is incorrect. American corporations aren’t set up to represent America’s interests in the Pacific region or anywhere else.
What’s the answer to this basic conundrum? Either we lessen the dominance of big American corporations over American politics, or we increase their allegiance and responsibility to America.
It has to be one or the other. Americans can’t thrive within a political system run largely by big American corporations — organized to boost their share prices but not boost America.
Robert B. Reich has served in three national administrations, most recently as secretary of labor under President Bill Clinton. He also served on President Obama's transition advisory board. His latest book is "Aftershock: The Next Economy and America's Future." His homepage is www.robertreich.org [8].
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Source URL: http://www.alternet.org/economy/robert-reich-why-americans-are-screwed-and-europeans-are-not
Links:
[1] http://www.alternet.org/authors/robert-reich-0
[2] http://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/mgilens/files/gilens_and_page_2014_-testing_theories_of_american_politics.doc.pdf
[3] http://www.gm.com/content/dam/gmcom/COMPANY/Investors/Corporate_Governance/PDFs/StockholderInformationPDFs/Annual-Report.pdf
[4] http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/22/business/apple-america-and-a-squeezed-middle-class.html?_r=0
[5] http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/storyline/wp/2014/11/19/the-strange-case-of-the-anti-union-union-at-volkswagens-plant-in-tennessee/
[6] http://20somethingfinance.com/american-hours-worked-productivity-vacation
[7] http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/23/upshot/the-american-middle-class-is-no-longer-the-worlds-richest.html?abt=0002&abg=0
[8] http://www.robertreich.org
[9] mailto:corrections@alternet.org?Subject=Typo on Robert Reich: Why Americans Are Screwed and Europeans Are Not
[10] http://www.alternet.org/
[11] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B
==
HISTORY:
1580 Drake Expedition, QE main backer, 5K% ROI
1600 East India Company, private armies, famine, opium
1681 Monopoly on Tea
1773 Tea Party; 90K pounds (24 million cups), $1 million today.
Thomas Jefferson wanted “ freedom from monopolies in commerce” in the Bill of Rights
Lincoln worried concentrated corporate wealth could threaten the republic (letter to Col. Elkins 1854)
==
Founders Limited:
Limited time (often ten years)
Limited purpose (for example, build a canal)
Public good
Charter can impose rules (no interlocking directorates)
All shareholders had a equal vote
Director could be removed
Revocation if not doing a good job
===
AlterNet [1] / By Alex Henderson [2]
10 Corporate Behemoths Stifling Competition and Delivering Awful Service to You
April 24, 2014 |
One of the fundamentals of free-market capitalism is that consumers benefit when competition is plentiful. If a business is selling a weak or inferior product, consumers can turn to the competition for a better deal. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt understood that, which is why a key element of his New Deal was the anti-trust, anti-monopoly legislation of the 1930s. Roosevelt firmly believed that large companies should be forced into a competitive environment whether they liked it or not, and that belief served the U.S. well for many years. But in recent decades, a variety of corporate lobbyists, far-right Republicans and neoliberal Democrats have shredded the New Deal and undermined anti-trust laws—thus encouraging corporations to grow larger and larger and engage in monopolistic practices.
Here are 10 mammoth corporations that detest free-market competition and do everything they can to stamp it out or greatly reduce it.
1. Comcast
When Comcast acquired Greater Media’s cable TV operations in Philadelphia in 1999 and gained over 250,000 new cable television customers in the East Coast’s second largest city (thus expanding its Mid-Atlantic customer base to more than 2 million at that point), consumer rights advocates feared that the company was growing too large. But Comcast is a much larger company than it was 15 years ago: it has since acquired major companies ranging from NBC Universal to AT&T Broadband, and if the proposed Comcast/Time Warner Cable merger [3] goes through, Comcast will have at least 30 million cable customers and an estimated 38% of the U.S.’ broadband customers. Despite being infamous for its poor customer service, Comcast keeps growing bigger and bigger, which is a reflection of its mammoth lobbying budget. Comcast spent $18.8 million on lobbying in 2013, and many politicians (both Republicans and Democrats) are afraid to challenge its monopolistic practices and force the company into genuine free-market competition.
Harming net neutrality will only add to the already-unfair advantage that telecom giants like Comcast and Verizon enjoy. Tom Wheeler, the new head of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), is a former lobbyist for the telecom industry—which, arguably, is a conflict of interest—and now, the FCC itself is undermining net neutrality [4] by accepting the idea that ISPs can ask content providers to pay for preferential treatment.
2. Monsanto
Founded in 1901, the Monsanto Corporation has been in business for 113 years. Monsanto’s size has increased considerably along the way, and these days, it is a corporate bully that doesn’t hesitate to throw its weight around. Now the world’s dominant provider of controversial GMO (genetically modified organism) seeds, Monsanto has been quite aggressive about suing farmers for unauthorized use of its seeds—even if the farmer never intended to become a Monsanto customer. Percy Schmeiser (a canola farmer in Saskatchewan, Canada) was sued by Monsanto [5] for a patent violation after GMO seeds from a neighbor’s canola plants drifted onto his land. Schmeiser has complained that Monsanto made it impossible for him to continue with his canola strain because he can’t prove his canola plants are Monsanto-free. Meanwhile, organic farmers have complained that because Monsanto’s GMO seeds are so ubiquitous in the U.S., it has become much harder for them to maintain organic standards. Monsanto hates competition, and its strong-arm tactics with Schmeiser and other farmers bear that out.
3. Blue Cross
During the healthcare reform debate of 2009 and 2010, Blue Cross and other health insurance giants used their lobbying muscle to make certain that the outcome—whether it was one favored by Democrats, Republicans or the Tea Party—would be more favorable to corporate profits than to consumers. Republicans and the Tea Party wanted to maintain the status quo, while some of the more liberal/progressive Democrats favored a public option that health insurance companies would have to compete with (a single-payer system was never on the table). Terrified at the thought of real competition, the health insurance industry spent a fortune lobbying against the establishment of a public option—and the law Democrats in Congress ended up passing in 2010, the Affordable Care Act, was greatly influenced by Republican ideas of the past (including those of the Heritage Foundation and 2006 GOP presidential candidate Bob Dole). The ACA does contain some positive reforms and has brought health insurance to millions of Americans who were unable to obtain it before, but it would have a lot more teeth had the health insurance industry not been unwilling to face real competition in the form of a public option [6].
4. Bank of America
The “too big to fail” status that Bank of America now enjoys is ironic in light of its humble beginnings. Founded as Bank of Italy by Amadeo Gianni in San Francisco in 1904, BofA originally found its niche by catering to Italian immigrants who faced discrimination from other banks. But today’s BofA has very little in common with the operation Gianni started 110 years ago. In recent decades, the megabank (which received $45 million in bailout money after the crash of September 2008 and now controls almost one in five home mortgages in the U.S.) has demonstrated its anti-competition philosophy by gobbling up one bank after another—and the more competition BofA eliminates, the worse it becomes for consumers. BofA apologists argue that if customers don’t like its abundance of fees and poor customer service, they can simply take their money elsewhere. But that’s a flawed argument because thanks to BofA’s aggressive lobbying and anti-competition practices, there are fewer and fewer alternatives to BofA in many parts of the United States.
5. Verizon
When the Federal Communications Commission approved the merger of Bell Atlantic and GTE in 2000, Verizon Communications became the largest provider of phone service in the United States. Since then, its practices have often been both anti-competition and anti-regulation. One of the biggest complaints consumers have about mobile/wireless providers is being forced to sign long-term contracts [7]. Verizon Wireless has often demonstrated its aversion to competition by chaining customers to such contracts and hitting them with stiff termination fees should they become dissatisfied and cancel. On the landline side, Verizon has been aggressively pushing many of its customers to give up copper wiring and go with its fiber-optics program FiOS—that is, if Verizon even offers landlines in a particular area. After Hurricane Sandy damaged copper lines on Fire Island, NY (where Verizon had a monopoly) in 2012, Verizon wanted to discontinue copper line support, but wasn’t offering FiOS there and tried to force the area’s landline customers onto the wireless program Voice Link. Problem: Voice Link didn’t support broadband, and many Fire Island residents liked having both a cell phone and a landline. Verizon later reconsidered and announced it would be installing FiOS on Fire Island [8], but the debacle underscored the problems that can occur when a behemoth like Verizon becomes a monopoly in a particular area.
6. American Airlines
Like banking and telecommunications, air travel is an industry that has been plagued by more and more consolidation. In 2013, American Airlines became the world’s largest airline when it merged with U.S. Airways (which had merged with America West in 2005). Other big airline mergers of the last five years have included the Delta/Northwest and United/Continental mergers—and now, 85% of the U.S. air travel market is dominated by only four airlines [9]: American, United, Delta and Southwest (widely regarded as the most consumer-friendly of the four). To understand how bad all these mergers are for consumers, one need only look at a study conducted by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which found that from 2007-2012, airlines in the United States cut the number of domestic flights by 14% [10]. The more companies like American are allowed to reduce competition, the worse it will be for consumers in terms of price, convenience and customer service [11].
