Tag Archives: Corporations

September 29, 2014 · 11:59 pm

Further Proof Wal-Mart is Inherently Evil….

I’m almost speechless…

Walmart….

Haven’t stepped foot in one in 15 years and this is only one example of why….

There is so much more I could say, but this speaks for itself….

 

NEWARK, N.J. AP – Actor-comedian Tracy Morgan and other people in a limousine struck from behind by a Wal-Mart truck on a highway in June are at least partly to blame for their injuries because they werent wearing seatbelts, the company said in a court filing Monday.

The filing was made in federal court in response to a lawsuit Morgan filed in July over the accident, which killed his friend James McNair, who was accompanying the former “Saturday Night Live” and “30 Rock” star back from a show in Delaware.

Morgan spent several weeks in rehab with rib and leg injuries.Wal-Mart Stores Inc., based in Bentonville, Arkansas, said in the filing that the passengers injuries were caused “in whole or in part” by their “failure to properly wear an appropriate available seatbelt restraint device,” which it said constitutes unreasonable conduct.An attorney representing Morgan and the other plaintiffs called Wal-Marts contentions “surprising and appalling.”

More:   AOL.com Article – Wal-Mart: Morgan wasnt wearing seatbelt in crash.

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December 5, 2012 · 6:59 pm

Hostess Employees Get 8% Pay Cut, Management Gets $1.8m Bonuses

I don’t know why I continue to be amazed at stories like this…..

Corporate America is really big on “accountability” and “results driven performance.”

At the worker’s and Middle Management level….

Personally, I think these “bonuses” and Golden Parachutes for failed upper Management ought to be taxed at round the 99% rate if the Company is in Bankruptcy.  If the Company shows a profit, then regular tax rates should apply.  That would drive true accountability and performance based rewards at all levels….

I know, impossible to enforce, but I can dream of wage equality, can’t I?

As I said earlier, it’s really hard to fail making junk food for Americans…..

From AmericaBlog.com:

You remember Hostess.  Home of the Twinkie.  Gone bankrupt and closing down after the previous CEO tripled his salary, knowing full well they were on their way to the poor house.

Well here we go again, Lucy.

While it’s worth noting that current Hostess acting CEO Gregory Rayburn, to his credit, is not accepting a bonus, you have to ask yourself why anyone would be getting a bonus in the first place, with the company in bankruptcy.

Well.  It seems that at the same time the company went into bankruptcy, and now is cutting employees’ pay by 8%, just in time for Christmas, the management team finagled itself a whopping $1.8m bonus.  ”The money is intended as an incentive for 19 top-level managers to remain with the Twinkies and Ding Dongs maker to oversee its liquidation,” the LA Times reports. Right, because you wouldn’t want to lose any of the winners that oversaw a company going into bankruptcy.

via Hostess employees get 8% pay cut, management gets $1.8m bonuses.

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November 10, 2011 · 8:29 pm

Robert Reich: The Corporate Pledge of Allegiance

Another brilliant article from former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich….

Click the link at the bottom to see his actual proposed “pledge” for the Corporations:

Words of Wisdom from RobertReich.org:

Despite what the Supreme Court and Mitt Romney say, corporations aren’t people. (I’ll believe they are when Georgia and Texas start executing them.)

The Court thinks corporations have First Amendment rights to spend as much as they want on politics, and Romney (and most of his fellow Regressives) think they need lower taxes and fewer regulations in order to be competitive.

These positions are absurd on their face. By flooding our democracy with their shareholders’ money, big corporations are violating their shareholders’ First Amendment rights because shareholders aren’t consulted. They’re simultaneously suppressing the First Amendment rights of the rest of us because, given how much money they’re throwing around, we don’t have enough money to be heard.

And they’re indirectly giving non-Americans (that is, all their foreign owners, investors, and executives) a say in how Americans are governed. Pardon me for being old-fashioned but I didn’t think foreign money was supposed to be funneled into American elections.

Romney’s belief big corporations need more money and lower costs in order to create jobs is equally baffling. Big corporations are now sitting on $2 trillion of cash and enjoying near-record profits. The ratio of profits to wages is higher than it’s been since before the Great Depression. And a larger and larger portion of those profits are going to top executives. (CEO pay was 40 times the typical worker in the 1980s; it’s now upwards of 300 times.)

MORE:   Robert Reich (The Corporate Pledge of Allegiance).

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October 25, 2011 · 6:57 am

Peter Smirniotopoulos: Why Occupy Wall Street Scares the Shit Out of the Political Establishment and the MSM, and Why the Movement Shouldn’t Conform to Either

Great article over at Huffington Post that I encourage you to read…

Occupy Wall Street is the first significant genuine grassroots protest I’ve seen in years.  And yes, I am discounting the astroturf Tea Party.  They were financed by the corporate world.  Occupy Wall Street is organic.

That’s what makes it so scary to the Powers That Be and the Corporate owned Press….

