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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 August, 2005.
Viewing Corporatism NEWS articles 1 through 40 of 40.
- Exxon Mobil Corp., the world's largest publicly traded oil company, reported a 32 percent increase in second-quarter profits as it reaped the benefits of soaring oil and natural gas prices.
- The US is increasingly viewed as a "culture-free zone" inhabited by arrogant and unfriendly people, according to study of 25 countries' brand reputations.
- Scandal-plagued Halliburton, the oil services company once headed by Vice President Dick Cheney, was secretly working with one of Iran's top nuclear program officials on natural gas related projects and, allegedly, selling the official's oil development company key components for a nuclear reactor, according to Halliburton sources with intimate knowledge into both companies' business dealings. - Nigerian soldiers guarding Chevron oil rigs billed the company for $109.25 a day after they allegedly attacked two villages in the volatile country, killing four people and setting fire to homes. The company paid.
- The news from Exxon Mobil established that the pattern was industry-wide. Royal Dutch Shell, the world's third-largest oil company, reported second-quarter profits up 34 percent. BP's (British Petroleum) were up 29 percent. ConocoPhillips, America's third-largest, reported profits that skyrocketed by 51 percent. But this front-page-worthy news wound up buried by the news media.
- ExxonMobil and other oil giants will receive benefits under
energy bill beyond direct federal financial help. The bill also
loosens environmental protections and limits states' rights on
siting and constructing liquified natural gas (LNG) facilities
and pipelines, potentially giving ExxonMobil more sway over
these decisions.
- Others besides Bunnatine Greenhouse have testified that Halliburton, the biggest holder of American rebuilding contracts in Iraq, has deceived the government and cheated taxpayers.
- Monsanto's announcement of their plans to purchase Seminis, the largest fruit and vegetable seed producer in the world, was quickly followed by a statement that Monsanto does not intend to apply biotech to develop these seeds-at least not yet. This is a curious assertion from a dominant biotech company. - Unfortunately, children for the most part trust that what they learn in school is true. When a brand name is presented to them in that context, it has almost unassailable credibility. The regrettable result of the corporate invasion of our schools is that kids begin to believe that Coke quenches your thirst, McNuggets make a great lunch and conserving energy is not important.
- The two largest U.S. teacher unions joined a "back-to-school" boycott against Wal-Mart Stores Inc., targeting one of the year's busiest shopping seasons to protest the retailer's labor practices. - It's the Great American Jobs Scam: an intentionally constructed system that enables corporations to exact huge taxpayer subsidies by promising quality jobs - and then lets them fail to deliver. The other benefit often promised - higher tax revenues - often proves false or exaggerated as well. - It's easy to forget sometimes - amidst all the lofty talk of geopolitics, of apocalyptic clashes between good and evil, of terror, liberty, security and God - that the war on Iraq is "largely a matter of loot," as Kasper Gutman so aptly described the Crusades in that seminal treatise on human nature, The Maltese Falcon. And nowhere is this more evident than in the festering, oozing imposthume of corruption centered around the Gutman-like figure of Dick Cheney. - So as we fight to bring liberal democracy to quasi-feudal backwaters in distant lands, we might remember that the fight for individual rights in the American workplace -- and now, beyond it -- is itself a long way from a victorious conclusion. And thanks to the NLRB, it just got longer - All the ways big business is intruding on your campus – from the Kmart Chair of Marketing to threats to U.S. Innovation.
- Activists who are fed up with waiting for the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to take proper action to protect the public from dangerous psychotropic drugs, are holding a three-day rally in front of the White House to condemn the FDA's failure to act on the matter.
- U.S. looking into Carlyle Group links to teacher funds
- The "everyday low prices" superchain refuses to carry books and music that dare criticize conservative values. - Call it, if you will, the crack cocaine of state and local governments' economic-development practices — their endless flow of tax breaks and outright gifts to private corporations they want to land, or figure they have to pay off to stay put.
- Exxon Mobil upped its capital and exploration budget last quarter, but it spent nearly as much buying back its own shares, bolstering its stock price. This quarter, the company said, it will spend even more -- $5 billion -- repurchasing shares. If only drivers could fill their tanks with stock certificates.