7. Wells Fargo
Like BofA, Wells Fargo had a reputation for being a West Coast bank throughout much of its history. But when the New Deal was greatly undermined in the 1980s and 1990s and the Glass-Steagall Act was overturned in 1999, Wells Fargo expanded considerably. Wells Fargo now has a strong presence all over the U.S. and has been allowed to acquire one bank after another (including Wachovia in 2009). Wells Fargo, whose assets increased from $609 billion before 2008 to $1.4 trillion [12] in 2013, needn’t worry about having a lot of competition because it has devoured so many of the local and regional banks it once competed with.
8. Koch Industries
Billionaires brothers Charles and David Koch like to paint themselves as masters of free-market competition. But in reality, Koch Industries is the essence of crony capitalism—and the tens of millions of dollars the Koch brothers have donated to politicians (especially Republicans and Tea Party candidates, but some Democrats as well) are designed to ensure that politicians never challenge Koch Industries in a meaningful way. The Citizens United and McCutcheon decisions encourage the Koch brothers to make sure that any politicians they help elect are as submissive to Koch Industries [13] as possible. And the Koch brothers’ desire to build a pro-Koch media empire that doesn’t challenge them in any meaningful way will only further their corporatist agenda.
9. Goldman Sachs
Matt Taibbi, who wrote about problems in the banking industry extensively during his years with Rolling Stone, has often said that in a true free-market environment, a behemoth like Goldman Sachs would not exist—especially in light of all the damage banking giants have done to the economies of the U.S. and other countries. But thanks to the too-big-to-fail doctrine, Goldman Sachs has not only been propped up by the U.S. government and the Federal Reserve, but has been allowed to continue growing in size: according to Bloomberg Businessweek, the U.S. five largest banks (JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Citigroup, Wells Fargo and Goldman Sachs) went from comprising 43% of American GDP in 2006 to 56% in 2011. Ideally, Goldman Sachs should have been broken up and divided into an abundance of smaller banks after the crash of September 2008—a move that would have mandated competition—but instead, commercial and investment banking were allowed to become even more concentrated. Beholden to banking lobbyists, U.S. politicians have sheltered Goldman Sachs execs [14] from the thing they need the most: competition.
10. JPMorgan Chase
Far-right critics of FDR's New Deal like to characterize Roosevelt as a Marxist, which is downright absurd to actual Marxists. But FDR understood how vital competition was to free-market capitalism when he signed the Glass-Steagall Act into law in 1933. Mandating a strict separation of commercial and investment banking, Glass-Steagall was meant to discourage monopolies—and its repeal in 1999 encouraged JPMorgan Chase to become the unwieldy giant it is today. Formed when J.P. Morgan & Co. merged with Chase Manhattan Bank in 2000, JPMorgan Chase is now the U.S.’ largest financial institution. A company that has $2.4 trillion in assets has enormous lobbying power, and according to the Center for Responsive Politics, it spent $8 million on lobbying in 2012 [15]. CEO Jamie Dimon claims that JPMorgan Chase (which faced hundreds of millions of dollars of fines last year) is overregulated when, in reality, it is woefully underregulated and would not have become so bloated if it operated in a true free-market economy and hadn’t received so much corporate welfare (including $25 billion in bailout money in October 2008).
See more stories tagged with:
competition [16]
http://www.alternet.org/print/economy/10-corporate-behemoths-stifling-competition-and-delivering-awful-service-you
===
February 18, 2014 | ISBN-10: 0199937192 | ISBN-13: 978-0199937196 | Edition: 1
Decisions made by the food, tobacco, alcohol, pharmaceutical, gun, and automobile industries have a greater impact on today's health than the decisions of scientists and policymakers. As the collective influence of corporations has grown, governments around the world have stepped back from their responsibility to protect public health by privatizing key services, weakening regulations, and cutting funding for consumer and environmental protection. Today's corporations are increasingly free to make decisions that benefit their bottom line at the expense of public health.
Lethal but Legalexamines how corporations have impacted -- and plagued -- public health over the last century, first in industrialized countries and now in developing regions. It is both a current history of corporations' antagonism towards health and an analysis of the emerging movements that are challenging these industries' dangerous practices. The reforms outlined here aim to strike a healthier balance between large companies' right to make a profit and governments' responsibility to protect their populations.
While other books have addressed parts of this story, Lethal but Legal is the first to connect the dots between unhealthy products, business-dominated politics, and the growing burdens of disease and health care costs. By identifying the common causes of all these problems, then situating them in the context of other health challenges that societies have overcome in the past, this book provides readers with the insights they need to take practical and effective action to restore consumers' right to health.
http://www.amazon.com/Lethal-But-Legal-Corporations-Consumption/dp/0199937192
===
5 Industries That Are Mercilessly Robbing the American People
September 29, 2013 |
There are more than five ways, of course. There are numerous product ripoffs, as described in a recent article byLynn Stuart Parramore [3], who identified textbooks and bottled water and print cartridges as a few of the ways Americans are duped into paying a lot more than reason and regulation would dictate.
And there are many industry-specific ripoffs, most notably in health care. We have the most expensive [4] health care system in the world, and yet we're falling behind [5] other developed countries in numerous health measures.
Here are five more industry-specific ripoffs of the American people:
- The Retail Industry (Walmart): Building Owner Fortunes with Public Tax Money
A study [6] in Wisconsin by the U.S. House Committee on Education and the Workforce determined that a typical Walmart store costs taxpayers over $1.7 million per year, or about $5,815 per employee. A 2004 study [7] in California put the cost per employee at $2,103.
For the year 2012, Walmart's pre-tax U.S. income [8] was almost $18.7 billion. That's over $14,000 per U.S. Walmart employee [9].
For the year 2012, the four Walton family members made over $20 billion [10] from their investments. That's over $15,000 per Walmart employee.
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2. The Financial Industry: Printing Their Own Money
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Thanks in good part to the derivatives market, the world's wealth [11] has doubled in ten years. Estimates of the speculative value of the financial derivatives market vary, from $708 trillion [12] to $1.2 quadrillion [13]. The Chicago Mercantile Exchange [14] alone reported a 2011 trading volume of over $1 quadrillion on 3.4 billion annual contracts.
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}:
A quadrillion is a thousand trillion. A return to the financiers of just .1 percent (a tenth of a penny from every dollar) would generate $1 trillion, the total Adjusted Gross Income for half of Americans [15].
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3. The Private Prison Industry: Billing Taxpayers for Empty Cells, then Selling Inmate Labor and Paying Them Sub-Minimum Wages
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Almost two-thirds of the private prison contracts analyzed by In the Public Interest [16] "included occupancy guarantees in the form of quotas or required payments for empty prison cells (a 'low-crime tax')."
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Some private prisons, such as Corrections Corporation of America and G4S, sell inmate labor [17] to corporations like Chevron, Bank of America, AT&T, and IBM, and pay the prisoners less than a dollar an hour [18].
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4. The Telecommunications Industry: Low Quality at High Prices
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In the 1990s the FCC deregulated [19] phone and cable and Internet companies, with the intention of promoting competition. But just a few companies -- Verizon and AT&T and Comcast and Time Warner -- have divided up the market [20], reducing competition as they remain poorly regulated.
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So now South Korea [21] has Internet access speeds 200 times faster than us at half the cost. Same thing in Hong Kong. And in Europe [20] unlimited texting and voice from Verizon costs about a third of U.S. prices.
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It gets worse, according to David Cay Johnston [22], who reports that regulations have been written that allow large corporations to add unsubstantiated charges to cell phones, cable TV, internet service providers and others that can cost American families over $2,000 per year.
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5. The Drug Industry: Buy American...But Tax Us Like We're Foreigners
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Bernie Sanders [23] notes that pharmaceutical companies like Eli Lilly and Pfizer have lobbied to keep Americans from buying cheaper prescription drugs from Canada and Europe, but then they their shift drug patents and profits to offshore tax havens to avoid paying U.S. taxes.
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Higher drug prices cost an average American family over $1250 per year [24].
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Drug companies also participate in "Pay-for-Delay" [25] deals, through which brand-name firms pay generic makers to keep their cheaper drugs out of the market for a number of years.
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That's capitalism. Ripping a once-strong society into little pieces.