I encourage you to click through and read Mr Smirniotopoulos’ entire article, after this brief excerpt:

So, what’s “the thing” about Occupy Wall Street that truly scares the shit out of the political establishment and the MSM? It is that they cannot *control* that which they truly do not understand. And even if the MSM and the political establishment take the time to come to understand Occupy Wall Street, they will never be able to manipulate it for their political gain. And that is a truly scary prospect for them.

There are plenty of talking heads in the MSM and in both political parties offering their avuncular advice to Occupy Wall Street; to clarify and simplify its message; to create a hierarchy of leadership; to anoint spokes models armed with talking points who can appear on–you guessed it–news and political talk shows with panels of political operatives from both parties, as seen on every MSM network. And to what end? For the convenience of the MSM so they don’t have to actually learn what’s really going on in Zuccotti Park; so they can continue to overlook how an organic democratic process actually works; to make it that much easier for the Democrats and the Republicans, respectively, to deify or demonize the movement for their own political gain. None of these outcomes, of course, will advance the cause of Occupy Wall Street and the Occupy movement.

Occupy Wall Street and the nationwide and global Occupy movement it has spawned should continue to be what it is: A messy yet remarkably effective example of what real democracy looks like. Because, after all, isn’t that the most important message of all here? That people believe in government by the people and for the people, and they plan on taking it back. NOW.

via Peter Smirniotopoulos: Why Occupy Wall Street Scares the Shit Out of the Political Establishment and the MSM, and Why the Movement Shouldn’t Conform to Either.

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October 24, 2011 · 8:04 pm

The 147 Companies That Control Everything

Fascinating article in Forbes….

Confirms a lot of suspicions and breeds more….

This is why Occupy Wall Street is so important….

 

Three systems theorists at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich have taken a database listing 37 million companies and investors worldwide and analyzed all 43,060 transnational corporations and share ownerships linking them. They built a model of who owns what and what their revenues are and mapped the whole edifice of economic power.They discovered that global corporate control has a distinct bow-tie shape, with a dominant core of 147 firms radiating out from the middle. Each of these 147 own interlocking stakes of one another and together they control 40% of the wealth in the network. A total of 737 control 80% of it all. The top 20 are at the bottom of the post. This is, say the paper’s authors, the first map of the structure of global corporate control.The #occupy movement will eat this up as evidence for massive redistribution of wealth. The New Scientist talked to one systems theorist who is “disconcerted” at the level of interconnectedness, but not surprised.

MORE:   The 147 Companies That Control Everything – Forbes.

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September 1, 2011 · 4:00 pm

US Firms Paid More to CEOs Than Taxes in 2010

This just isn’t right….

From CNBC:

 

Twenty-five of the 100 highest paid U.S. CEOs earned more last year than their companies paid in federal income tax, a pay study said on Wednesday. It also found many of the companies spent more on lobbying than they did on taxes.

At a time when lawmakers are facing tough choices in a quest to slash the national debt, the report from the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS), a left-leaning Washington think tank, quickly hit a nerve.

After reading it, Democratic Representative Elijah Cummings, ranking member of the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, called for hearings on executive compensation.

In a letter to that committee’s chairman, Republican Darrell Issa, Cummings asked “to examine the extent to which the problems in CEO compensation that led to the economic crisis continue to exist today”.

He also asked “why CEO pay and corporate profits are skyrocketing while worker pay stagnates and unemployment remains unacceptably high”, and “the extent to which our tax code may be encouraging these growing disparities”.

In putting together its study, IPS chose to compare CEO pay to current U.S. taxes paid, excluding foreign and state and local taxes that may have been paid, as well as deferred taxes which can often be far larger than current taxes paid.

The group’s rationale was that deferred taxes may or may not be paid, and that current U.S. taxes paid are the closest approximation in public documents to what companies may have actually written a check for last year.

$16.7 Million Average

Compensation for the 25 CEOs with pay surpassing corporate taxes averaged $16.7 million, according to the study, compared to a $10.8 million average for S&P 500 [.SPX  1219.64    6.72  (+0.55%)   ] CEOs. Among the companies topping the IPS list: eBay [EBAY  30.885    -0.065  (-0.21%)   ] whose CEO John Donahoe made $12.4 million, but which reported a $131 million refund on its 2010 current U.S.taxes.

via Fiscal Policy: US Firms Paid More to CEOs Than Taxes in 2010: Study – CNBC.

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August 11, 2011 · 7:15 pm

Mitt Romney Says Corporations ‘Are People, My Friend’

This is what’s wrong with the Republican Party- They not only think Corporations are people, they think they are VIP’s!

Much more important than Middle Class People….

How much longer are real people going to listen to this foolishness?

I encourage you to click the link to the full article and the video.  From The Huffington Post:

WASHINGTON — Speaking to an occasionally rowdy crowd two days before the Ames Straw poll, Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney made what seems likely to become a much-discussed flub, declaring to a group of Iowans that “corporations are people.”

Pressed by an attendee at the Iowa State Fair on Thursday as to why he was focusing on entitlement reforms as a means of deficit reduction over asking corporations to share part of the burden, the GOP frontrunner shot back:

“Corporations are people, my friend… of course they are. Everything corporations earn ultimately goes to the people. Where do you think it goes? Whose pockets? Whose pockets? People’s pockets. Human beings my friend.”

