Veritas. Politicks and moronity. International laws and relations. Facebook and Microsoft help fund rightwing lobby network, report finds | World news. Some of America’s largest technology and telecoms companies, including Facebook, Microsoft and AT&T, are backing a network of self-styled “free-market thinktanks” promoting a radical rightwing agenda in states across the nation, according to a new report by a lobbying watchdog.
The Center for Media and Democracy asserts that the State Policy Network (SPN), an umbrella group of 64 thinktanks based in each of the 50 states, is acting as a largely beneath-the-radar lobbying machine for major corporations and rightwing donors. Its policies include cutting taxes, opposing climate change regulations, advocating reductions in labour protections and the minimum wage, privatising education, restricting voter rights and lobbying for the tobacco industry. The network’s $83.2m annual warchest comes from major donors. More surprisingly, backers also include Facebook and Microsoft, as well as the telecoms giants AT&T, Time Warner Cable and Verizon.
I was a liberal mole at Fox News: From Bill O’Reilly to Roger Ailes, here’s all the inside dope. People would often ask me about how Fox pushes a message. And I would always tell them the message isn’t so much pushed as it is pulled, gravitationally, with Roger Ailes as the sun at the center of the solar system; his vice presidents were the forces of gravity that kept the planet-size anchors and executive producers in a tight orbit; then all the lesser producers and PAs were moons and satellites and debris of varying sizes. An organizational flow chart at Fox would be tough to draw up, as title alone was not the ultimate signifier of status.
Sometimes the anchors outranked their executive producers, as was the case with “The O’Reilly Factor.” (In fact, Bill had procured an EP title for himself, but he outranked the two other EPs on the show, both Stan, who oversaw TV, radio, and the website, and Gayle, who focused on television and also served as a fact-checker.) Realistically, there was tremendous pressure to hew closely to the company line. Here’s how it went: 9:30 a.m. 10:00 a.m. Andy Haldane Praises Brown-Vitter Bill To End 'Too Big To Fail' A senior Bank of England official influential in global policy debates has praised proposed U.S. legislation that would forever end the perception that the biggest banks are too big to fail, providing support for a bipartisan bill that forces the biggest American banks to either make themselves safer or shrink. Andy Haldane, Bank of England executive director for financial stability, said legislation introduced by Sens.
Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) and David Vitter (R-La.) "has attractions" that may have long-term appeal. The bill, dubbed the "Terminating Bailouts for Taxpayer Fairness Act" and introduced April 24, would force banks with more than $500 billion in assets to fund at least 15 percent of their balance sheets with equity capital. If implemented, the largest U.S. banks would have to raise more than $1 trillion in fresh capital, on top of the tens of billions of dollars in capital they've raised over the past year to meet impending requirements. The U.S. Amazon Under Fire Over Corporation Tax Avoidance. The UK arm of internet shopping giant Amazon paid corporation tax of just £2.4 million last year despite earning sales of £4.2 billion.
Details of the American firm's tax contribution were revealed in filings at Companies House and come as internet group Google is today due to be quizzed by MPs about its tax bill. The revelation follows uproar over the tax paid by other multinational giants including Starbucks and Apple. Google vice president Matt Brittin is due to appear before the Commons Public Accounts Committee months after it last quizzed the firm about its taxes.
Chairwoman of the committee Margaret Hodge said she plans to haul Amazon back to explain its financial dealings after its company filings showed Amazon.co.uk paid tax of £3.2 million in 2012, on sales of £320 million. The Seattle-based group told has investors its 2012 UK sales were £4.2 billion. Amazon received UK Government grants of £2.5 million last year, beating its corporation tax payments. Why US firms are turning to Mexico, leaving China behind. 2 May 2013Last updated at 19:19 ET By Alastair Leithead BBC News, Tijuana Footbal fever in Tijuana A giant statue of a hairless Mexican dog wearing a superhero cape greets Tijuana football club fans arriving for a Latin American showdown. The Xolos soccer team (pronounced show-lows) take their name from the breed of dog standing on its hind legs atop the still-unfinished stadium - it just happens to be the club owner's favourite pet.
Barking blasts from the speakers and fans go crazy with trumpets and red and black flags as the current Mexican champions take on a Brazilian team in a Latin American championship match. Mexico is not only confident - it's now playing in the big leagues. Chinese wages quadruple After years of violence linked to the drugs war there is finally something to cheer about in Tijuana: a successful football team that did not even exist six years ago, a lower murder rate and an economy on the rise. The Xolo looms over the football stadium in Tijuana “Start Quote. Koch Brothers Making Play for Tribune’s Newspapers. Tannen Maury/European Pressphoto Agency Tribune’s newspapers, including The Chicago Tribune, have caught the interest of a number of suitors. The first two pieces of the strategy — educating grass-roots activists and influencing politics — were not surprising, given the money they have given to policy institutes and political action groups.