- Wal-Mart, which was fined earlier this year for violating child labor laws in Connecticut, agreed to pay $600,000 in civil penalties for alleged violations of clean-water laws at 22 stores.
- Gag Order Against Speaking with Legislators and at Scientific Conferences on "Emerging Contaminants" - Corporations' efforts to curb free speech through lawsuits are unfortunately succeeding.
- Today Donald Rumsfeld is known throughout the world as the zealous U.S. Secretary of Defense who is waging a global "war on terror" in search of "terrorists" and "weapons of mass destruction." Most people, however, are not aware that Rumsfeld himself unleashed a chemical weapon of mass destruction upon the world in 1981—and it’s still out there destroying people all over the world. That "WMD" is aspartame and it has been scientifically and anecdotally linked to millions of chronic illnesses and deaths. - Merck killed 19 times as many Americans with Vioxx than the 9/11 hijackers did with their planes, according to David Graham, MD, of the FDA. And it was intentional. - A measure designed to create jobs is instead rewarding the companies that are most adept at stashing overseas profits in tax havens, allowing them to bring money home at a severely discounted tax rate.
- Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon, General Dynamics, Honeywell and United Technologies have all done well in the first half of this year and have a huge backlog of orders. With US President George W. Bush and Congress ready to spend, they can expect robust sales for years to come. - What country has the most advanced animal protection legislation in the world? If you guessed the United States, go to the bottom of the class. The United States lags far behind all 25 nations of the European Union, and most other developed nations as well, such as Switzerland, Australia, New Zealand and Canada.
- A global coalition of unions is launching an unprecedented campaign to organize workers around the world at US retail giant Wal-Mart, seeking to bring a new level of globalization to the labor movement. - In the end it was the "generosity" of Coca-Cola in distributing cadmium-laden waste sludge as "free fertilizer" to the tribal aborigines who live near the beverage giant's bottling plant in this remote Kerala village that proved to be its undoing.
- Will the last person leaving the last health food store, who purchased the last bottle of non-prescription 500mg, vitamin C, please turn out the lights? - We already have enough evidence on Roundup to be concerned about its effects on human and animal health.
- About 1,200 union jobs have been eliminated since mechanics and plane cleaners walked off the job three days ago, Northwest Airlines said Monday, as it uses the strike to impose many of the cost-cutting changes it demanded during months of contract negotiations.
- A former employee of Halliburton subsidiary KBR has admitted taking $110,300 (£61,225) in bribes from an Iraqi firm it awarded a US contract - According to Tehran authorities, Oriental Oil Kish, a subsidiary of Halliburton operating in the Middle East, won the contract last January thanks to bribes. - The Securities and Exchange Commission has subpoenaed documents from Chicago Bridge & Iron Co. as part of an investigation into Halliburton Co.'s business dealings in Nigeria, the company said in filing. - "Yomango is a brand name whose principal objective ... is not the selling of things," according to the movement's manifesto, "but the ... promoting of shoplifting as a form of disobedience and direct action against multinational corporations. Buying is an action based on obedience; (we are) taking to the extreme the free circulation of goods." - The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled corporations have a right to spend unlimited corporate funds to influence ballot questions. As citizens in dozens of communities have learned, that power enables giant corporations to turn ballot measures -- theoretically the purest form of democracy -- into yet another sphere of corporate dominance.
- TeenScreen is being used to push drugs on a population of kids who, in the eyes of many experts, are already overmedicated. An estimated 10 million children in the US are now taking mind-altering drugs that have documented side-effects of suicidal ideation, mania, psychosis, and future drug dependence. - The ratio of average CEO pay (now $11.8 million) to worker pay (now $27,460) spiked up from 301-to-1 in 2003 to 431-to-1 in 2004. If the minimum wage had risen as fast as CEO pay since 1990, the lowest paid workers in the US would be earning $23.03 an hour today, not $5.15 an hour.
- Giffen denies wrongdoing. His lawyers, Steven Cohen and William Schwartz, say in court papers that Giffen's actions were condoned by the Central Intelligence Agency, White House and State Department to curry favor with Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev, 65.
Pages for August, 2005
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