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Paul Merrell

Boycott, Divest and Sanction Corporations That Feed on Prisons  :    Informat... - 0 views

www.informationclearinghouse.info/article41455.htm

incarceration-nation for-profit-prisons boycott

shared by Paul Merrell on 09 Apr 15 - No Cached
  • All attempts to reform mass incarceration through the traditional mechanisms of electoral politics, the courts and state and federal legislatures are useless. Corporations, which have turned mass incarceration into a huge revenue stream and which have unchecked political and economic power, have no intention of diminishing their profits. And in a system where money has replaced the vote, where corporate lobbyists write legislation and the laws, where chronic unemployment and underemployment, along with inadequate public transportation, sever people in marginal communities from jobs, and where the courts are a wholly owned subsidiary of the corporate state, this demands a sustained, nationwide revolt. “Organizing boycotts, work stoppages inside prisons and the refusal by prisoners and their families to pay into the accounts of phone companies and commissary companies is the only weapon we have left,” said Amos Caley, who runs the Interfaith Prison Coalition, a group formed by prisoners, the formerly incarcerated, their families and religious leaders.
  • These boycotts, they said, will be directed against the private phone, money transfer and commissary companies, and against the dozens of corporations that exploit prison labor. The boycotts will target food and merchandise vendors, construction companies, laundry services, uniforms companies, prison equipment vendors, cafeteria services, manufacturers of pepper spray, body armor and the array of medieval instruments used for the physical control of prisoners, and a host of other contractors that profit from mass incarceration. The movement will also call on institutions, especially churches and universities, to divest from corporations that use prison labor. The campaign, led by the Interfaith Prison Coalition, will include a call to pay all prisoners at least the prevailing minimum wage of the state in which they are held. (New Jersey’s minimum wage is $8.38 an hour.) Wages inside prisons have remained stagnant and in real terms have declined over the past three decades. A prisoner in New Jersey makes, on average, $1.20 for eight hours of work, or about $28 a month. Those incarcerated in for-profit prisons earn as little as 17 cents an hour. Over a similar period, phone and commissary corporations have increased fees and charges often by more than 100 percent. There are nearly 40 states that allow private corporations to exploit prison labor. And prison administrators throughout the country are lobbying corporations that have sweatshops overseas, trying to lure them into the prisons with guarantees of even cheaper labor and a total absence of organizing or coordinated protest.
  • Corporations currently exploiting prison labor include Abbott Laboratories, AT&T, AutoZone, Bank of America, Bayer, Berkshire Hathaway, Cargill, Caterpillar, Chevron, the former Chrysler Group, Costco Wholesale, John Deere, Eddie Bauer, Eli Lilly, ExxonMobil, Fruit of the Loom, GEICO, GlaxoSmithKline, Glaxo Wellcome, Hoffmann-La Roche, International Paper, JanSport, Johnson & Johnson, Kmart, Koch Industries, Mary Kay, McDonald’s, Merck, Microsoft, Motorola, Nintendo, Pfizer, Procter & Gamble, Quaker Oats, Sarah Lee, Sears, Shell, Sprint, Starbucks, State Farm Insurance, United Airlines, UPS, Verizon, Victoria’s Secret, Wal-Mart and Wendy’s.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • “Prisoner telephone rates in New Jersey are some of the highest in the country,” Caley said. “Global Tel Link charges prisoners and their families $4.95 for a 15-minute phone call, which is about two and a half times the national average for local inmate calling services.”
  • Prison phone services are a $1.2-billion-a-year industry. Prisoners outside New Jersey are charged by Global Tel Link, which makes about $500 million a year, as much as $17 for a 15-minute phone call. A call of that duration outside a prison would cost about $2. If a customer deposits $25 into a Global Tel Link phone account, he or she must pay an additional service charge of $6.95. And Global Tel Link is only one of several large corporations that exploit prisoners and their families. JPay is a corporation that deals in privatized money transfers to prisoners. It controls money transfers for about 70 percent of the prison population. The company charges families that put money into prisoners’ accounts additional service fees of as much as 45 percent. JPay generates more than $50 million a year in revenue. The Keefer Group, which controls prison commissaries in more than 800 public and private prisons, and which often charges prisoners double what items cost outside prison walls, makes $41 million a year in profit.
  • Prisons, to swell corporate profits, force prisoners to pay for basic items including shoes. Prisoners in New Jersey pay $45 for a pair of basic Reebok shoes—almost twice the average monthly wage. If a prisoner needs an insulated undergarment or an extra blanket to ward off the cold at night he must buy it. Packages from home, once permitted, have been banned to force prisoners to buy grossly overpriced items at the commissary or company-run store. Some states have begun to charge prisoners rent. This gouging is burying many prisoners and their families in crippling debt, debt that prisoners carry when they are released from prison. The United States has 2.3 million people in prison, 25 percent of the world’s prison population, although we are only 5 percent of the world’s population. We have increased our prison population by about 700 percent since 1970. Corporations control about 18 percent of federal prisoners and 6.7 percent of all state prisoners. And corporate prisons account for nearly all newly built prisons. Nearly half of all immigrants detained by the federal government are shipped to corporate-run prisons. And slavery is legal in prisons under the 13th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. It reads: “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States.”
  • Vast sums are at stake. The for-profit prison industry is worth $70 billion. Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), the largest owner of for-profit prisons and immigration detention facilities in the country, had revenues of $1.7 billion in 2013 and profits of $300 million. CCA holds an average of 81,384 inmates in its facilities on any one day. Aramark Holdings Corp., a Philadelphia-based company that contracts through Aramark Correctional Services to provide food to 600 correctional institutions across the United States, was acquired in 2007 for $8.3 billion by investors that included Goldman Sachs. And, as in the wider society, while members of a tiny, oligarchic corporate elite each are paid tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars annually, the workers who generate these profits live in misery.  “It is an abomination that prisoners are paid 22 cents an hour, $1.20 cents a day,” Larry Hamm told the Newark meeting. “Every prisoner should get the minimum wage of New Jersey, $8.38 per hour.”
  • Paul Merrell on 09 Apr 15
     