}:}:}:}:
See more stories tagged with:
capitalism [26],
economy [27],
america [28],
wages [29],
wealth [30],
walmart [31]
---
Source URL: http://www.alternet.org/economy/5-industries-are-mercilessly-robbing-american-people
Links:
[1] http://alternet.org
[2] http://www.alternet.org/authors/paul-buchheit-0
[3] http://www.alternet.org/economy/product-rip-offs?paging=off
[4] http://www.commondreams.org/view/2013/03/04-0
[5] http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/news/fullstory_138575.html
[6] http://democrats.edworkforce.house.gov/sites/democrats.edworkforce.house.gov/files/documents/WalMartReport-May2013.pdf
[7] http://laborcenter.berkeley.edu/retail/walmart.pdf
[8] http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/104169/000010416913000011/annualreporttoshareholders.htm
[9] http://corporate.walmart.com/our-story/locations
[10] http://www.usagainstgreed.org/Forbes400_2011-12.xls
[11] http://www.thefinancialist.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/2012-GlobalWealthReport-.pdf
[12] http://www.bis.org/publ/otc_hy1111.pdf
[13] http://beforeitsnews.com/alternative/2012/10/the-economy-derivatives-market-a-1-2-quadrillion-time-bomb-2479924.html
[14] http://www.cmegroup.com/investor-relations/annual-review/2011/financial-milestones.html
[15] http://taxfoundation.org/article/summary-latest-federal-individual-income-tax-data-0
[16] http://www.inthepublicinterest.org/sites/default/files/Criminal-Lockup%20Quota-Report.pdf
[17] http://www.alternet.org/story/155061/getting_paid_93_cents_a_day_in_america_corporations_bring_back_the_19th_century
[18] http://www.prisonpolicy.org/prisonindex/prisonlabor.html
[19] http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-12-27/u-s-internet-users-pay-more-for-slower-service.html
[20] http://www.alternet.org/bill-moyers-why-us-internet-access-slow-costly-and-unfair
[21] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/05/internet-speed-united-states-digital-divide_n_1855054.html
[22] https://soundcloud.com/danahey/tim-danahey-show-david-cay
[23] http://www.commondreams.org/view/2013/02/09-7
[24] http://www.commondreams.org/view/2013/09/23
[25] http://www.alternet.org/drugs/where-does-it-say-supreme-court-has-constitutional-power-hike-medicine-prices-5x-their-cost
[26] http://www.alternet.org/tags/capitalism
[27] http://www.alternet.org/tags/economy-0
[28] http://www.alternet.org/tags/america
[29] http://www.alternet.org/tags/wages
[30] http://www.alternet.org/tags/wealth
[31] http://www.alternet.org/tags/walmart
[32] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B
===
2013
- Winners: People's Award: Shell, Jury Award: Goldman Sachs
Nominees are Alstom, Coal India, G4S, Lonmin, and Repower
2012
Nominees were Freeport, TEPCO, Samsung and Syngenta
2011
- Audience award: Neste Oil, Jury award: AngloGold Ashanti
Nominees were Axpo (a Swiss energy company), BP, Foxconn and Philip Morris
2010
- Winners: 2x Roche (Swiss, People), Royal Bank of Canada (Global), water mandate of UN Global Compact (Greenwash)
The Public Eye Award in the category Swiss and People was given to the Swiss health care-company for the selling of the drug Cellcept in China, where over 90% of the organs for transplantation comes from executed prisoners - against their own will.
2009
- Winners: 2x Newmont Mining Corporation (Global, People), BKW FMB Energie AG (Swiss)
- Positive Award: Freddy Lozano and Jairo Quiroz Delgado, executive members from the trade union Sintracarbon.
Newmont received the 2009 award for its Akyem project in Ghana. According to the jury it had destroyed unique natural habitats, carried out forced resettlement of local people and polluted soil and rivers.[5][6] Newmont described the information as misleading and said the project had been extensively studied by international and national environmental experts, members of the local communities, and by the appropriate governmental agencies and departments.[7]
BWFK FMB Energie AG received the Swiss Award for their participation at German coal-burning power plants and the same time propagation of power efficiency and renewable energy in Switzerland.
The positive Award was given to two members of the union Sintracarbon in Columbia for their fight for better work conditions for the workers in the country's biggest coal mine (El Cerrejón).
2008
- Positive Award: Hess Natur
Both the People’s Award and the Global Award were given to French state-owned Areva for the suppression of true health conditions of uranium mine workers at subsidiaries Somaïr and Cominak in northern Niger.[8] Therefore, the hospitals would diagnose patients with HIV when they were actually displaying symptoms of cancer caused by radioactive contamination of air, water and soil. Glencore was “honored” for its opaque business practices and unacceptable labor rights in Colombian coal mines.[9]
The Positive Award went to Hess Natur, Germany’s largest mail-order house for natural fabrics, for its social and ecological involvement that stresses fair trade of its raw materials.
2007
- Winners: Bridgestone (Global), Novartis (Swiss)
- Positive Award: Coop (Switzerland)
Bridgestone received the Global Award for the disastrous working conditions at a subsidiary in Liberia.[10] The workers lived in mud huts, the children were forced to work, and they had to handle highly toxic materials without protection.[11] Novartis received the Swiss Award for the patenting of the cancer drug Imatinib, forcing a halt in production of Indian generics. As a result, ten thousand patients worldwide could no longer afford medication that slowed the spread of leukemia.[12] The product from Novartis is ten times more expensive than the generics.[13]
Coop received the Positive Award for its dedication to ecological products and farming in Switzerland.
2006
- Winners: Chevron (Environment), citigroup (Taxes), The Walt Disney Company (Social)
- Positive Award: Euzkadi Union SNRTE, Germanwatch and FIAN
For 30 years, Chevron allowed highly toxic waste water to flow into the Amazon in Ecuador, and for cost-saving reasons it did not pump the waste water back into the earth, which was normal practice at the time.[14] Chevron refuses to pay for the environmental consequences and the health problems of the local communities.[15] Citigroup received its award for the unscrupulous advice it gave to tax evaders. Disney produces toys in China and does not disclose the names of the suppliers, thus protecting them from industry monitoring.[15]
The Positive Award was given to the three organizations for their efforts against the unlawful closure of a Continental tire factory in Mexico, in which all of the organizations’ demands were met.
2005
Dow received its award for the refusal to accept any responsibility for the 1984 catastrophe in Bhopal. Dow merged with the company responsible for the accident.[16] Shell received its award for gas flaring in Nigeria in residential areas.[17] Wal-Mart denies responsibility for working conditions at its suppliers.[18] KPMG received its award for encouraging its clients to practice aggressive tax evasion.[19]
References
---
http://www.globaltrends.com/knowledge-center/features/shapers-and-influencers/151-special-report-corporate-clout-distributed-the-influence-of-the-worlds-largest-100-economic-entities
Of the world’s 100 largest economic entities in 2010, 42 (42%) are corporations, versus 44% in 2009. If you look at the top 150 economic entities in 2010, the proportion of corporations rises to 58%.
The largest, as in 2009 was Wal-Mart, whose 2010 revenues exceeded the GDPs of 171 countries making it the 25th largest economic entity in the world. It ranks ahead of Norway and Iran, employing 2.1 million people or the equivalent of 43% of Norway’s population. The next group in terms of size is the energy majors, buoyed by energy price increases over 2010, with revenues of the five largest players increasing between 25% and 45% over the year. Combined, the revenues of these five companies (Royal Dutch Shell, ExxonMobil, BP, Sinopec and China National Petroleum) were the equivalent of 2.5% of global GDP in 2010.]
==
AlterNet [1] / By Paul Buchheit [2]
5 Ways That Raw, Unregulated Capitalism Is Acting Like a Cancer on American Society
May 5, 2013 |
Unregulated capitalism is out of control. Like a cancer [3], it has become "something evil or malignant that spreads destructively," with tumors growing in several once-healthy parts of the American body.
1. Attacking the Hungry
The uncontrolled growth of investment wealth is diverting resources away from vital programs, effectively smothering them. The average Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) [4] recipient received about $1,500 for food for the entire year. At least ten Americans each made that much in under ten seconds from their investment gains in 2012 [5], about the time it took each one to fluff his pillow and roll over in bed.
Under capitalism, fortunes accrue to a few while 47 million [6] Americans, or one out of seven, need food assistance [7]. Almost half of the hungry are children [8]. For every food bank we had in 1980 [9], we now have 200.
Yet just 20 people made more from their investment income in one year [5] than the entire 2011 food assistance budget [10]. That's $73 billion, taxed at the capital gains rate. Meanwhile, President Obama couldn't get the $1 billion per year he needed to improve childhood nutrition [9]in schools.
Most recently, the House proposed a farm bill [11] that would cut another $2 billion a year from the food stamps account.
2. Suffocating the Students
The corporate style of capitalism allows young college graduates, the bright hope of the future, to work in minimum wage positions while carrying an average of $26,000 [12] in student loans, which accumulated because tuition rose ten times faster [13] than the cost of living, and which now come with interest rates [14] many times higher than the banks pay.
The great majority of pre-recession jobs have been replaced, if they've come back at all, aslow-wage [15] jobs in food service and retail. The number of college grads working for minimum wage has doubled [16] in five years. They may be the 'fortunate' ones. In 2011, about 360,000 [17]Americans holding advanced degrees were on food stamps or some other form of public assistance. Many of them are homeless [18].
Jobless and frustrated young Americans trusted the system, and it failed them. Yet free enterprise entrepreneurs hustle [19] them for even more college, in order to extract federal loan money, which goes right to the schools to pay administrative salaries.
Defenders of capitalism say hard work will ensure success. At a recent jobs hearing [20] in Washington, only one Congressman bothered to show up.
- Weakening the Children
The disease has been spreading since the 1960s, when life expectancy [21] began to decrease along with increasing health care costs. Capitalism has betrayed our children. A UNICEF study [22] places the U.S. 22nd out of 24 OECD countries in "children's health and well-being."
