Get Up, Stand Up - A guide to taking on the corporatocracy.
The Corporate Whistleblower's Survival Guide: From Erin Brockovich to Enron, whistleblowers who "challenge abuses of power that betray the public trust" have proven to be a necessity in modern business culture. Recent federal legislation in finance and health reform have cemented legal protections and mechanisms for whistleblowing. This book provides a thorough guide and history to the whistleblower's legal rights. With extensive legal texts, sample letters, resources, and information on upcoming whistleblower reforms.
But not for long, sucker. I'm right behind you.
Whatever happened to anti-trust laws?
Washington Post - As President Obama attended the 70th anniversary D-Day events in France on Friday, the White House announced he plans to nominate Jane Hartley as the U.S. top envoy in Paris. The Hartley pick has been rumored for a while. She is a top Democratic fundraiser, raising at least $500,000 for Obama in 2012. She's the chief executive of the Observatory Group, an economic and political advisory firm in Manhattan. Hartley and her husband Ralph Schlosstein, an investment banker, are a power couple in the finance world, who have held top dollar fundraisers for the president.
@RBReich - Companies will act legally only when risk of detection times amount of fine is larger than profit from illegality.
Why are big corporations so unpatriotic?
Firedog Lake - According to a new report from Citizens for Tax Justice and the U.S. Public Interest Research Group, the majority of America's Fortune 500 companies are cheating the tax man to the amount of approximately $90 billion by using offshore tax havens. That cheating leaves the rest of US taxpayers on the hook to make up the difference.
Senator Bernie Sanders: 93% of all new income generated between 2009 and 2010 went to the top 1%.
Twenty-five of the 100 highest paid U.S. CEOs earned more last year than their companies paid in federal income tax. The Institute for Policy Studies said it also found many of the companies spent more on lobbying than they did on taxes.
The corporations that buy our elections hire more people overseas than in U.S.
Question of the day: Punk Patriot: If corporations are people, does that make shareholders slaveowners? Shouldn't that be challanged on the grounds of the 13th amendment?
ARE THE TELECOMS OUT TO KILL TRADITIONAL LAND LINES?
Tom Ely, World Socialist - In 1970, fresh from the Masters program of the Harvard Business School, Paulson entered the Nixon administration, working first as staff assistant to the assistant secretary of defense. In 1972-73, Paulson worked as office assistant to John Erlichman, assistant to the president for domestic affairs. Erlichman was one of the key figures involved in organizing President Richard Nixon's notorious "plumbers" unit that carried out illegal covert operations against the president's political opponents, including espionage, blackmail, and revenge. Ehlichman resigned in 1973, and in 1975 he was convicted of obstruction of justice, perjury, and conspiracy, and was imprisoned for 18 months.
Utilizing his connections, Paulson went to work for Goldman Sachs in 1974. In a 2007 feature, the British newspaper the Guardian wrote, "Not only was he well connected enough to get the job [in the Nixon White House], but well connected enough to resign in the thick of the Watergate scandal without ever getting caught up in the fallout. He went straight to Goldman back home in Illinois."
Paulson rose through the ranks of Goldman Sachs, becoming a partner in 1982, co-head of investment banking in 1990, chief operating officer in 1994. In 1998 he forced out his co-chairman Jon Corzine "in what amounted to a coup," according to New York Times economics correspondent Floyd Norris, and took over the post of CEO.
Goldman Sachs is perhaps the single best-connected Wall Street firm. Its executives routinely go in and out of top government posts. Corzine went on to become US senator from New Jersey and is now the state's governor. Corzine's predecessor, Stephen Friedman, served in the Bush administration as assistant to the president for economic policy and as chairman of the National Economic Council. Friedman's predecessor as Goldman Sachs CEO, Robert Rubin, served as chairman of the NEC and later treasury secretary under Bill Clinton.