    Why pay a liveable wage to American workers if you can get prison labor for less than market prices in Bangla Desh? The prison telephone racket has bothered me for many years. The FCC authorized no-limit telephone charges for prisoners and their families on the simplistic grounds of, "well, they prisoners who have reduced civil rights anyway. But it ignored that most prison phone calls are collect calls to families on the outside, who are not prisoners and still have their full civil rights. The for-profit prison industry is a prime example of not thinking things through before privatizing a formerly government function. Privatization creates a lobby for the industry, as Americans have learned all to well with the privatization of most Dept. of Defense work other than actual combat.   Already, for profit prison industries are showing up in state legislatures to demand longer prison sentences. They were the prime movers behind the "mandatory minimum sentence" movement, which has stuffed prisons to overflowing. 
Gary Edwards

'Clinton death list': 33 spine-tingling cases - 0 views

www.wnd.com/...-list-33-most-intriguing-cases

Clinton-Body-Count

shared by Gary Edwards on 05 Feb 17 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 05 Feb 17
     
    "(Editor's note: This list was originally published in August 2016 and has gone viral on the web. WND is running it again as American voters cast their ballots for the nation's next president on Election Day.) How many people do you personally know who have died mysteriously? How about in plane crashes or car wrecks? Bizarre suicides? People beaten to death or murdered in a hail of bullets? And what about violent freak accidents - like separate mountain biking and skiing collisions in Aspen, Colorado? Or barbells crushing a person's throat? Bill and Hillary Clinton attend a funeral Apparently, if you're Bill or Hillary Clinton, the answer to that question is at least 33 - and possibly many more. Talk-radio star Rush Limbaugh addressed the issue of the "Clinton body count" during an August show. "I swear, I could swear I saw these stories back in 1992, back in 1993, 1994," Limbaugh said. He cited a report from Rachel Alexander at Townhall.com titled, "Clinton body count or left-wing conspiracy? Three with ties to DNC mysteriously die." Limbaugh said he recalled Ted Koppel, then-anchor of ABC News' "Nightline," routinely having discussions on the issue following the July 20, 1993, death of White House Deputy Counsel Vince Foster. In fact, Limbaugh said, he appeared on Koppel's show. "One of the things I said was, 'Who knows what happened here? But let me ask you a question.' I said, 'Ted, how many people do you know in your life who've been murdered? Ted, how many people do you know in your life that have died under suspicious circumstances?' "Of course, the answer is zilch, zero, nada, none, very few," Limbaugh chuckled. "Ask the Clintons that question. And it's a significant number. It's a lot of people that they know who have died, who've been murdered. "And the same question here from Rachel Alexander. It's amazing the cycle that exists with the Clintons. [Citing Townhall]: 'What it
Paul Merrell

Profit Prisons - Inmates Charged for Jail Stay, Left Buried in Debt When they Get Out -... - 0 views

countercurrentnews.com/...ried-in-debt-when-they-get-out

U.S. prisons pay-for-stay ACLU

shared by Paul Merrell on 16 Nov 15 - No Cached
  • Did you know that people who end up in prison for a variety of different reasons have a very good chance of being charged a fee for every day that they stay behind bars as if they were voluntarily staying at a hotel? According to a new ACLU report, this is exactly what is happening all across the United States, in select prisons where these policies have been enacted. The BBC reported that roughly 10 million people in the United States owe a combined total of over $10 billion in “pay-to-stay” prison debt. Obviously, these fees can make a bad situation even worse for people who are serving time for petty crimes, especially considering that most of the people who do end up behind bars come from lives of poverty to begin with. Now, when many of these inmates are released from prison they are unable to get back on their feet due to this crippling debt. Some people who have been arrested for petty offenses, many drug-related, are released from jail with tens of thousands of dollars worth of debt that make it near impossible for them to rebuild their lives.
  • This week, the ACLU has released one of the first comprehensive reports on the “pay-to-stay” policies that have been implemented at prisons around the country. Mike Brickner of the ACLU told the BBC that these policies are destructive to people who come from lives of poverty, and to make matters worse they don’t even work. “We’re hearing from people who are claiming this is going on their credit scores and preventing them from doing all sorts of things. They simply don’t work. People are coming out of jail with hundreds or thousands of dollars’ worth of debt, and if you are a returning citizen, having that is just another albatross around your neck. It’s a program that maybe feels good to people who have a tough on crime mentality, but, in fact, it’s sort of a fruitless exercise,” Brickner said. Even supporters of the program have admitted that it doesn’t bring in enough money to justify its existence. Dale Osborne, a jail administrator from the state of Ohio where 40 out of 75 jails have pay-to-stay policies, has defended the program, but admits that it is a failure and that he would not really miss it. “It offsets the expenses that the taxpayers are required to have. The more revenue I can generate within a facility, the less the taxpayers have to pay,” he said, adding that “If we lost the ability to have a pay-for-stay program here I’m not going to have any huge heartache over the loss of it.” While it may not be a huge advantage to the prisons, this program is a massive disadvantage for former prisoners who are attempting to re-enter society.
Paul Merrell