But the third one was: media. Other than financing a few fringe libertarian publications, the Kochs have mostly avoided media investments. By early May, the Tribune Company is expected to send financial data to serious suitors in what will be among the largest sales of newspapers by circulation in the country. The papers, valued at roughly $623 million, would be a financially diminutive deal for Koch Industries, the energy and manufacturing conglomerate based in Wichita, Kan., with annual revenue of about $115 billion. Politically, however, the papers could serve as a broader platform for the Kochs’ laissez-faire ideas.
10 Insanely Overpaid Nonprofit Execs. Nonprofits take your donations and give them to a good cause, right? To be fair, most do, while paying their employees competitive but modest salaries. But a handful of nonprofits pay their top executives shockingly high salaries that could make their for-profit corporate counterparts jealous. PHOTO GALLERY: The 10 Highest-Paid Nonprofit Execs While you may be scrambling to make your annual charitable contributions, nonprofit executive compensation is rising faster than inflation, though not by much. Median pay for executives at the largest charities and foundations increased 3.8 percent in 2011 to $429,512, according to a September report from the Chronicle of Philanthropy, whereas the inflation rate was about 3 percent during the year. More from the Fiscal Times: - 10 Insanely Overpaid Public Employees - 10 Insanely Overpaid Public College Presidents - 7 Places Where the Wealthy Hide Their Money.
Former Walmart District Manager Accuses Company of Widespread Inventory Manipulation. A Chicago Walmart on Black Friday. (Reuters/John Gress) Also by the Author The state’s unprecedented cuts to benefits for the jobless are leaving families stranded without money for food, transportation and housing. Organizers have found a new approach to promoting workers’ rights at the retail giant. In 1996, Sylvester Johnson left his post as a commanding officer in the US Army and began a career managing logistics at Walmart’s corporate headquarters in Bentonville, Arkansas. Instead, Johnson believes he was ultimately terminated because he is black.
“We're talking about hiding tens or hundreds of millions of dollars in losses here—inflating the profits of a store, a district, a region, a division and ultimately the entire company,” Johnson told The Nation. Johnson’s case, which goes to trial on April 22 in a North Carolina federal district court, seeks to prove that he was treated differently than his white counterparts. Walmart rejects Johnson’s allegations. Ponzi Scheme Used Tax Havens To Shuffle Investors' Money. Bribes for Venezuelan officials were funneled through tax havens, court filings claim. Francisco Illarramendi often called on Moris Beracha when he needed an infusion of cash. The Venezuelan-born Illarramendi was a manager of a Connecticut-based investment advisory firm. Beracha was a Venezuelan financier close to the Hugo Chavez government who, a lawsuit against him claims, could produce multi-million-dollar advances of cash with relative ease — for the right price. On Nov. 2, 2007, Beracha emailed Illarramendi instructions to deposit more than $10 million — Beracha’s share of profits from a transaction — into three HSBC bank accounts in Switzerland, via an HSBC account in New York.
“Dude, I am your biggest producer hahahahaha,” Beracha wrote in Spanish before he sent the message off to Illarramendi. The scheme collapsed in 2011, causing losses of hundreds of millions to investors, including a member of one of Latin America’s richest families. Offshore fraud Moris Beracha Shell game Extorted. Do drugs really have to be so expensive? 28 March 2013Last updated at 18:49 ET By Michelle Childs Medicins Sans Frontieres A liver cancer treatment is off-limits in the NHS due to its unjustifiably high price tag, but in India the same treatment is available for less than £100 a month. In this week's Scrubbing Up, Michelle Childs, of Medecins Sans Frontieres, questions why wealthy nations are not doing more to drive down medicine costs. Sorafenib tosylate is a drug for liver cancer patented by German pharmaceutical company Bayer and marketed as Nexavar. Bayer priced the drug at nearly £3,500 per month.
Until March last year, India - a country where half the population live on less than £1 per day - had no choice but to pay this sum for patented Nexavar. But to ensure its citizens had affordable access, the country has since granted a compulsory licence clause that cuts the cost of the drug by allowing another company to manufacture the therapy, even though it is still under patent. Continue reading the main story “Start Quote. Wrong Way to Admit You Blew Millions of Dollars.
Somewhere in the vast interior of China last year, almost a half-billion dollars of cash belonging to Caterpillar Inc. vanished. So how did the company soften the blow when it broke the news to investors? Easy. Caterpillar said the loss was “non-cash.” See? Accounting tricks don’t have to be complex after all. This sort of abuse of the English language is routine in corporate disclosures and has long been a pet peeve of mine.