Agence France Press, in a 2006 article on Paulson's appointment, "Has Goldman Sachs Taken Over the Bush Administration?" noted that, in addition to Paulson, "the president's chief of staff, Josh Bolten, and the chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, Jeffery Reuben, are Goldman alumni."
"But the flow goes both ways," the article continued, "Goldman recently hired Robert Zoellick, who stepped down as the US deputy secretary of state, and Faryar Shirzad, who worked as one of Bush's national security advisors.". . .
Paulson, according to a celebratory 2006 Business Week article entitled "Mr. Risk Goes to Washington," was "one of the key architects of a more daring Wall Street, where securities firms are taking greater and greater chances in their pursuit of profits." Under Paulson's watch, that meant "taking on more debt: $100 billion in long-term debt in 2005, compared with about $20 billion in 1999. It means placing big bets on all sorts of exotic derivatives and other securities."
According to the International Herald Tribune, Paulson "was one of the first Wall Street leaders to recognize how drastically investment banks could enhance their profitability by betting with their own capital instead of acting as mere intermediaries." Paulson "stubbornly [asserted] Goldman's right to invest in, advise on and finance deals, regardless of potential conflicts.". . .
ARS TECHNICA - After commissioning a 2005 study from LEK Consulting that showed collegiate file-swappers were responsible for 44 percent of movie studio "losses" to piracy, the MPAA then used the report it bought to bludgeon Congress into considering legislation to address this massive problem. Now the MPAA admits that the report's conclusions weren't even close to being right; collegiate piracy accounts for only 15 percent of "losses." Oops. And that's assuming you believe the rest of the data.
Retail workers in the U.S. are making $4.5 billion less each year due to Wal-Mart's presence, according to a new study by the University of California's Center for Labor Research and Education.
The study focuses on stores that opened between 1992 and 2000 and concludes, "Opening a single Wal-Mart store lowers the average retail wage in the surrounding county between 0.5 and 0.9 percent."
Wal-Mart's presence pushes down wages in two ways. "First is the substitution effect: a new Wal-Mart store replaces better paying jobs with lower-paying ones," the authors explain. "A second factor is competition: Wal-Mart pushes down wages in competing businesses."
Not only did Wal-Mart lower average wage rates, but "every new Wal-Mart in a county reduced the combined or aggregate earnings of retail workers by around 1.5 percent." Because this number is higher than the reduction in average wages, it indicates that Wal-Mart not only lowered pay rates, but also reduced the total number of retail jobs. That finding is consistent with a major study published earlier this year that found that the opening of a Wal-Mart store causes a net loss of about 150 retail jobs.
"At the national level, our study concludes that in 2000, total earnings of retail workers nationwide were reduced by $4.5 billion due to Wal-Mart's presence," they find.
Most of these losses were concentrated in metropolitan areas. Although Wal-Mart is often associated with rural areas, three-quarters of the stores it built in the 1990s were in metropolitan counties.
Another new study from the UC Center for Labor Research and Education indicates that Wal-Mart could substantially raise its workers' earnings, particularly those living at or near poverty, with little impact on most shoppers. "Living Wage Policies and Wal-Mart" analyzes the effects of instituting a $10 minimum wage at Wal-Mart. More than half of the retailer's employees (56%) currently earn less than $10 an hour.
"We find that 46.3 percent of the pay increase would go to workers in families with total incomes below 200 percent of the federal poverty level," the study finds. "These poor and low-income workers could expect to earn an additional $1,020 to $4,640 a year."
CNN - The most sought-after corporate board members are those who curry favor with fellow directors, not those who are active in standing up for shareholders, a new academic study has concluded. . . The study by business professors James Westphal of the University of Michigan and Ithai Stern of Northwestern University suggests that directors - who are supposed to be watchdogs for shareholders - still are not independent enough. . .
"Our findings indicate that directors who engage in monitoring and control behavior are effectively punished in the director labor market," Westphal and Stern wrote. "They are less likely to be selected onto additional boards, and thus they are less likely to become central in the board network" that exists throughout corporate America.