Gates Foundation Sells Stake in U.K. Prison Operator G4S - Bloomberg - 0 views

www.bloomberg.com/...-u-k-security-company-g4s.html

Israel Palestine BSD G4S

shared by Paul Merrell on 09 Jun 14 - No Cached
  • The Gates Foundation Asset Trust, the entity that manages the investments for the $40.2 billion Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, has liquidated its entire stake in G4S Plc (GFS), the world’s biggest security-services provider. “Like other large foundations, the foundation trust evaluates its holdings regularly, both for performance and fit,” John Pinette, a spokesman for the Gates family, said in a statement. “As a result of this, the foundation trust no longer holds an investment in G4S.” The Crawley, England-based company has attracted criticism for its contracts with the Israel prison system. The U.K.’s Guardian newspaper said in an editorial on June 4 that G4S should “end the corporation’s participation in Israel’s brutal occupation” in the West Bank. Since 2011, G4S has conducted a series of reviews in relation to its business in Israel, according to the company’s website. Its latest investigation concluded there was “no plausible case against G4S on the ground of alleged war crimes commited by Israel.”
  • The Gates Foundation Asset Trust, the entity that manages the investments for the $40.2 billion Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, has liquidated its entire stake in G4S Plc (GFS), the world’s biggest security-services provider. “Like other large foundations, the foundation trust evaluates its holdings regularly, both for performance and fit,” John Pinette, a spokesman for the Gates family, said in a statement. “As a result of this, the foundation trust no longer holds an investment in G4S.” The Crawley, England-based company has attracted criticism for its contracts with the Israel prison system. The U.K.’s Guardian newspaper said in an editorial on June 4 that G4S should “end the corporation’s participation in Israel’s brutal occupation” in the West Bank. Since 2011, G4S has conducted a series of reviews in relation to its business in Israel, according to the company’s website. Its latest investigation concluded there was “no plausible case against G4S on the ground of alleged war crimes commited by Israel.”
  • Paul Merrell on 09 Jun 14
     
    A very high profile win for the Palestinian Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions ("BSD") movement as the Gates Foundation divests.  Despite the bravado in this article, G4S announced today that it will not renew any of its contracts to provide security services not only in Palestine but also in Israel. http://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/g4s-end-israel-prison-contracts-pressure-mounts-over-torture-complicity After the Gates Foundation announced its divestment, the UK government announced that it was launching an investigation of G4S activities in Israel.  The BSD movement, modeled on the BSD campaign that brought down the apartheid government of South Africa, has been racking up more and more wins lately, in each week.  BSD activists are in guarded optimism mode because, they say, G4S has previously lied about its plans in regard to Palestine. In addition to providing prison security services, G4S also operates a series of border checkpoints between Israel, Israel settlements in Palestine, and areas of Palestine still occupied by indigenous Palestinians, including checkpoints along the border of the largest open air prison in the world, the Gaza Strip. The BSD movement has also targeted American companies that profit from Israel's illegal occupation and colonization of Palestine, including Caterpillar Corp. The ultra-high profile divestment by the Gates Foundation just might have been a watershed moment that unleashes a torrent of related actions by other investors around the world.   
Gary Edwards

The List: Unnecessarily Shut Down by Obama to Inflict Public Pain - 0 views

www.breitbart.com/...st-obama-closures-for-shutdown

government-shutdown Obammunism financial-crisis

shared by Gary Edwards on 08 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 08 Oct 13
     
    "The media may or may not report on these individual occurrences, but what they will never do is provide the American people with the full context and scope of Obama's shrill pettiness. Below is a list of illogical, unnecessary, and shockingly spiteful moves our government is making in the name of essential and non-essential. This list will be regularly updated, and if you have something you feel should be added, please email me at jnolte@breitbart.com or tweet me @NolteNC.Please include a link to the news source. -- 1. Treatments for Children Suffering From Cancer - The GOP have agreed to a compromise by funding part of the government, including the National Institutes of Health, which offers children with cancer last-chance experimental treatment. Obama has threatened to veto this funding. 2. The World War II Memorial - The WWII memorial on the DC Mall is a 24/7 open-air memorial that is not regularly staffed. Although the White House must have known that WWII veterans in their eighties and nineties had already booked flights to visit this memorial, the White House still found the resources to spitefully barricade the attraction.  The Republican National Committee has offered to cover any costs required to keep the memorial open. The White House refused. Moreover, like the NIH, the GOP will pass a compromise bill that would fund America's national parks. Obama has threatened to veto that bill. 3. Furloughed Military Chaplains Not Allowed to Work for Free - Furloughed military chaplains willing to celebrate Mass and baptisms for free have been told they will be punished for doing so. 4. Business Stops In Florida Keys - Although the GOP have agreed to compromise in the ongoing budget stalemate and fund the parks, Obama has threatened to veto that funding. As a result, small businesses, hunters, and commercial fisherman can't practice their trade. While the feds have deemed the personnel necessary to keep this area open "non-essential," the "enforcement office
Paul Merrell

