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| Taking a Closer Look at the Stories Ignored by the Corporate Media |
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Archive for the Month of May, 2005.
Viewing Corporatism NEWS articles 1 through 22 of 22.
- More than 10,000 Striking Workers at Japanese-Invested Walmart Supplies Firm in Shenzhen Demand Right To Set Up Their Own Trade Union.
- Shoplifting is more than a way to survive in the cutthroat competition of the 'free market' and protest corporate injustices. It is also a different kind of orientation to the world and to life. The shoplifter makes do with an environment that has been conquered by capitalism and industry, where there is no longer a natural world from which to gather resources and everything has become private property, without accepting it or the absurd way of life it entails. - Wal-Mart wants in on banking, but critics are concerned that Wal-Mart's interest in establishing an industrial bank may open a Pandora's box (a bank branch in every store), which could devastate community banks, credit unions and others. - The War in Iraq has been very good for Halliburton. KBR, a Haliburton subsidiary was given $10.5 billion in contracts. It charged $88 million for 3.4 million meals that it never served. In one outrageous example, KBR allegedly billed $27.5 million to deliver liquefied petroleum gas that had been purchased in Kuwait for $82,000.
- The bankruptcy reform bill that President Bush just signed into law will do more than discipline those who live riotously on loans without paying them back in full. Think for a moment about new prisons to house the indebted. Back to the future of debtors' prison.
- A new group of Wal-Mart critics ran a full-page advertisement on April 20 contending that the company's low pay had forced tens of thousands of its workers to resort to food stamps and Medicaid, costing taxpayers billions of dollars. On April 26, as part of a campaign called "Love Mom, Not Wal-Mart," five members of Congress joined women's advocates and labor leaders to assail the company for not paying its female employees more. - BP has a legal right to get a licence from Indonesia to extract gas in West Papua. Its moral case is less clearcut.
- Many of us greeted the unveiling of the government's new food pyramid with a mixture of puzzlement and confusion. Indeed, the dizzying layers of rainbow-colored lines helped distract from the fact that the food industry's fingerprints are all over the new dietary guidelines; in ways that hurt rather than help consumers.
- With help from some unlikely places, Corrections Corporation of America is hoping to build the largest for-profit private prison in the United States.
- How would you like a 54-percent pay raise? That's how much pay jumped last year for the chief executives of the 500 largest U.S. companies, according to Forbes magazine. Worker pay is shrinking, the economy is stalling, the trade deficit is growing, and the stock market is below 1999 levels -- but CEO pay is still on steroids. The highest-paid CEO in 2004 was Yahoo's Terry Semel, who hauled in $230.6 million. That's more than $4 million a week - In the wake of the recent cancellation of the CHEERS study in which parents were to be paid to expose their infant children to pesticides, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is finalizing a new policy that encourages the same type of human dosing studies by industry. - In the ’70s and ’80s, the banana companies Dole, Del Monte and Chiquita used a carcinogenic pesticide, Nemagon, to protect their crops in Nicaragua. Today, the men and women who worked on those plantations suffer from incurable illnesses. Their children are deformed. The companies feign innocence.
- Last week Standard and Poor's, a bond rating agency, downgraded both Ford and General Motors bonds to junk status. It sees a significant risk that the companies won't be able to pay their debts. Don't cry for the bondholders, but do cry for the workers. In 1968, when General Motors was a widely emulated icon of American business, many of its workers were lifetime employees. On average, they earned about $29,000 a year in today's dollars, a solidly middle-class income at the time. They also had generous health and retirement benefits.
- The Judge who exonerated Cheney, A. Raymond Randolph, is with the George Mason University. A. Raymond Randolph serves on the Advisory Board of George Mason University Law and Economics Center. George Mason University, Law and Economics Center has received $115,000 from ExxonMobil since 1998.
- An Alternative Annual Report on Halliburton. On May 18, Halliburton will hold its annual shareholders meeting in downtown Houston. Inside, CEO David Lesar will be congratulating himself on the astonishing $7.1 billion revenue the company has made off its recent work in Iraq. This number is double what the company made in the war-torn country the previous year; it boosts Halliburton's overall revenue some 25 percent, bringing it to over $20 billion for 2004.
- Looking for an easy way to protest Bush foreign policy week after week? And an easy way to help alleviate global poverty? Buy your gasoline at Citgo stations.
- Four women and six men are at Houston Police Southeast and six men at at Houston Police Central. - Maryland Governor Bob Ehrlich will stand with Wal-Mart Stores COO Eduardo Castro-Wright and veto his legislature’s historic bill to compel the retail giant to pay more for its Maryland employees’ health care coverage. Wal-Mart Watch has previously called upon Ehrlich to return Wal-Mart’s campaign donations.
- Business Week reported that Michael Eisner, CEO of Disney earned $565 million in 1998 and nearly $1 billion over the past ten years. On its website, the UAW lists the compensation of the largest corporations in America in an effort to expose the glaring disparities between the haves and the have nots.
- Local grocery workers union leads the fight to block Wal-Mart's efforts to infiltrate inner suburbs. The growing belief that Wal-Mart's highly touted efficiency is depressing wages throughout the economy, have snowballed into an image problem that is making it increasingly hard for Wal-Mart to build stores in the Washington region.
- More than 2,000 workers at plants in California and Connecticut that bottle Coca-Cola soft drinks went on strike Monday, just before the start of the summer season. - Regardless as to whether or not Americans as a whole perceive it, we may single out the ten deadly enemies of the American people and of all people of all nations as a matter of fact. These are ten American largest corporations whose product is virtually lethal. They put in danger not only the people who work for such industries but also those who are directly or indirectly affected by their deadly products.
Pages for May, 2005
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