Child poverty, perhaps the main cause of their health problems, is up 50% [23] since 1973, with the rate for minorities three times that for white children.
Our global poverty ranking is shameful. Despite having the second-highest average income for children among the 30 OECD countries, the U.S. ranked 27th out of 30 for child poverty [24](percentage of children living in households that are below 50% of the median income).
- Depleting the Taxpayers
The body of our society has been drained of its vital juices by tax avoidance. Loopholes and exemptions cost the public about a trillion dollars [25] a year, and underreported [26] income costs another $450 billion. The total is much more than the cost of our stable but always threatened Social Security program.
Since the recession, Fortune 500 corporations have cut [27] their tax payments in half, even though their profits have doubled in less than ten years.
Finally, it is estimated [28] that between $21 and $32 trillion is hidden offshore, untaxed, with up to40% [29] owned by Americans. U.S. PIRG [30] estimates that the average taxpayer in 2012 paid an extra $1,026 in taxes to make up for tax havens by corporations and wealthy individuals. The average small business paid $3,067.
5 .Paralyzing the Voters
Corporations and Congress are a carcinogenic mix. Voters are rendered useless, like withering organs, as all the attention is given to the greedy mass of nutrient-taking super-rich individuals and companies.
A vast majority of Americans want background checks [31] on guns, an emphasis [32] on clean energy [33], job stimulus [34] programs, taxes on the rich [35], and an uncut Social Security [36] program. Yet Congress only hears the ka-ching of campaign contributions. Of the 435 House elections [37] in 2004, 95% of them were won by the candidates who outspent their opponents.
Healing
There's much more to the sickness, like the workplace explosions and fires triggered by cost-cutting measures, banks preying [38] on working people, the environmental [39] destruction caused by oil companies [40] and herbicide [41] manufacturers, attempts [42] to profit [43] http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-03-07/investors-seek-ways-to-profit-from-global-warming from global warming, the middle class collapse caused by corporations transferring jobs overseas and then calling themselves multi-nationals to avoid allegiance to the country that supported their growth. Et cetera, et cetera.
This all allows a small number of people to make most of the money. These are the people who demand 'freedom' at the first hint of regulation.
The post-WW2 American body began to deteriorate around the time of Milton Friedman, author of one of the all-time economic inaccuracies: "The free market system distributes the fruits of economic progress among all people." For forty years the sickness caused by his teaching has spread, at first without pronounced symptoms, but now in an out-of-control process that threatens to incapacitate the better part of America. A revolutionary medicine may be the only hope for recovery. A revolution, that is, of co-ops and small farms and local currencies and solar panels on the rooftops.
See more stories tagged with:
capitalism [44],
us [45]
---
Source URL: http://www.alternet.org/economy/5-ways-raw-unregulated-capitalism-acting-cancer-american-society
---
Investors Seek Ways to Profit From Global Warming
By Matthew Campbell and Chris V. Nicholson on March 07, 2013
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-03-07/investors-seek-ways-to-profit-from-global-warming
Investing in climate change used to mean putting money into efforts to stop global warming. Morgan Stanley (MS), Goldman Sachs (GS), and other firms took stakes in wind farms and tidal-energy projects, and set up carbon-trading desks. The appeal of cleantech has dimmed as efforts to curb greenhouse gas emissions have faltered: Venture capital and private equity investments fell 34 percent last year, to $5.8 billion, according to Bloomberg
New Energy Finance.
Now some investors are taking another approach. Working under the assumption that climate change is inevitable, they’re investing in businesses that will profit as the planet gets hotter. (The World Bank says the earth could warm by 4C by the end of the century.) Their strategies include buying water treatment companies, brokering deals for Australian farmland, and backing a startup that has engineered a mosquito to fight dengue, a disease that’s spreading as the mercury climbs.
Derivatives that help companies hedge against abnormal weather and natural catastrophes are drawing increased interest from some big players. In January, KKR (KKR) bought a 25 percent stake in Nephila Capital, an $8 billion Bermuda hedge fund that trades in weather derivatives. (The firm is named after a spider that, according to local folklore, can predict hurricanes.) “Climate risk is something people are paying more and more attention to,” says Barney Schauble, managing partner at Nephila Advisors, the firm’s U.S. arm. “More volatile weather creates more risk and more appetite to protect against that risk.”
Drought is helping spur business at Water Asset Management. The New York hedge fund, which has about $400 million under management, buys water rights and makes private equity and stock market investments in water treatment companies. “Not enough people are thinking long term of [water] as an asset that is worthy of ownership,” says Chief Operating Officer Marc Robert. “Climate change for us is a driver.”
When investors think about global warming, “there is an overemphasis of its negative impacts,” says Michael Richardson, head of business development at Land Commodities, which advises rich individuals and sovereign wealth funds on purchases of Australian farmland. The company’s pitch: The gloomy prospect of hotter temperatures, scarce arable land, and rapidly rising populations will make inland cropland Down Under—far from rising seas yet close to Asia’s hungry customers—more valuable. The Baar (Switzerland)-based company worked on more than $80 million in transactions last year, four times its 2011 total, according to Richardson.
Ole Christiansen is also investing to take advantage of rising temperatures. “Last summer we were exploring in south Greenland, mainly for gold,” says the chief executive officer of NunaMinerals (NUNA), a local mining company. “It has previously been covered by a glacier, but most of that glacier has disappeared, so suddenly we had access to a lot of ground that nobody had seen before.” Mining companies spent 524 million kroner ($91.5 million) on mineral exploration in the Danish territory in 2010, a 75 percent increase from a year earlier, according to the most recent data available from Nuuk-based Statistics Greenland. Those figures don’t take into account recent deals such as one inked in November between Anglo American (AAL) and Danish mining startup Avannaa Resources, which have committed more than $15 million to a joint venture to explore for copper in the eastern part of Greenland.
Jason Drew is among the investors who have bet about $30 million on Oxitec, an Abingdon (England)-based startup that’s developed a special kind of mosquito: one that can’t reproduce. When an Oxitec mosquito mates with a wild female, the offspring will not survive to adulthood, so the mosquito population declines. The company is exporting the test-tube skeeters to the increasing number of countries coping with outbreaks of dengue, a mosquito-borne disease whose spread has been aided by rising temperatures and increased humidity. (Health authorities in the Florida Keys reported 66 cases of locally acquired dengue in 2010.) “When the mosquitoes move quite rapidly over a relatively short period of time, human resistance [to the virus] doesn’t build up quickly enough,” Drew says.
The United Nations estimates that investments in infrastructure and technology to mitigate the effects of climate change will total as much as $130 billion a year by 2030. A leader in this field is Arcadis, a Dutch engineering firm that offers flood-protection services. The company has been on a buying spree in recent years, most recently snapping up ETEP, a Brazilian water engineering and consulting firm. Arcadis’s revenue was up 26 percent last year, to €2.5 billion ($3.25 billion), thanks in part to Superstorm Sandy. The company won contracts from New York’s Nassau County and New York City to help bring water treatment facilities back online. In the past it has worked with authorities in New Orleans to upgrade levees and in San Francisco to create a plan to deal with rising sea levels.
Piet Dircke, who oversees water management at Arcadis, says his phone was ringing nonstop in the days after Sandy. “The climate is changing. Sea level is rising. That’s quite obvious,” says Dircke. “At the same time, the cities that are close to the waterline continue to grow and have more money and need for protection. It’s almost a natural growth market.”
The bottom line: The costs of adapting to climate change may reach $130 billion a year by 2030, creating opportunities for a host of investors.
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-03-07/investors-seek-ways-to-profit-from-global-warming
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Brand name riggers of the justice system
By Jim Hightower- Mon., 3/4/13
Practically every national brand name you've ever heard of now slips predatory arbitration provisions into their customer terms-of-service agreements and/or employment agreements. Not only do these sneaky inserts strip away your constitutional right to take them to court (peremptorily immunizing them from any wrongs they do to you), but many of the boilerplate provisions also arbitrarily ban you from joining with other small claimants in class actions to hold them accountable. Here is a sampling of 10 market powerhouses that suckerpunch you with this double-whammy:
- Amazon
- Dell
- Starbucks
- Verizon Wireless
- AT&T
- eBay
- Time Warner
- Wells Fargo
- Citibank
- Microsoft
The list of corporations that underhandedly bar your access to the courts ranges across every business sector. Buying a home? If you choose one from Centex, DR Horton ("America's Builder"), KB, Pulte, or Ryland-it'll come with forced arbitration built into it. Maybe you or a loved one needs a nursing home. That can be an unhappy experience, but if you have a complaint, you'll find that such national chains as Carrington Place, Covenant, and Kindred shove you into the dark hallways of corporate justice.
Take out a student loan from Discover, invest through Charles Schwab or T. Rowe Price, purchase a television from Sony, or a game console from Xbox LIVE, get involved in some e-commerce on eBay or PayPal, get a Starbucks gift card, buy a membership at Gold's Gym, go for entertainment through Ticketmaster or Netflix, or call Orkin for pest control--every one of those transactions comes with a fine-print proviso that waives your Seventh Amendment rights.