Berkeley divests from torture profiteer G4S | The Electronic Intifada - 0 views

electronicintifada.net/...-divests-torture-profiteer-g4s

war & peace Israel BDS G4S private-prisons Berkeley

shared by Paul Merrell on 20 Aug 16 - No Cached
  • The city of Berkeley, California, has adopted a resolution to divest from private prison firms, including G4S, a provider of services to Israeli jails where Palestinians are routinely tortured. In the resolution, approved by the city council on 19 July, Berkeley will be called on to divest from private prison corporations and request that its business partners, including banking giant Wells Fargo, follow suit. The resolution targets major players in the US’ private prison industry, including the Geo Group, the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) and G4S. G4S is one of the largest corporations in the world and provides security services inside US prisons. It also operates inside Israeli prisons, where Palestinian adults and children are interrogated, tortured and held without charge or trial. The corporation has been a longtime target of the Palestinian-led boycott, divestment and sanctions campaign for its involvement in Israel’s military occupation and incarceration systems. G4S has lost millions of dollars in contracts with businesses, unions and universities, due to the growing boycott campaign. The United Methodist Church and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation have also pulled their investments in the company. Earlier this year, G4S announced it was leaving the Israeli market and selling its Israeli subsidiary, but the corporation has a long track record of breaking promises.
Paul Merrell

New Article Advocates for Consolidating Nuclear Complex - 0 views

www.pogo.org/...olidating-nuclear-complex.html

war & peace nuclear-weapons Energy-Dept. costs privatization

shared by Paul Merrell on 24 Jan 15 - No Cached
  • This week Robert Alvarez published an article in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists about the National Nuclear Security Administration called "Rebranding the nuclear weapons complex won’t reform it." The piece details the long history of the Department of Energy’s management (and mismanagement) of the nuclear weapons complex, the establishment of the semi-autonomous NNSA, and the many conflicts of interest that have prevented the downsizing of the sprawling U.S. nuclear weapons complex. Alvarez also highlighted the astronomical costs associated with these facilities and recommended a truly independent commission, made up of specialists who do not have conflicts of interests, to review the complex:
  • Lab overcapacity, in particular, contributes to an inflated weapons complex cost structure, within which the average full time employee is two to three times as expensive as in the private sector. Since 2006, when management of the weapons labs was transferred from the nonprofit University of California to for-profit entities, administrative fees have jumped by 650 percent at Los Alamos. The bloat in the weapons complex is hardly limited to the national labs; the Y-12 nuclear weapons plant in Tennessee has excess capacity that is comparable, in size, to two auto assembly plants. The Obama administration should establish a commission—one, this time, that is not dominated by the very contractors that run the nuclear weapons complex—to analyze and downsize the redundant elements of that complex. The Defense Department accomplished such a downsizing over the past 20 years; it's long past time for the Energy Department to begin shedding its surplus capacity. Given that weapons facilities dominate the wage and benefit structures of large areas in several states, such streamlining will no doubt meet stiff congressional resistance. Still, the downsizing sword could eliminate redundant facilities and free up funding to rebuild those that are truly needed.
  • Paul Merrell on 24 Jan 15
     
    Those who argue for privatization *never* acknowledge that outsourcing government work invariably results in a strong vested interest lobby for spending even more. Here's a classic example of that. We've seen many other examples, e.g., the privatization of prisons resulting in the prison industry lobbying for lengthening prison sentences and creating new criminal prohibitions punishable by incarceration.   
Paul Merrell

BP Settlement in Gulf Oil Spill Is Raised to $20.8 Billion - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...is-raised-to-20-8-billion.html

