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US CORPORATIONS NEWSLETTER #10,  JUNE 7, 2020. 

 Compiled by Dick Bennett for a Culture of Peace and Justice. 

 (#1 August 7, 2008; #2 Feb. 11, 2010; #3 July 21, 2011; #4 Oct. 9, 2011; #5 Nov. 1, 2011; #6 May 5, 2012; #7 June 11, 2012; #8 Dec. 12, 2012; #9 May 5, 2013).

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rightorepair.org, digitalrighttorepair.org, Motor Vehicle Owners' Right to Repair Act, iFixit for free repair guides and more.

THE RACE FOR WHAT'S LEFT

The Global Scramble for the World's Last Resources

Michael T. Klare.  Picador, Macmillan, 2012.

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Praise for The Race for What's Left

The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empire by Tim Wu.     It is easy to forget that every development in the history of the American information industry — from the telephone to radio to film — once existed in an open and chaotic marketplace inhabited by entrepreneurs and utopians, just as the Internetdoes today. Each of these, however, grew to be dominated by a monopolist or cartel. In this pathbreaking book, Tim Wu asks: will the Internet follow the same fate.  Could the Web — the entire flow of American information — come to be ruled by a corporate leviathan in possession of “the master switch”? Analyzing the strategic maneuvers of today’s great information powers — Apple, Google, and an eerily resurgent AT&T — Wu uncovers a time-honored pattern in which invention begets industry and industry begets empire. He shows how a battle royal for the Internet’s future is brewing, and this is one war we dare not tune out. “Fascinating, balanced, and rigorous—a tour de force.” — The New YorkReview of Books “Entertaining. . . . There’s a sharp insight and a surprising fact on nearly every page of Wu’s masterful survey.” — The Boston Globe

Corporate Tax Breaks: How Congress Rigs the Rules

Robert Borosage, Op-Ed, NationofChange, April 29, 2014: This week, the House Ways and Means Committee is poised to demonstrate exactly how the rules are rigged. On Tuesday, the committee will begin to mark up a series of corporate tax breaks – known as “extenders” because they have been extended regularly every year or two for over a decade. Only now the committee plans to make many of them permanent, at the cost of an estimated three hundred billion dollars over ten years. And it does not plan to pay for them by closing other corporate loopholes or raising rates. READ  |  DISCUSS  |  SHARE

	Dear Dick, This week, while the rest of us dutifully sat down to pay our fair share in taxes, some of the most profitable corporations in the country avoided paying billions by exploiting complicated corporate tax loopholes. Luckily, there is some hope. President Obama can close some of the most egregious loopholes through executive action—without the approval of Congress. Tell President Obama to close corporate tax loopholes through executive action. In 1952, the corporate income tax accounted for about 32 percent of all federal tax revenue. Today, despite record-breaking profits, corporate taxes bring in just 11 percent. Meanwhile, some members of Congress are trying to convince us that we need cuts to Social Security, Medicare, food stamps and other programs that millions of Americans rely on. We know better. Click here to read more about the corporate tax loopholes that are robbing American taxpayers and to demand that President Obama take action. All the best, Sarah Arnold

CEO pay revealed, WRITE SEC

Claiborne D., SumOfUs.org us@sumofus.org via uark.edu
to James

Corporations will have to start disclosing how much CEOs are paid compared to the typical worker if the SEC implements a new rule. But corporate lobbyists are fighting like mad to stop it. Tell the SEC to resist corporate pressure and stick to its plan to require disclosure.

Rise Up or Die

May 19, 2013

Illustration by Mr. Fish

The World As It Is: Dispatches on the Myth of Human Progress.   A collection of Truthdig Columns by Chris Hedges.   https://www.indiebound.org/book/9781568586403?aff=Truthdig   Keep up with Chris Hedges’ latest columns, interviews, tour dates and more atwww.truthdig.com/chris_hed

Evening News Ignores Supreme Court Decision That Protects Corporate Immunity By Sergio Munoz, Media Matters for America, 07 July 13.   vening cable and network news have almost completely ignored the Supreme Court's sweeping decision in American Express v. Italian Colors, a 5-3 decision that further privatizes and restricts access to justice for everyday Americans by allowing corporations to immunize themselves from judicial review.