The same goes for the contract you'll have to sign if you take a job with nearly any national corporation. From Hooters to Neiman Marcus, Papa John's to Yahoo!, Hobby Lobby to Nordstrom, Manpower to Macy's, the employment agreement that they tell you is just a perfunctory part of putting you on the payroll has the binding arbitration "gotcha" in it.
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We reviewed 12 of the dirtiest corporate tax dodgers: Bank of America, Citi, JPMorgan, Wells Fargo, Chevron, BP, Shell, Exxon, Massey Energy, Alpha Natural Resources, Peabody Energy and Arch Coal. These 12 banks, oil and coal companies are responsible for foreclosing on millions of people’s homes and polluting our air, water and climate. At the same time, we found that they pay next to nothing into a tax system that provides the very services that protect the homeless, the sick and our environment.
:{Read more:Corporate Tax Dodgers: The Dirtiest Dozen | Rainforest Action Network http://ran.org/corporate-tax-dodgers-dirtiest-dozen-0#ixzz1rw5ubuoN}:
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See Life Inc Rushkoff
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PERSONHOOD
The Santa Clara Blues:: Corporate Personhood versus Democracy
http://www.iiipublishing.com/afd/santaclara.html
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house at 2710 Thomes Avenue serves as a little Cayman Island on the Great Plains. It is the headquarters for Wyoming Corporate Services, a business-incorporation specialist that establishes firms which can be used as "shell" companies, paper entities able to hide assets.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/06/28/us-usa-shell-companies-idUSTRE75R20Z20110628
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The Real Boston Tea Party was Against the Wal-Mart of the 1770s
see what wd TJ do (bk)
CNBC Correspondent Rick Santelli called for a "Chicago Tea Party" on Feb 19th in protesting President Obama's plan to help homeowners in trouble. Santelli's call was answered by the right-wing group Freedomworks, which funds campaigns promoting big business interests, and is the opposite of what the real Boston Tea Party was. FreedomWorks was funded in 2004 by Dick Army (former Republican House Majority leader & lobbyist); consolidated Citizens for a Sound Economy, funded by the Koch family; and Empower America, a lobbying firm, that had fought against healthcare and minimum-wage efforts while hailing deregulation.
Anti-tax "tea party" organizers are delivering one million tea bags to a Washington, D.C., park Wednesday morning - to promote protests across the country by people they say are fed up with high taxes and excess spending.
The real Boston Tea Party was a protest against huge corporate tax cuts for the British East India Company, the largest trans-national corporation then in existence. This corporate tax cut threatened to decimate small Colonial businesses by helping the BEIC pull a Wal-Mart against small entrepreneurial tea shops, and individuals began a revolt that kicked-off a series of events that ended in the creation of The United States of America.
They covered their faces, massed in the streets, and destroyed the property of a giant global corporation. Declaring an end to global trade run by the East India Company that was destroying local economies, this small, masked minority started a revolution with an act of rebellion later called the Boston Tea Party.
On a cold November day in 1773, activists gathered in a coastal town. The corporation had gone too far, and the two thousand people who'd jammed into the meeting hall were torn as to what to do about it. Unemployment was exploding and the economic crisis was deepening; corporate crime, governmental corruption spawned by corporate cash, and an ethos of greed were blamed. "Why do we wait?" demanded one at the meeting, a fisherman named George Hewes. "The more we delay, the more strength is acquired" by the company and its puppets in the government. "Now is the time to prove our courage," he said. Soon, the moment came when the crowd decided for direct action and rushed into the streets.
That is how I tell the story of the Boston Tea Party, now that I have read a first-person account of it. While striving to understand my nation's struggles against corporations, in a rare book store I came upon a first edition of "Retrospect of the Boston Tea Party with a Memoir of George R.T. Hewes, a Survivor of the Little Band of Patriots Who Drowned the Tea in Boston Harbor in 1773," and I jumped at the chance to buy it. Because the identities of the Boston Tea Party participants were hidden (other than Samuel Adams) and all were sworn to secrecy for the next 50 years, this account is the only first-person account of the event by a participant that exists. As I read, I began to understand the true causes of the American Revolution.
I learned that the Boston Tea Party resembled in many ways the growing modern-day protests against transnational corporations and small-town efforts to protect themselves from chain-store retailers or factory farms. The Tea Party's participants thought of themselves as protesters against the actions of the multinational East India Company.
Although schoolchildren are usually taught that the American Revolution was a rebellion against "taxation without representation," akin to modern day conservative taxpayer revolts, in fact what led to the revolution was rage against a transnational corporation that, by the 1760s, dominated trade from China to India to the Caribbean, and controlled nearly all commerce to and from North America, with subsidies and special dispensation from the British crown.
Hewes notes: "The [East India] Company received permission to transport tea, free of all duty, from Great Britain to America..." allowing it to wipe out New England-based tea wholesalers and mom-and-pop stores and take over the tea business in all of America. "Hence," wrote, "it was no longer the small vessels of private merchants, who went to vend tea for their own account in the ports of the colonies, but, on the contrary, ships of an enormous burthen, that transported immense quantities of this commodity ... The colonies were now arrived at the decisive moment when they must cast the dye, and determine their course ... "
A pamphlet was circulated through the colonies called The Alarm and signed by an enigmatic "Rusticus." One issue made clear the feelings of colonial Americans about England's largest transnational corporation and its behavior around the world: "Their Conduct in Asia, for some Years past, has given simple Proof, how little they regard the Laws of Nations, the Rights, Liberties, or Lives of Men. They have levied War, excited Rebellions, dethroned lawful Princes, and sacrificed Millions for the Sake of Gain. The Revenues of Mighty Kingdoms have entered their Coffers. And these not being sufficient to glut their Avarice, they have, by the most unparalleled Barbarities, Extortions, and Monopolies, stripped the miserable Inhabitants of their Property, and reduced whole Provinces to Indigence and Ruin. Fifteen hundred Thousands, it is said, perished by Famine in one Year, not because the Earth denied its Fruits; but [because] this Company and their Servants engulfed all the Necessaries of Life, and set them at so high a Price that the poor could not purchase them."
After protesters had turned back the Company's ships in Philadelphia and New York, Hewes writes, "In Boston the general voice declared the time was come to face the storm."
The citizens of the colonies were preparing to throw off one of the corporations that for almost 200 years had determined nearly every aspect of their lives through its economic and political power. They were planning to destroy the goods of the world's largest multinational corporation, intimidate its employees, and face down the guns of the government that supported it.
The queen's corporation
The East India Company's influence had always been pervasive in the colonies. Indeed, it was not the Puritans but the East India Company that founded America. The Puritans traveled to America on ships owned by the East India Company, which had already established the first colony in North America, at Jamestown, in the Company-owned Commonwealth of Virginia, stretching from the Atlantic Ocean to the Mississippi. The commonwealth was named after the "Virgin Queen," Elizabeth, who had chartered the corporation.
Elizabeth was trying to make England a player in the new global trade sparked by the European "discovery" of the Americas. The wealth Spain began extracting from the New World caught the attention of the European powers. In many European countries, particularly Holland and France, consortiums were put together to finance ships to sail the seas. In 1580, Queen Elizabeth became the largest shareholder in The Golden Hind, a ship owned by Sir Francis Drake.
The investment worked out well for Queen Elizabeth. There's no record of exactly how much she made when Drake paid her share of the Hind's dividends to her, but it was undoubtedly vast, since Drake himself and the other minor shareholders all received a 5000 percent return on their investment. Plus, because the queen placed a maximum loss to the initial investors of their investment amount only, it was a low-risk investment (for the investors at least--creditors, such as suppliers of provisions for the voyages or wood for the ships, or employees, for example, would be left unpaid if the venture failed, just as in a modern-day corporation). She was endorsing an investment model that led to the modern limited-liability corporation.
After making a fortune on Drake's expeditions, Elizabeth started looking for a more permanent arrangement. She authorized a group of 218 London merchants and noblemen to form a corporation. The East India Company was born on December 31, 1600.
By the 1760s, the East India Company's power had grown massive and worldwide. However, this rapid expansion, trying to keep ahead of the Dutch trading companies, was a mixed blessing, as the company went deep in debt to support its growth, and by 1770 found itself nearly bankrupt.
The company turned to a strategy that multinational corporations follow to this day: They lobbied for laws that would make it easy for them to put their small-business competitors out of business.
Most of the members of the British government and royalty (including the king) were stockholders in the East India Company, so it was easy to get laws passed in its interests. Among the Company's biggest and most vexing problems were American colonial entrepreneurs, who ran their own small ships to bring tea and other goods directly into America without routing them through Britain or through the Company. Between 1681 and 1773, a series of laws were passed granting the Company monopoly on tea sold in the American colonies and exempting it from tea taxes. Thus, the Company was able to lower its tea prices to undercut the prices of the local importers and the small tea houses in every town in America. But the colonists were unappreciative of their colonies being used as a profit center for the multinational corporation.
Boston's million-dollar tea party
And so, Hewes says, on a cold November evening of 1773, the first of the East India Company's ships of tax-free tea arrived. The next morning, a pamphlet was widely circulated calling on patriots to meet at Faneuil Hall to discuss resistance to the East India Company and its tea. "Things thus appeared to be hastening to a disastrous issue. The people of the country arrived in great numbers, the inhabitants of the town assembled. This assembly, on the 16th of December 1773, was the most numerous ever known, there being more than 2000 from the country present," said Hewes.