environment BP litigation settlement

shared by Paul Merrell on 13 Oct 15 - No Cached
  • The Justice Department on Monday announced a final settlement with the oil giant BP of $20.8 billion for its role in the disastrous 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill, raising the total from the initial $18.7 billion settlement announced in July.At either amount, it is the largest environmental settlement — and the largest civil settlement with any single entity — in the nation’s history.The United States attorney general, Loretta Lynch, called the filing of the final settlement “a major step forward in our effort to deliver justice to the gulf region in the wake of the Deepwater Horizon tragedy — the largest environmental disaster our nation has ever endured.”Gina McCarthy, the Environmental Protection Agency administrator, estimated that the final settlement represented a payment of $1,725 for each barrel of oil spilled in the disaster. The maximum amount that a judge could have assessed in the case was $4,300 a barrel.
  • The settlement resolves a 2010 lawsuit filed by the Justice Department against BP. It includes civil claims under the Clean Water Act, for which BP has agreed to pay a $5.5 billion penalty, the largest civil penalty in the history of environmental law. Also, it includes natural resources damages claims under the Oil Pollution Act, for which BP has agreed to pay $7.1 billion, on top of the $1 billion it previously committed to pay for early restoration work. Continue reading the main story Related in Opinion Editorial: BP Deal Will Lead to a Cleaner GulfJULY 8, 2015 In addition, the settlement includes economic damages claims, for which BP has agreed to pay $4.9 billion to the five gulf states — Alabama, Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas — and up to $1 billion to local governments. Louisiana, the hardest hit of the states, will receive $5 billion of the $8.8 billion allocated for restoration.Ms. Lynch said the increase in the total settlement represented a “refining of the numbers” over the initial settlement. “Over time, we refine numbers as the settlement is finalized,” she said.
  • Geoff Morrell, BP senior vice president for United States communications, said in a statement that the revised overall figure did not change the settlement announced in July, but included amounts previously spent or disclosed by the company. The settlement, he said, “resolves the largest litigation liabilities remaining from the tragic accident,” and provides the company “certainty with respect to its financial obligations.”Under the draft restoration plan, $8.8 billion would be allocated to restore the gulf ecosystem.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • A panel responsible for assessing the damages to the gulf ecosystems found effects on the region’s wildlife, including fish, oysters, plankton, birds and sea mammals; habitat, including marshes and beaches; and recreational activities.The proposed $8.8 billion in restoration would be invested across the five gulf states over 15 years, in a range of projects intended to restore those resources.“This restoration plan ensures that the funds will be distributed in ways that make sense,” Ms. McCarthy said.
  • Paul Merrell on 13 Oct 15
     
    Let's see. $20.8 billion total settlement. $8.8 billion going to environmental restoration. The Feds pocket $12 billion. And it's all pennies on the dollar in terms of ongoing damage.  The Feds, knowing that they can profit from environmental havoc committed by corporations, only paused deep ocean drilling permits for a few months, hoping for more damage to be caused by other companies.  The real scandal was and is that BP had a long and extremely well-documented history of causing environmental disasters in their pursuit of oil profits. Were there truly any environmental justice, the result would have been corporate capital punishment and virtually all of its executives in prison for the remainder of their lives, preferably at hard labor cleaning up the mess they created. But throw enough zeros after the settlement number and the human beings whose penny-pinching on safety caused the disaster walk free, free to do it all over again. They must have joined the same Too Big to Jail Golf Club that the banksters use.  
Paul Merrell

Bigger than Libor? Forex probe hangs over banks - Nov. 20, 2013 - 0 views

money.cnn.com/...index.html

banksters forex foreign-exchange fraud

shared by Paul Merrell on 22 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • Yet another dark cloud is looming over global banks as officials examine their behavior in the massive foreign exchange market, threatening to deal a new blow to earnings and reputations. Regulators in the U.S., Europe and Asia are in the early stages of investigating whether traders at the world's top banks manipulated foreign exchange benchmarks to profit at the expense of their clients. Goldman Sachs (GS, Fortune 500), Citigroup (C, Fortune 500), JP Morgan (JPM, Fortune 500), Deutsche Bank (DB), Barclays (BCS), Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS), UBS (UBS) and HSBC (HBCYF)are among the firms in their sights. Financial lawyers say the probe could have steep and uncertain consequences as the impact of currency market abuse would reverberate far beyond Wall Street.
  • It's unwelcome timing for an industry already fighting a raft of legal battles over foreclosure abuses, misleading investors over mortgages and payment protection insurance. And then there's the Libor scandal. A global investigation into the setting of the London interbank lending rate, and related global benchmarks, has so far yielded about $3.6 billion in fines. Penalties for some of the biggest players are still to come. Traders have also faced criminal charges. As the extent of damage caused by Libor-rigging is revealed, lawyers say the probe into fixing currency rates could unfold in a similar way, and rival its impact. London is the center of the loosely regulated foreign exchange market, the biggest in the world's financial system with average daily turnover of $5.3 trillion. Proven abuse in this market would have a significant ripple effect, exposing offending firms to a host of legal action.
  • Paul Merrell on 22 Nov 13
     
    For more detail see http://money.cnn.com/2013/10/30/news/companies/global-forex-probe/ I'll get excited if and when major bankster executives face prison time. Until then, the "fines" against corporations are just a cost of doing business usually dwarfed by the unjust riches that one group of human beings fraudulently acquires from others. Reality check: corporations are an entirely imaginary legal fiction; it's actually people that are committing the misbehavior. Fines for corporations are as fictional as the corporations themselves; you must prosecute the people and send them to prison to deter bankster misbehavior.  And it is human beings working for another legal fiction, government, who are making the decisions to prosecute corporations rather than misbehaving people. 
Paul Merrell