The rules say Caterpillar must write down the value of what it bought -- or, more precisely, what it mistakenly believed it had bought, because the assets it paid for never existed in the first place. Last June, Caterpillar paid $690 million -- $475 million of which was cash -- for a Hong Kong-based company called ERA Mining Machinery Ltd., which makes coal-mining equipment through a subsidiary in China called Zhengzhou Siwei Mechanical & Electrical Manufacturing Co. Blown Cash Why did Caterpillar call it non-cash? Sketchy Pedigree. Secrets and Lies of the Bailout: One Broker's Story | The Shady Inside Deals That Are Protecting Goldman Sachs at Your Expense.
The Greening of Goldman Sachs January 12, 2013 | Like this article? Join our email list: Stay up to date with the latest headlines via email. In economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman’s book, End This Depression Now! Big Money, as Krugman writes in his book, buys Big Influence. But they’re not satisfied with having only most of it — they want it all. Writing in the conservative Washington Examiner, columnist Tim Carney says many of these expensive giveaways were “spawned by a web of lobbyists, donors and staffers surrounding Democratic Sen.
And so it was — and more. Get it? Lloyd Blankfein, CEO and chair of the global investment giant Goldman Sachs, is on Fix the Debt’s Fiscal Leadership Council. Yes, but Blankfein and Goldman Sachs make sure their entitlements aren’t touched! Privately Owned “Charter Cities” in Honduras: Entire Urban Areas Handed over to Corporations. The Honduran National Congress is currently reviewing the law to geographically define the first four “Charter Cities” in the world, three sites along the Caribbean coast in Garifuna afro-indigenous territory, Trujillo, the Valle de Cuyamel and the Sico-Paulaya Valley, which includes Miskitu indigenous territory.
One is proposed in the Gulf of Fonseca which would include the community of Sacate Grande. The Charter Cities initiative cedes city-sized sections of Honduras to corporations or foreign governments to govern autonomously, indefinitely. Investors can make their own laws, build their own police force, administer services and regulate their economy. On September 4, Michael Strong, representing the MKG Group, signed a memorandum of understanding in the Honduran Congress to establish the world’s first Charter City, a contract is surrounded by confusion and secrecy. The Seasteading Institute is dedicated to promoting communities in the sea, free of states. Ten Numbers the Rich Would Like Fudged. November 22, 2012 | Like this article? Join our email list: Stay up to date with the latest headlines via email. 1.
Only THREE PERCENT of the very rich are entrepreneurs. According to both Marketwatch and economist Edward Wolff, over 90 percent of the assets owned by millionaires are held in a combination of low-risk investments (bonds and cash), personal business accounts, the stock market, and real estate. 2. In a world listing compiled by a reputable research team (which nevertheless prompted double-checking), the U.S. has greater wealth inequality than every measured country in the world except for Namibia, Zimbabwe, Denmark, and Switzerland. 3. The Tax Justice Network estimated that between $21 and $32 trillion is hidden offshore, untaxed. Based on a historical stock market return of 6%, up to $750 billion of income is lost to the U.S. every year, resulting in a tax loss of about $260 billion. 4. 5. 6. Another stat that required a double-check. 7. 8. Goldman Sachs' Global Coup d'e tat. Greek Prime Minister Lucas Papademos in his office at the Presidential Palace in Athens, Greece, January 16, 2012.
(Photo: Eirini Vourloumis / The New York Times) When the people of Greece saw their democratically elected Prime Minister George Papandreou forced out of office in November of 2011 and replaced by an unelected Conservative technocrat, Lucas Papademos, most were unaware of the bigger picture of what was happening all around them. Similarly, most of us in the United States were equally as ignorant when, in 2008, despite the switchboards at the US Capitol collapsing under the volume of phone calls from constituents urging a “no” vote, our elected representatives voted “yes” at the behest of Bush's Treasury Secretary Henry Paulsen and jammed through the biggest bailout of Wall Street in our nation’s history.
Steadily – and stealthily – Goldman Sachs is carrying out a global coup d’etat. But that's just scratching the surface. What’s happening here goes back more than a decade. U.S. overseeing mysterious construction project in Israel. On the News With Thom Hartmann: "Stand Your Ground" Gun Law Strikes Again in Florida, and More. A Death in the Family - and the Question Is: Whodunit? Who’s Buying Britain? Probe Reveals Real Estate Speculators Hidden By Offshore Alchemy. Secrecy for sale: Post-Soviet billionaires invade UK, via British Virgin Islands. Front Men Disguise the Offshore Game's Real Players.