The group called for a vote on whether to oppose the landing of the tea. The vote was unanimously affirmative, and it is related by one historian of that scene "that a person disguised after the manner of the Indians, who was in the gallery, shouted at this juncture, the cry of war; and that the meeting dissolved in the twinkling of an eye, and the multitude rushed in a mass to Griffin's wharf."
That night, Hewes dressed as an Indian, blackening his face with coal dust, and joined crowds of other men in hacking apart the chests of tea and throwing them into the harbor. In all, the 342 chests of tea--over 90,000 pounds--thrown overboard that night were enough to make 24 million cups of tea and were valued by the East India Company at 9,659 Pounds Sterling or, in today's currency, just over $1 million.
In response, the British Parliament immediately passed the Boston Port Act stating that the port of Boston would be closed until the citizens of Boston reimbursed the East India Company for the tea they had destroyed. The colonists refused. A year and a half later, the colonists would again state their defiance of the East India Company and Great Britain by taking on British troops in an armed conflict at Lexington and Concord (the "shots heard 'round the world") on April 19, 1775.
That war--finally triggered by a transnational corporation and its government patrons trying to deny American colonists a fair and competitive local marketplace--would end with independence for the colonies.
The revolutionaries had put the East India Company in its place with the Boston Tea Party, and that, they thought, was the end of that. Unfortunately, the Boston Tea Party was not the end; within 150 years, during the so-called Gilded Age, powerful rail, steel, and oil interests would rise up to begin a new form of oligarchy, capturing the newly-formed Republican Party in the 1880s, and have been working to establish a permanent wealthy and ruling class in this country ever since.
Thom can be heard daily on his radio show 12pm - 3pm ET. Visit http://www.thomhartmann.com to stream live or find a station near you.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/thom-hartmann/the-real-boston-tea-party_b_187189.html
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How did all this trouble over tea begin?
Tea was imported regularly to the American Colonies starting in the early 1720s. By the 1760’s, colonists were consuming 1.2 million pounds of tea a year. Both men and women had come to enjoy it as an everyday beverage, although it was most popular among the ladies of cosmopolitan communities such as Boston.
England soon realized that it could make more money on the tea trade by imposing new taxes. This made English tea very expensive. In response to the increase in the price of English tea, colonists began smuggling cheaper tea from Holland. While Parliament knew about the smuggling, it had a hard time enforcing the law. There were not enough customs officials in the colonies, and the nooks and crannies of the American coastline made it easy to find ways to smuggle goods into the colonies.
In 1767 Parliament responded to smuggling by passing the Indemnity Act. This repealed the duty on tea and made English the same price as Dutch tea. This pleased both the English East India Company and law-abiding colonial merchants. However, Parliament also passed the Townshend Acts in 1767, which once again put a tax on tea.
The colonists protested against the taxes for many reasons. They believed that Britain was unfairly using the taxes to help pay for British troops sent to America during the French and Indian War (1754-1763). Perhaps most importantly, they felt that Parliament did not have the right to tax them because the American colonies had no representative in Parliament. The colonists believed that only taxes they were able to vote on were legal.
The Sons of Liberty, a group of colonists organized to protest English rule, warned merchants, artisans, and others that more unjust laws would follow. Colonists began to boycott British goods to protest taxes. As tea was the most common and widely used of the newly taxed items, attention was focused on the tea tax. The anti-British movement and the boycott of British goods were successful. In the spring of 1770, Parliament repealed the Townshend Acts and the duties on all items – except tea. 
The 1773 Tea Act
On May 10, 1773, the British Parliament passed the Tea Act of 1773. This act allowed the English East India Company to sell tea in the American colonies at bargain prices – but there was still a tax on the tea. Patriot leaders believed the cheap tea was a ploy to get them to accept Parliament’s right to tax the colonies.
Under the Tea Act, the East India Company could ship tea directly to the American colonies, where it would be sold by a specific group of merchants. These merchants were called tea consignees, and were the only merchants in the colonies who would be allowed to sell the tea. All of these merchants were Loyalists.
The tea, which today would be valued at over $1 million, was due to arrive in Boston in late November of 1773. The Patriots tried to persuade the consignees to refuse the tea through public embarrassment and harassment. The tea consignees refused.
In the ports of Philadelphia and New York, the local Sons of Liberty had successfully demanded that the tea consignees resign. But in Boston, the tea consignees refused, ignoring a summons to the Liberty Tree. 
The tea ship Dartmouth arrives in Boston
On Sunday, November 28 the Dartmouth arrived in Boston Harbor. The ship was loaded with East India Company tea and duty was payable the moment the tea was landed. If the duty was not paid within 20 days of the ships arrival, the authorities could seize both the cargo and the ship. The deadline for paying the tax was midnight, December 16.
Broadsides quickly were printed and plastered all over Boston, announcing a meeting:
Friends! Brethren! Countrymen! That worst of Plagues, the detested tea shipped for this port by the East India Company, is now arrived in the Harbor; the hour of destruction, or manly opposition to the machinations of Tyranny stares you in the Face…
Meetings at Old South Meeting House
On November 29, 1773, thousands of people gathered at old Faneuil Hall, but it was so crowded that the meeting moved to the Old South Meeting House.
The Old South Meeting House was the largest building in colonial Boston and was well known as a meeting place for the Patriots. Boston residents had previously flocked to mass meetings at Old South to protest the Boston Massacre. Led by Samuel Adams, the angry assembly had forced Acting Royal Governor Hutchinson to remove the British troops from Boston and onto an island fort in the harbor. In 1772 and 1773, speakers at Old South Meeting house delivered fiery orations decrying the Boston Massacre. These speeches, attended by huge crowds including men, women and children, helped to keep outrage over the Boston Massacre alive, and made the Old South Meeting House a notorious hotbed of patriot resistance to British rule. 
Meetings of “the Body of the People”
The crowd at Old South Meeting House included those not normally in attendance at Boston town meetings, such as men from surrounding towns and those without voting privileges. In order to vote at an official town meeting, a colonist had to be a male property owner over 21 years of age. In contrast, Governor Hutchinson described the meetings at Old South Meeting House as including “principally of the lower ranks of the people and even journeymen tradesmen were brought in to increase the number, and the rabble were not excluded.” The meetings were called “The Body of the People”, with resolves from the meetings signed, simply, “The people”.
Samuel Adams described the meeting on November 29 in a letter to a friend:
…the people met in Faneuil hall, without observing the rules prescribed by law for calling them together…they were soon obliged for the want of room to adjourn to the Old South Meeting House; where were assembled upon this important occasion 5000, some say 6000 men, consisting of the respectable inhabitants of this and the adjacent towns. The business of the meeting was conducted with decency, unanimity, and spirit.
At that meeting, Samuel Adams introduced a resolution that was met with approval:
“Whether it is the firm resolution of this body that the tea shall not only be sent back but that no duty shall be paid thereon?”
The meeting voted to put a guard of 25 men on the Dartmouth to ensure that the tea would not be landed. The meeting adjourned until the following day to allow the tea consignees time to make a proposal.
http://www.oldsouthmeetinghouse.org/osmh_123456789files/BostonTeaPartyBegan.aspx
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Published on Friday, July 1, 2011 by CommonDreams.org
Movement to Abolish Corporate Personhood Gaining Traction
In the year and a half since the Citizens United decision, Americans from all walks of life have become concerned about corporate dominance of our government and our society as a whole. In Citizens United v. FEC, the U.S. Supreme Court (in an act of outrageous “judicial activism) gutted existing campaign finance laws by ruling that corporations, wealthy individuals, and other entities can spend unlimited amounts of money on political campaigns.
Throughout the country people have responded by organizing against “corporate personhood,” a court-created precedent that illegitimately gives corporations rights that were intended for human beings.
The movement is flowering not in the halls of Congress, but at the local level, where all real social movements start. Every day Americans experience the devastation caused by unaccountable corporations. Thanks to the hard work of local organizers, Boulder, CO could become the next community to officially join this growing effort. Councilmember Macon Cowles is proposing to place a measure on the November ballot, giving Boulder voters the opportunity to support an amendment to the U. S. Constitution abolishing corporate personhood and declaring that money is not speech.
At the forefront of this movement is Move to Amend, a national coalition of hundreds of organizations and over 113,000 individuals (and counting). Move to Amend is committed to building a grassroots movement to abolish corporate personhood, to hold corporations accountable to the public, and ultimately to fulfill the promise of an American democratic republic.
Boulder is not alone in this fight, nor is it the first community to consider such a resolution. In April, voters in Madison and Dane County, WI overwhelmingly approved measures calling for an end to corporate personhood and the legal status of money as speech by 84% and 78% respectively. Similar resolutions have been passed in nearly thirty other cities and counties. Resolutions have also been introduced in the state legislatures of both Vermont and Washington.