"This victory is for the Palestinians" - US Presbyterians vote to divest | The Electron... - 0 views

electronicintifada.net/...s-us-presbyterians-vote-divest

war & peace Israel Palestine BDS Presbyterians Methodists

shared by Paul Merrell on 22 Jun 14 - No Cached
  • Palestinians and solidarity activists are celebrating a historic vote by the Presbyterian Church USA (PCUSA) to divest from three companies that profit from and assist Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian people. After hours of debate and a decade of intense, hard-fought efforts, PCUSA’s 221st general assembly in Detroit voted on Friday night by 310-303 to divest the church’s holdings in Caterpillar, Hewlett-Packard and Motorola Solutions.
  • At its last general assembly two years ago, a similar divestment measure failed to pass by just two votes.
  • The Presbyterian decision comes just over a week after the pension fund of the United Methodist Church divested from prison and occupation profiteer G4S, due in part to concerns over the company’s dealings with the Israel Prison Service.
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  • While the BDS movement has been gaining greater coverage and attention, the Presbyterian vote received high-profile media coverage, including articles in The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Reuters, Associated Press and in Israeli and Arabic-language media.
  • Anti-Palestinian groups expressed anger and dismay at the vote, lobbing thinly-disguised accusations of anti-Semitism at Presbyterians.
  • In its statement, Jewish Voice for Peace said that such “attempts to cynically use accusations of anti-semitism to forestall principled actions are losing power.”
  • Paul Merrell on 22 Jun 14
     
    The Presbyterian and Methodist divestment actions follow earlier divestments by the Friends Fiduciary Corp., which manages assets for U.S. Quakers, and the Mennonite Central Committee.
Paul Merrell

Paris: Made in Libya, not Syria? | Asia Times - 0 views

atimes.com/...paris-made-in-libya-not-syria

war & peace ISIL Paris-attacks Libyan-mercenaries

shared by Paul Merrell on 25 Nov 15 - No Cached
  • Using the criterion cui bono (who benefits?) to the Paris outrage, one notes an apparent shortage of “bono” to ISIL, unless the thinking of the leadership runs to: “It would be an excellent idea to focus the fury of the West upon us here in Iraq instead of laying low and letting the West go along with the GCC/Turkish plan of quagmiring Russia in Syria.” Doesn’t make too much sense.  Which is why, in my opinion, is why you see a lot of metaphysical hand waving that the real motive for the attacks was to erase the Muslim “grey zone,” provoke a fatal over-reaction from the West, contribute to the agonies of the Syrian refugees in Europe, rend the time-space continuum and thereby bring the Crusaders to their knees, etc.
  • Media and analyst coverage appears determined to overlay a profitable traffic-building and mission-enhancing narrative of “Western civilization under attack by ISIL,” and ignore the factors that point to the attack as a murderous local initiative, not by ISIL or the mythical immigrant threat, but by alienated Muslim citizens of the EU.  The rhetoric of righteous, united fury against a monstrosity committed by the external “other,” perhaps, is easier to digest than the awkward theme of national minorities committing extreme acts of violence against societies they believe oppress and marginalize them. So we get lots about the horrors of ISIL and relatively little about the, to me, rather eye-opening statistic that while 8% of the population of France is Muslim, it is estimated that 70% of the prison population is.  I suppose it would be churlish to explore the issue of blowback from French penal and social policies at this juncture.  But there is some interesting data that places the alleged and now apparently deceased mastermind, Abdelhamid Abaaoud, in context concerning the degree of his allegiance to ISIL.
  • Katibat al-Battar al-Libi, in other words, was formed as a rather bloody piece of outreach by Libyan Islamists to share Libya experience in insurrection and revolution with Syria.  After IS arose and became a dominant military and financial force, the “KBL” threw in their lot with ISIS, and members of the brigade subsequently returned to Libya to establish an IS beachhead. A July 2015 study by Small Arms Survey confirms the autonomous character of Katibat al-Battar al-Libi. While the uncertain relationship between JAN and IS was being clarified, Libyans stayed ‘outside’ the fray, remaining in their own units and not integrating into other IS hierarchies or command structures. In Latakia for instance, Libyans kept their own separate battalion (The Daily Star, 2013). As the split between JAN and IS deepened, Libyans chose IS but remained apart, forming the Katibat al-Battar al-Libiya (KBL) (The Libyan al-Battar Brigade), under the auspices of IS. Since its formation, the KBL has been active in eastern Syria, notably in Al Hasakah and Deir az-Zor. The battalion maintained links with Ansar al-Sharia in Libya, an early and prominent supporter of IS. Ansar al-Sharia proved to be an excellent recruiting tool and played a role in the arrival of many Libyans in Syria prior to 2014. And who is Ansar al-Sharia in Libya?  Via The Telegraph:
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  • Abaaoud, a citizen of Belgium of Moroccan descent, was well known as a violent radical miscreant linked to an Islamic cell in Verviers, Belgium, that did all sorts of mean, murderous crap.  As far as Belgian and French authorities were concerned, he had been an item long before Paris.
  • Washington believes the group is responsible for the 2012 attack on the US consulate in Benghazi that killed the ambassador and three other Americans.  In November, the United Nations blacklisted Ansar al-Sharia Benghazi and its sister group, Ansar al-Sharia Derna, over links to Al-Qaeda and for running camps for the Islamist State group.  So there you have your soundbite.  The Paris outrage: Made in Libya.  Not Syria.  And brought to us by the people who killed Christopher Stevens in Benghazi. I am sure that Hillary Clinton is grateful to the French police for botching the raid to capture Abaaoud and pumping 5000 rounds into his apartment instead of capturing him; otherwise, he might have become a lively topic of interest and curiosity and the right wing could have cooked off the Benghazi! munitions through election day.  For that matter, it seems unlikely that the governments of the West, or the media cheerleaders thirsting for a rousing good vs. evil narrative, are very interested in exploring the morally fraught issue of blow back from the spectacular Libyan disaster, either. To sum up: the alleged and now reportedly deceased architect of the Paris attacks, Abdelhamid Abaaoud, did not fight “for IS.”  He fought “with” Katibat al-Battar al-Libi, a Libyan outfit whose presence in Syria predates that of ISIS.  Even after Katibat al-Battar al-Libi decided to pledge allegiance to ISIS, it retained its independent identity.  And it would appear unlikely that Abaaoud, as a European of Moroccan descent, would be a central figure in the brigade, whose personnel, funding, and mission seem to have largely emanated from Libya.
  • Despite his seemingly junior status in an autonomous militia, it is possible that Abaaoud was recruited by al-Baghdadi to commit the Paris outrage.  But foreign fighters flock to Syria not only to accumulate general jihadi merit, but also to acquire skills they could apply in their own struggles.  And Abaaoud may have gone to the Syrian war zone to hook up with an extremely capable Libyan outfit and acquire the experience and connections to fulfill his own ambitions for mayhem in Europe, and not necessarily to support the global or even local objectives of the IS caliphate.  So it is by no means axiomatic that Abaaoud returned to Europe with the mission to execute a high-level ISIS strategy. Instead, Abaaoud might have been an angry guy with the skills, resources, and inclination to commit mass murder on his own kick.  The police were already after him big time after the Verviers raid in January (we are now told that Abaaoud was “on” or a “candidate for” a spot on the drone assassination assignment list, but I wonder if this is post-hoc ass-covering).  So maybe he and his friends decided to pull the pin, and go out in a big way. I doubt we’ll ever get the full story.  But “Paris: Made in Libya” is an honest hook.
  • Paul Merrell on 25 Nov 15
     