DISCLOSURE MOVEMENT TO END SECRET POLITICAL CAMPAIGNING

CEOs Play Hide and Seek by Jim Hightower.  The Progressive (July 2013).

http://www.progressive.org/sites/default/files/mag/pdfs/theprogressive_web_july_2013.pdf

How front groups for corporations and wealthy individuals “pour unlimited sums of corporate cash into elections without ever disclosing the names of their funders.”  --Dick

Cartoon Corporations & Gov't.jpg 70K   View   Download

Dot Earth Did 90 Companies 'Cause the Climate Crisis of the 21st Century'? By ANDREW C. REVKIN Who’s most accountable for the vast emissions of greenhouse gases so far — the companies that extracted the fuels or the citizens using them? CORPORATE LYING:  SOME ADVERTISING EXCEEDS CHICANERY Big Food Companies Want to Call GMO Foods "Natural"  John Upton, Grist, RSN Dec. 23, 2013  Upton reports: "Is genetically engineered food natural? The Grocery Manufacturers Association, a trade group representing some of the world's biggest food and food-related companies, including ConAgra Foods, Bayer CropScience, and the Coca-Cola Company, thinks so."  READ MORE OPPOSING CORPORATE RIGHT TO SUE GOVERNMENT “The Global Fight Against Corporate Rule” Activists are challenging rules that grant corporations the right to sue governments. Robin Broad and John Cavanagh  January 14, 2014   |    This article appeared in the February 3, 2014 edition of The Nation. ·         ·           A protester holds a sign that reads in Spanish “No to mining” at a protest against Canada’s gold and silver mining operations in northern El Salvador, outside Canada’s Consulate office in San Salvador. (AP Photo/Luis Romero) Over the past several decades, multinational corporate Goliaths have helped to write and rewrite hundreds of rules skewing tax, trade, investment and other policies in their favor. The extraordinary damage these policies have caused has become increasingly apparent to the communities and governments most directly affected by them. This, in turn, has strengthened the potential of a movement that’s emerging to try to reverse the momentum. But just like David with his slingshot, the local, environmental and government leaders seeking to revise rules to favor communities and the planet must pick their battles carefully.  One of the most promising of these battles takes aim at an egregious set of agreements that allow corporations to sue national governments. Until three decades ago, governments could pass laws to protect consumers, workers, health, the environment and domestic firms with little threat of outside legal challenge from corporations. All that changed when corporations started acquiring the “right” to sue governments over actions—including public interest regulations—that reduce the value of their investments. These rights first appeared in little-known bilateral investment treaties. Twenty years ago, corporate lawyers embedded them in the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Today, more than 3,000 trade and investment agreements and even some national investment laws grant foreign investors these powers.  The Obama administration is attempting to insert similar anti-democratic investor protections in new trade and investment agreements with countries that border the Pacific and with the European Union. Hoping to expedite the so-called Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), congressional leaders introduced fast- track trade promotion legislation on January 9 that would severely limit Congress’s ability to amend such agreements. The widely anticipated move set off a storm of protest from unions, environmentalists, liberal members of Congress and others, and will likely remain a high-profile fight in the coming weeks. The forces aligned against these proposed agreements are not alone. Activists across the globe are developing creative and increasingly effective strategies to push back against investor assaults on their communities, environment and national sovereignty. An important front has opened up in El Salvador, where a multinational firm is using investor powers to sue the government over the “right” to mine gold. This case represents an extreme assault on democracy, as local communities, the majority of the Salvadoran public and the Salvadoran government all oppose the gold mining. But what’s happening in El Salvador is not an anomaly. There are crucial battles brewing in several other Latin American countries—including Argentina, Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador—as well as in other parts of the developing world.  At the very least, these struggles should give the Obama administration pause as it considers the next round of trade agreements. But what makes them so strategic—and promising—is that powerful citizen groups are persuading governments to take up the challenge. As they do, they are building momentum in a broad global fight against investor rights.  * * * Salvadoran land sits atop a wide belt of gold running down the middle of Central America, a vein that has enticed profiteers for more than a century. In the early 1900s, the US miner Charles Butters began plundering the region using a lucrative process that employed cyanide to separate gold from rock. Within years, Butters was making millions. But what he seems not to have contemplated—and what the farmers in these parts know well—is that the area is vulnerable to earthquakes and tropical storms, both of which make it difficult to contain the toxic chemicals used to mine gold. And no one appears to have known that the heavily concentrated sulfides found in the rock that often surrounds gold become sulfuric acid when they are exposed to the elements during the extraction process. The acid leaches other toxic materials into the soil and water. In July 2012, at the San Sebastián site of the mine that Butters opened more than a century ago, the Salvadoran environment ministry found levels of cyanide and iron that were through the roof. The areas affected by gold mining will remain contaminated for centuries unless the companies are kept out and forced to pay for costly cleanup. Yet El Salvador is not suing the mining firms for such destruction. Instead, in 2009, at a tribunal housed in an imposing World Bank building just a few blocks from the White House, firms sued the Salvadoran government for not letting them mine. One of them, Canada’s Pacific Rim Mining Corporation, is demanding either that it be allowed to mine in northern El Salvador or that the government pay it over $300 million in damages, an amount equivalent to more than 1 percent of the Salvadoran economy.  Over the course of several trips we have taken in recent years to learn about the local movement against mining, corn and bean farmers have led us up and down the hills of northern El Salvador, guiding us through the streams that feed the LempaRiver. This river, which flows from Guatemala through El Salvador and then along the border with Honduras before it plunges south into the Pacific Ocean, provides water to more than half the country’s people. One of our guides was Miguel Rivera, a local “pro-water” activist whose older brother Marcelo, a popular educator, was brutally assassinated in 2009 after organizing many in his community against gold mining. Miguel and his colleagues brought us through different parts of the Lempa watershed to show us pollution from agribusiness, factories, hog farms and gold mining. Along the way, Miguel, who has become a trained water expert, often paused to test it for toxins and other substances. We visited the site of Butters’s San Sebastián mine, which has been closed for years but continues to leach toxic substances into the streams. Some days, the water was Kool-Aid orange; on others, it was Ocean Spray cranberry.  As the prices of gold and other metals skyrocketed after 2000, multinational firms like Pacific Rim rushed to apply for permits to mine in resource-rich regions like the Salvadoran province of Cabañas, where Miguel lives. Initially, the farmers of this poor region were intrigued by the prospect of good jobs, but a number of them visited the mines in neighboring Honduras and returned with horror stories of disease, polluted rivers and few actual jobs. A community activist told us, “We learned how much water the mining companies would use to mine, and water became a big issue. Mining uses a lot of it, and we had little.” Some visited the old Butters site in San Sebastián, where the orange and cranberry waters sealed their opposition.  Local activism on the proposed Pacific Rim mine—including cultural work led by Marcelo Rivera and a radio station run by local youth—spread in Cabañas and across El Salvador. Farmers, students, people of faith, lawyers and human-rights activists formed the National Roundtable Against Metallic Mining, and won over politicians and even the mainstream Catholic church. By 2007, a national poll showed that more than 62 percent of Salvadorans opposed metals mining. As Miguel Rivera and others continually stressed to us, the slogan of the Roundtable was “We can live without gold, but we can’t live without water.”  When the progressive FMLN party won the presidency in 2009, the newly elected president, Mauricio Funes, pledged not to issue mining permits during his five-year term, a promise he has kept. In other words, El Salvador has quietly become the first nation on earth to stop destructive gold mining.  ·         1 ·         2 ·         3 ·         next › ·         last » Robin Broad and John Cavanagh  January 14, 2014   |    This article appeared in the February 3, 2014 edition of The Nation.

The Rise of the American Corporate Security State: Six Reasons to Be Afraid  by Beatrice Edwards. 

1. Average citizens are subject to ever-expanding surveillance and data collection by the government-corporate complex.
    
2. Control of information by the government-corporate complex is expanding.
    
3. The separation of powers established by the Constitution is eroding.   Rights guaranteed by constitutional amendments are becoming irrelevant.  Reporting a crime may be a crime, and informing the public of the truth is treason.
    
4. The government-corporate surveillance complex is consolidating. What has become a confidential but informal collaboration now seeks to legalize its special status.
    
5. Financial reforms enacted after the 2008 crisis are inoperable and ineffective because of inadequate investigations and intensive corporate lobbying.
    
6. Systemic corruption and a fundamental conflict of interest are driving us toward the precipice of new economic crises.