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corphistlon
corphistlon.doc
7/10/2012 3500 words
A history of corporate personhood
Douglass Rushkoff realized we had a profound problem with corporations when his neighbors protested his posting information about a mugging, since it would damage their "brand" and hence property values. He wondered when home became real estate, more important than the safety of our kids. He finds that our internalizing the value of the corporation led to competition with each other in the short term for seemingly limited resources disconnect us from our place, each other, our values, and the true sources of security and happiness.
Monarchs borrowed the idea from the Church, which "incorporated" groups of monks, and gave a joint stock company a monopoly over a place/and/or industry in return for a share of the profits so no one else, even locals could compete. (p 8) Limited liability means you could lose no more than your investment, the debt died in bankruptcy, a process protected by the state p9. British East India Company 1600, Dutch EIC 1602. It extended monarch’s "reach without the cost or liability of an official military expedition" (9) The EIC promoted opium use in India and China, then overthrew addicted rulers (who wanted to stop it?) 96 Dominated trade in North America and Caribbean as well.
Brits saw advantage of Columbus booty. Queen Elizabeth the biggest shareholder in Drake's Golden Hind 1580, granted " legal freedom from liability' proto-corporation, could lose only what they put in (Hartmann: p64) Drake got 5K% return on investment. She formed EIC as a follow-up to Drake. QE also granted monopoly rights for a fee, in theory outlawed in 1624 but continued in different guises.
In The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power, Joel Bakan points out that corporations differed from the traditional partnership in which people trusted each other and worked together: corporations separate owners from managers. Adam Smith in 1776 said bad idea to manage "other people's money", and corporations had been banned for fify years by then (with a few exceptions).
He was a moral philosopher, and Invisible Hand meant to deal only with small local companies. Many Enlightenment ideas have been hijacked and perverted by neo-cons, including Darwin. Crier: Smith’s inv hand refers to small local biz, highly critical of concentrated wealth and power (39) which deceive and oppress, fraud and abuse ( 40).
"Because of their origins, these markets were constrained by the need to maintain social cohesion. In mid-Victorian England, in part because of the development of transportation and communications, these community-rooted markets—“embedded in society and subject to many kinds of regulation and restraint”—were destroyed." (Pfaff)
Government the only counterbalance to corporate power p 40 T Jefferson backed, Hamilton wanted to replicate UK mercantile system, use debt to build economy 41
Hamilton source of expanded fed power (granted vs ltd)
They had been largely outlawed because of the South Sea Company collapse, which had been a scam from the start, though some important people were involved; it collapsed in 1720, a plague year which some feared was a "judgment on human materialism." Fortunes were lost, a director John Blunt was shot, and the King came back to town to quell unrest. Other directors fined or jailed, though one MP wanted them sewn into sack of snakes and money and drowned in the Thames 1720 Bubble Act (p6)
Late C17 early 18 Century "jobbers" or stock brokers worked the coffeehouses and Exchange Alley, but often scams and the number shrank from 95 to 20 in five years, often speculative bubble burst.
" The real Boston Tea Partywas a protest against huge corporate tax cuts for the British East India Company, the largest trans-national corporation then in existence. This corporate tax cut threatened to decimate small Colonial businesses by helping the BEIC pull a Wal-Mart against small entrepreneurial tea shops, and individuals began a revolt that kicked-off a series of events that ended in the creation of The United States of America." in the midst of an economic crisis, unemployment.
East India Co in debt trying to compete with the Dutch; Act for Restraining and Punishing of Pirates made everyone else smugglers; Townshend Acts 1687 aided dumping of EIC surplus tea, undercutting local sellers.
The East India Company had 17 million pounds of excess tea in UK
Tea Act 1681 against Dutch traders and American smugglers (privateers) gave EIC monopoly on American tea trade, no taxes on tea it sold in am, which allowed it to sell cheap to put competition out of business (p71) (colonials still had to pay the tax, hence "no taxation w/o rep").
Other colonies managed to prevent EIC ships, but not Boston. Hewes writes "Things thus appeared to be hastening to a disastrous issue. The people of the country arrived in great numbers, the inhabitants of the town assembled. This assembly, on the 16th of December 1773, was the most numerous ever known, there being more than 2000 from the country present," said Hewes.
Tea party 1773 342 chests, 90k lbs, 24 mi cups, 10K values, today a 1 million 83 Parliament closed port till paid; Lexington 18 months later
EIC tried to resume trade after war, but trade wars in 1812 and 1814 72
"The revolutionaries had put the East India Company in its place with the Boston Tea Party, and that, they thought, was the end of that. Unfortunately, the Boston Tea Party was not the end; within 150 years, during the so-called Gilded Age, powerful rail, steel, and oil interests would rise up to begin a new form of oligarchy, capturing the newly-formed Republican Party in the 1880s, and have been working to establish a permanent wealthy and ruling class in this country ever since."
Thomas Jefferson wanted "freedom from monopolies in commerce" in Bill of Right p 92 Federalists like Hamilton opposed. There’s nothing in Constitution on corporations because the Founders wanted states to keep close eye on them. Jefferson fretted about "moneyed corporations” 1816 after presidency
GOP was reform party before Lincoln (pro middle class and labor; 1st to use word “strike” and stop cops/goons from attacking strikers) through Teddy Roosevelt (p3). Lincoln said that concentrated corporate wealth could end republic p 44 ( letter to Col Wm F. Elkins 11/21 1854)
A radical GOP splinter had House and pushed through civil rights act 1866 and defeated veto, passed 13-15th Amendments. 13th was to counter Dred Scott. Thaddeus Stevens worried not tough enough ~ kkk but backed
Cartherine Crier points out that early in the republic, corporations were: (p 49) limited time, public good, charter could impose rules, all had equal vote and dir could be removed (50) One corporation could not own stock in another; a charter could be revoked even if no wrongdoing, just not doing a good job (50).
Justice Marshall in 1819 said corps were artificial, only rights conferred by charter essential to its existence, for the end it was created for. (TH)
In 1819 the Supreme Court limited state control over corp; states began to reassert, but last 1/3 of c19 business friendly courts went other way
SANTA CLARA
"After the Civil War the Fourteenth Amendment, passed to guarantee full and
equal citizenship to all Americans, used language entirely consonant with Earle. As
the amendment applied to “All persons born or naturalized in the United
States . . . ,” it plainly denied its protection to corporations, which can be neither
born nor naturalized." (Allison)
"Railroad lawyers pulled some stunning shenanigans in their pursuit of corporate
personhood. Most bizarre was the example of Roscoe Conkling--lawyer,
Congressman, Senator, two-time Supreme Court nominee, Republican party leader,
member of a scandalous marital triangle. Nace (2003) contends that it was
Conkling’s argument in 1882, in a case similar to Santa Clara (San Mateo County v.
Southern Pacific Railroad Company), that turned the Court in favor of corporate
personhood.
Conkling was a surviving member of the Congressional committee that had
drafted the Fourteenth Amendment. In the pay of Southern Pacific Railroad, he
parlayed that status into the role of an authority on Congressional intent. During his
argument he flourished what he called a journal of the drafting committee and
claimed that the committee had wavered, draft after draft, between “person” and
“citizen,” finally choosing “’person” as the word more inclusive of corporations.
Conkling’s story was plausible, but seemed to go for naught: The Court made no
decision, as the case was rendered moot when the railroad paid some of the taxes
claimed by San Mateo County.
The flourished journal disappeared after Conkling’s Court appearance. It
turned up in 1914, but was not closely examined until Howard Jay Graham, a
Stanford law librarian, took a look at it twenty years later (Graham, 1968). What he
discovered was that Conkling’s plausible argument was a complete fabrication. There
had been no switching back and forth between “person” and “citizen.” All drafts of
the amendment had used the word “person.” The Joint Committee on
Reconstruction had never meant to protect corporations under the Fourteenth
Amendment. But Conkling had certainly earned his $10,000 retainer if, as Nace
contends, Conkling’s false argument had a residual effect that appeared four years
later in the Santa Clara headnotes. (In Conkling’s day the annual wage of an
average worker was about $500.)" Allison
1877" By then the Supreme Court was under the supervision of Chief Justice Morrison Remick Waite, himself a former railroad attorney. Associate Justice Stephen J. Field, who was so openly on the side of the railroads in case after case that he annoyed his colleagues, also heavily influenced the Court. "(Also on 9th Circuit)
After the Civil War the railroads had cash reserves and were keen to expand, as were a number of industries that needed capital, so the pressure to increase corporate power and freedom were enormous, although the courts routinely rebuffed attempts of corporations to get the rights on citizens, they kept trying to pick the lock, as a virus does a cell, by inserting boilerplate language into all legal documents.
Santa Clara Cty v So Pac RR was a routine local tax case. Presided over by Chief Justice Morrison Remick Waite, who had been lawyer for the railroad; lost as Whig, won huge settlement against the UK for helping outfit the CSA Alabama. Grant appointed as 7th choice, in the middle of a railroad bribery scandal. no prior judge experience.