The comment was immediately pounced on by Democrats, who saw it as another example of Romney being uncomfortable on the stump and inartful in his attempts to come off as an everyday pol.

“This is what Mitt Romney is going to run on? Corporations are people? Really?” said Democratic National Committee Communications Director Brad Woodhouse. “There’s a great message for people struggling to get by and trying to make ends meet. Don’t complain — corporations are people too!”

Speaking at the Des Moines Register soapbox, Romney was also interrupted by a heckler who asked if if he supported “scrapping the Social Security payroll cap so that rich people pay their fair share into the trust fund?”

Romney responded, “There was a time in this country where we didn’t celebrate attacking people based on their success. We didn’t go after people because they were successful. I’ve watched this president go across the country attacking people, and I… and I am… if you want to speak, you can speak. But right now it’s my turn, so let me continue.”

The presidential contender went on to underscore his bottom line. “If you don’t like my answer, you can vote for someone else,” he said.

via Mitt Romney Heckled, Says Corporations ‘Are People, My Friend’ (VIDEO).

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May 25, 2011 · 8:46 am

Psychopaths in High Places

This explains so much…

Fr0m NPR:

Some psychologists have a theory that many of the world’s ills can be blamed on psychopaths in high places.

“Robert Hare, the eminent Canadian psychologist who invented the psychopath checklist, … recently announced that you’re four times more likely to find a psychopath at the top of the corporate ladder than you are walking around in the janitor’s office,” journalist Jon Ronson tells Guy Raz, host of weekends on All Things Considered.

Ronson is the author of a new book, The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry. The titular test is called the PCL-R. Invented by Hare, it’s a checklist of characteristics common to psychopaths: things like glib and superficial charm, grandiosity, manipulative behavior and lack of remorse.

Picture a psychopath and you might think of Norman Bates. But Ronson says successful businessmen can also score high on the checklist. While researching his book, Ronson visited the Florida home of Al Dunlap — known as “Chainsaw Al” — who as CEO of appliance maker Sunbeam was notorious for his gleeful fondness for firing people and shutting down factories.

“So I turned up at his house, and it was full of sculptures of predatory animals,” Ronson says. “And he immediately started to talk about how he believed in the predatory spirit, which was word for word what Bob Hare writes about in the checklist: Look out for their belief in the predatory spirit.”

But Dunlap managed to turn the psychopath test on its head, Ronson says.

“He admitted to many, many items on the checklist, but redefined them as leadership positives,” he says. “So ‘manipulation’ was another way of saying ‘leadership.’ ‘Grandiose sense of self worth’ — which would have been a hard one for him to deny because he was standing underneath a giant oil painting of himself — was, you know, ‘You’ve got to like yourself if you’re going to be a success.'”

via A Psychopath Walks Into A Room. Can You Tell? : NPR.

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March 29, 2011 · 6:43 pm

GE Pays No Incomes Taxes and Now Wants Workers to Make Concessions | AlterNet

Amazing…

It seems there is no sense of shame anymore…

And why should there be when no one holds anyone accountable?

This has all crossed from the absurd to the unbelievable…

The message coming from Washington can’t be taken any other way than that Corporations are not only “people”, they are more important than most people….

And this is barely being reported on MSNBC or NBC– because GE owns them…

You’ve likely already read Lauren Kelley’s piece from last week about how GE is milking the system like you’ve never seen before. The company made $14.2 billion, $5.1 billion of which came from the US, but, through some creative bookkeeping, GE paid no US taxes. That’s right, none. And to make matters worse they actually claimed a $3.2 billion tax benefit. So, that means we owed them money!

Can this story get any worse?

Apparently, yes. Mike Elk reports, “After not paying any taxes and making huge profits, ThinkProgress has learned that General Electric is expected to ask its nearly 15,000 unionized employees in the United States to make major concessions.”

via GE Pays No Incomes Taxes and Now Wants Workers to Make Concessions | AlterNet.

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March 29, 2011 · 6:36 pm

The Real Story of Our Economy: Why Our Standard of Living Has Stalled Out | | AlterNet

These facts cannot be repeated often enough…

Especially since the Corporate media chooses to ignore them…

The average real wage of the non-supervisory production workers (which comprise 82.4 percent of total private non-farm employees) actually declined by 9 percent between 1975 and 2010.

Meanwhile the top 1 percent saw their share of national income rise from 8 percent in 1975 to 23.5 percent in 2005

More amazing still, the wage gap between the top 100 CEOs and the average worker jumped from $45 to $1 in 1970 to an unbelievable $1,723 to $1 in 2006

Today after the crash, financial incomes are so enormous that in 2010, John Paulson, the top hedge fund manager, earned $2.4 million an HOUR (not a misprint), and his tax rate is less than yours

via The Real Story of Our Economy: Why Our Standard of Living Has Stalled Out | | AlterNet.

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