One the Alabama case, he worked with: The case reporter the Court Reporter, J. C. Bancroft Davis (Harvard) incorrectly summarized the judgment in the head quote for publication, inserting that 14th A applied to corps, which had never come up in the case (he had been pres of a rr) 51 more rights than women then? 54
S.W. Sanderson, represented the railroad and had the "reputation of a pit bull" TH (ex judge for SPRR). Similar to Conklin, Sanderson claimed a "secret committee" in Congress intended 14th to apply to corporations (p 22).
Representing Santa Clara County was Delphin Delmas, "silver tongued orator of the West”. Emigrated from France at ten to join his father, a 49er. A graduate of Santa Clara College ( and a delegate to Democratic convention 1904, nominated W.R. Hearst in part because his anti-monopolist position?), worked for local towns and as a defense attorney; he worked pro bono and alone to protect last redwoods with Semper Virens Club in creating the first state park in California.
In this case against the SP, and others, he argued passionately for the rights of natural persons, vs artificial ones.
Sanderson wrote that Southern Pacific could not be taxed differently on its fences than other corporations or human beings?. The court rejected Santa Clara County appeal, but one of the railroad's six defenses involved the 14th Amendment. However, since many of those arguments not needed, never argued nor ruled on.
However, the headnote (summary) by Davis included the ideas that that corporations are equal to natural persons and not artificial person (the reporter alludes to Waite saying that's our opinion without rationale) 24..The case itself had no legal justification. More alarming, Waite was concerned about errors in court reporter work (Allison)
Stephen Johnson Field, friend of Gov. Leland Stanford (who later headed the Southern Pacific Railroad) (one brother promoted the Transatlantic cable, another worked for railroads. Judge Field annoyed his colleagues by requesting to write majority decisions on railroad cases (Allison). He had some liberal views when young, but bad news from Europe about political and labor unrest soured him, "A shocking example was the spontaneous uprising of the Paris Commune in March, 1871, followed by its bloody suppression. In America, newspaper exaggerations fed an hysterical conservative reaction against Granger and labor movements as conspiratorial threats to property. He had seen similar uprisings in his European tour of 1848. Worse still, the disease seemed to have crossed the oceans to San Francisco, where he arrived to find a miners’ strike in July, 1871. Workers in the Amador mines, seeking in vain a $3 wage and something shorter than a 12-hour day, had stopped the pumps at a cost of $100,000 in property damage.
One can only imagine the effect upon Field the jurist as strikers battled the troops
sent in to pacify them (Graham, 1968). And there were the Great Railroad Strike of
1877, the Mussel Slough Tragedy of 1880, and the Haymarket Riot of 1886." (Allison)
Farmers and workers quashed a bid for Democratic presidential run.
" The Santa Clara decision was enshrined in 1889 when, three years after it was
handed down, it was first cited in a majority opinion as a precedent. Because Chief
Justice Waite died in 1888, he was not on hand to admonish Associate Justice
Stephen J. Field--as he likely would have done--when Field, writing the Court’s
unanimous opinion about three hogs killed by a train, cited Santa Clara County v.
Southern Pacific Railroad Company as a precedent for corporate personhood
(Minneapolis & St. Louis Railway Company v. Beckwith (1889)). Allison Field admitted in 1889 that Santa Clara County case did not grant personhood legally.
"In these two sentences (according to the conventional wisdom), Waite weakened the kind of democratic republic the original authors of the Constitution had envisioned, and he set the stage for the future worldwide damage of our environmental, governmental, and cultural commons. The plutocracy that had arisen with the East India Company in 1600 and had been fought back by America's Founders had gained a tool that was to allow it, in the coming decades, to once again gain control of most of North America and then the world.
Ironically, of the 307 Fourteenth Amendment cases brought before the Supreme Court in the years between Waite's proclamation and 1910, only 19 dealt with African Americans: 288 were suits brought by corporations seeking the rights of natural persons.
Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black pointed out fifty years later, "I do not believe the word 'person' in the Fourteenth Amendment includes corporations.... Neither the history nor the language of the Fourteenth Amendment justifies the belief that corporations are included within its protection."4
Sixty years later Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas made the same point, writing, "There was no history, logic or reason given to support that view [that corporations are legally 'persons']." p25
New Jersey was the first to start the race to the bottom by loosening restrictions on corporations followed by charter-mongering in Delaware, and Maryland) . Governor Woodrow Wilson fretted and tried to reverse 1912-3 (Allison).
Teddy Roosevelt Bull Moose run, called for a ban on corporate money in politics; unregulated business is a plutocracy; only fed power can control (60 crier)
Standard Oil avoided all limits by being a trust, that could own other co's; trust busting
Sherman Act only went after bad behavior, i.e. illegal methods to gain monopolies, other tactics allowed (Crier 52). By 1935 1/10th of 1 percent of US corporations owned 52% of all corporate assets.
In the wake of 1886 decision, rise of Populist politics led to reaction in the courts favoring corporations, reversed somewhat in FDR era. (Allison)
"President Roosevelt, stymied by a hostile judiciary, failed in his threat to enlarge the Court in 1937. However, the same year produced a “spontaneous” shift favorable to New Deal policies when Justice Owen Roberts suddenly joined the four New Deal dissenters (Hughes, Brandeis, Cardozo and Stone). This time the Lochner vampire slept for several decades. It was an age of first principles and government regulation to prevent corporate abuse of state granted privileges.
It too came to an end. The 1970s brought in a flock of federal regulations
about clean air and water, pollution, occupational safety, and other matters
beneficial to the public. Upset about compliance costs and frightened by the likes of
reformer Ralph Nader, corporations sought the advice of Lewis Powell through the
auspices of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Powell, a corporate lawyer and soon to-
be Supreme Court Justice, advised them to seek recourse in the law. “American
business and the enterprise system have been affected as much by courts as by the
executive and legislative branches of government. Under our constitutional system,
especially with an activist-minded Supreme Court, the judiciary may be the most
important instrument for social, economic and political change.” (Nace, 2003, p.
156.)
With Powell on the bench, after confirmation hearings in which he portrayed
himself as a moderate, the Court turned right in First National Bank of Boston v.
Bellotti (1978). Writing for the majority, Powell opined that a bank had a
Fourteenth Amendment right to use its treasury funds to oppose a state
referendum for a state income tax. To limit the political speech of a corporation
would be to violate the First Amendment, because the latter was meant to protect
political speech, whether the speaker was a natural person or a corporation. The
important thing was to protect the listener’s right to hear a vigorous debate. As far
as corporations were concerned, that was what the First Amendment was about."
"Powell did not explain why it was not sufficient to protect the free speech of
corporate officers as ordinary individuals. He did not explain why my listener’s right
to receive information should give a corporate director the right to take from
shareholders the money needed to send me that information.
The dissenters were strong and clear, but only dissenters. Powell and his four
colleagues ignored nearly 200 years of constitutional limits on corporate participation
in elections because they chose to do so. However, they did not go all the way:
They withheld their blessing from corporate interference in the election of
candidates for political office. Referenda were fair game, but candidates taboo.
The Court went back and forth on this issue for several years, until another
election installed another conservative president, who turned the Court hard right
with two new appointments. The president was George W. Bush; the
appointments, John Roberts and Samuel Alito. This new Court headed off toward
the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and its own Lochner era (Constitutional
Accountability Center, 2010). It crossed the line in 2010 with its Citizens United
decision.
The new era started in the 2008 primary season with a video-on-demand
movie against Hillary Clinton. Citizens United was the corporation that planned to
release the film. The impediment was the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act (BCRA),
which kept corporations from spending treasury funds on corporate electioneering
ads for broadcast shortly before any federal election. In court, Citizens United asked
that its anti-Hillary film be exempted as a feature-length movie seen only by those
willing to pay. The case made its way to the U.S. Supreme Court.
The Court could have ruled narrowly, as it usually prefers to do, by ruling the
film an exception to the BCRA. However, the majority saw a chance to outdo
Powell with a constitutional right to transmute corporate gold into political power.
Dissenter Justice Stevens thought the majority had changed the facts of the
case itself so as to make new law. Nevertheless, the majority, including Chief Justice
John Roberts, who had seemed so respectful of precedent during his confirmation
hearings, went ahead and made new law. They simply denied any radical departure
from constitutional case law, and ruled that corporations are associations of citizens
entitled to full constitutional protection. Accordingly, campaign laws that target
corporations for special treatment violate the First Amendment. Critics saw the
ruling as an open door to foreign corporations willing to buy influence in American
elections." (Allison)
We can hope the Supreme Court reverses, we can try to get rid of some of them to hasten this (nearly happened in the case of Samuel Chase), or we can pass a Constitutional amendment to eliminate corporate personhood and return corporations to the state envisioned by Founding Fathers. At the very least, they should not be able to buy elections, [some current stats on SuperPacs?] and ideally we should be again able to fire them if they violate the public interest.
Bibliography
The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power, Joel Bakan
Patriot Acts Catherine Crier Threshold NY 2011
Unequal Protection: How Corporations Became "…
by Thom Hartmann
Life Inc by Douglass Rushkoff
“The Climate of Corporate Personhood” by James and Tomilea Allison
http://movetoamend.org/sites/default/files/ClimateOfCorpPersonhood.pdf
CALIFORNIA
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http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/06/28-12