    So the "mastermind" of the Paris attacks was a product of the U.S. war on Libya, not of ISIL. Why am I not surprised? 
Paul Merrell

Why Aren't Big Bankers in Jail? - FAIR: Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting - 0 views

fair.org/...why-arent-big-bankers-in-jail

financial-collapse criminal-immunity too-big-to-jail too-big-to-fail banksters

shared by Paul Merrell on 05 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • The man in charge of a bank that engaged in massive mortgage fraud chatted with a corporate media host (CNBC Squawk on the Street, 7/12/13) about the fact that virtually none of those who enriched themselves while eviscerating the life savings of many blameless people, derailing the US economy along the way, have faced criminal prosecution
  • Granted, Cramer is no one's idea of a serious interrogator of the financial system (FAIR Blog, 3/13/09). But much journalism on the question of criminal prosecution of industry leaders amounts to similar apologia. While there have been substantive inquiries into the wrongdoing of investment banks and auditors, those calling for jail time are often dismissed as irrational, driven by "blood lust" (Washington Post, 9/12/13), "anger" (Chicago Tribune, 11/30/13) or "vengeance" (Washington Post, 11/18/13).
  • What the soft-headed among us don't recognize, evidently, is that "blowing up your company isn't necessarily a crime," as the Christian Science Monitor (10/11/11) put it. "America doesn't criminalize bad business decisions," wrote the Washington Post (9/12/13). Or, from Businessweek (5/12/11): "In the American legal system, people who merely act badly or unwisely do not do time." But some have no trouble pointing to actual crimes in the crisis. "Issuing a mortgage that is known to be based on false information and then selling it in the secondary market is fraud and punishable by time in jail," economist Dean Baker (Beat the Press, 9/13/13) noted, citing the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission. "Packaging loans into mortgage backed securities that an investment bank has good reason to believe are based on false information is also fraud and punishable by time in jail." Former federal bailout inspector Neil Barofsky agrees we're not talking about a perhaps lamentable but inactionable "culture." Asked by NPR (7/26/13) about the no-actual-crime "narrative," Barofsky answered: "No. I think that there was a tremendous amount of fraud."
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  • We're told such calls come from the margins: That no "financial industry types" have been jailed is "a recurring theme among Occupy Wall Street protesters and some Democratic politicians" (Christian Science Monitor, 10/11/11) or "the Occupy Wall Street crowd" (New York Times, 3/1/13). People who believe bankers should go to jail are deflecting blame—from the people: "The real scandal," explained the Washington Post's Charles Lane ("Banks Aren't the Bad Guys," 11/18/13), was "Americans' shared, erroneous belief in ever-rising housing prices and corresponding mania to profit from them." And maybe they need to move on: "This all happened a really long time ago. What-ever happened to the statute of limitations?" the Washington Post (11/19/13) asked itself in a recent Q&A.
  • Certainly the problem extends beyond the actions of a few bigwigs. But people who say jailing industry executives should be the sole response exist only in pundits' minds. William Black, who advocates prison for industry executives (Moyers & Company, 9/17/13), pointed to structural reasons for a lack of prosecutions, including regulatory agencies' abandonment of key functions since the 1980s' Savings & Loan scandal. "When the regulators ceased making criminal referrals—which had nothing to with an end of crime, obviously; it just had to do with a refusal to be involved in the prosecutorial effort anymore—they doomed us to a disaster where we would not succeed." Others say revolving-door relationships between banks and their government watchdogs contribute to settlements that are too generous to serve as deterrents (LittleSis, 10/23/13). Even the historic $13 billion JP Morgan settlement winds up being less than meets the eye, as much of the fine is tax-deductible, $4 billion of it is part of an earlier settlement and much of the rest will take the form of mortgage relief that will help the bank in the long run (Salon, 11/20/13).
  • Paul Merrell on 05 Jan 14
     
    Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting weighs in on mainstream media's reluctance to call for banksters to be issued horizontal striped suits, noting that the excuses used ignore that there are real victims and that real crimes were comitted. 
Paul Merrell

US Corporations Used Personal Armies To Uproot, Terrorize Colombia - 0 views

www.mintpressnews.com/...222821

war & peace corporate-wars Columbia Coke Chiquita BP United-Fruit

shared by Paul Merrell on 07 Dec 16 - No Cached
  • Some of the numerous foreign corporations accused of serious human rights abuses in Colombia include fruit companies Dole, Del Monte, and Chiquita, agribusiness giant Cargill, and other representatives of the fossil fuel industry like Texaco (formerly Texas Petroleum Company) and Exxon Mobil. Heeding corporate orders, paramilitary groups murdered union and labor rights activists, tortured and terrorized countless indigenous and Afro-Colombian people, and devastated entire villages of subsistence farmers to make way for mining, fossil fuel extraction, or plantations that would bring massive profits to foreign corporations. The Colombian military — and, in at least one high-profile massacre, the U.S. military — sometimes lent a hand in these human rights crimes. “Every human rights person I work with in Colombia believes the peace process is a necessary precondition” to ending corporate exploitation of Colombia, Dan Kovalik, a human rights and labor rights lawyer who teaches at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law, told MintPress News.
  • In court, “Chiquita admitted to paying paramilitaries and giving them 3,000 Kalashnikov rifles between 1997 and 2004,” Kovalik said. Chiquita allied with the United Auto-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC), one of the country’s most violent paramilitary groups, Steven Cohen noted in a report for ThinkProgress in 2014. The AUC, a group once designated as a terrorist group by the U.S. government, is responsible for thousands of deaths in Colombia. It turns out that Chiquita had been playing both sides of the conflict. Cohen reported: “By its own account, Chiquita made at least 100 payments — $1.7 million in total — to the AUC between 1997 and 2004. In the decade prior to that, the company had maintained a similar arrangement with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), the nominally leftist rebel group chased out of the region by the combined (and coordinated) efforts of the AUC and Colombian military.”
  • “There’s been some recent reports that [Chiquita’s funding of paramilitaries] may have continued until very recently through a subsidiary,” Kovalik added. While these allegations remain unproven in court, they do suggest a staggering number of victims. Multiple lawsuits were consolidated in 2011, accusing Chiquita of being involved in the killings of as many as 4,000 Colombian nationals. While the evidence is clearest in the case of Chiquita, other international banana growers are suspect as well. “According to Salvatore Mancuso, a high-ranking paramilitarian in U.S. prison, Dole and Del Monte also worked with the paramilitaries,” Kovalik said. “All the banana companies have.” Mancuso is currently serving a 15-year sentence in a federal prison and has been spoken openly about the influence that corporations like Chiquita hold in Colombia.
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  • The influence of banana growers in Colombia pre-dates the ongoing civil war. In 1928, the Colombian government brutally shut down a strike by United Fruit Company banana pickers under threat from the U.S. government. Some estimates put the death toll from the military action as high as 2,000, including workers, women and children. United Fruit was once one of the most powerful corporations in the world, manipulating the governments and economies of multiple Latin American countries. Chiquita was a trademark of United Fruit until 1990, when the company renamed itself Chiquita Brands International in an effort to rehabilitate its image. (Chiquita was purchased by two Brazilian companies in 2015, and is now headquartered in Switzerland.)
  • “It should be noted under the peace agreement, at least the one that went down in October, Coca-Cola was one of the companies named [that will be] subjected to further investigation for paramilitary ties,” Kovalik said. Coca-Cola, or at least its Colombian bottlers, have also been linked to paramilitary groups and human rights abuses. The bottlers and the company’s Atlanta headquarters have faced multiple lawsuits over attacks on union organizers. A 2010 documentary, “The Coca-Cola Case,” focused on the soda giant’s role in turning Colombia into the “trade union murder capital of the world,” June Chua wrote in a review for Rabble.ca that year.
  • Colombia is rich with resources that foreign corporations are eager to exploit, particularly in the mining, agriculture, and biofuels industries. “Mining is probably the biggest threat now to indigenous people, Afro-Colombians and peasants, and will continue to be as the peace agreement goes forward,” Kovalik added. Justin Podur, an author and global political analyst, told MintPress that Colombian human rights activists frequently say that “displacement in Colombia is not a side effect of the war, it’s really the point of the war.” Whether by design or coincidence, decades of unrest created fertile ground for profit.
  • In one of the most shocking examples of fossil fuel companies supporting the death and displacement of Colombian people, Kovalik highlighted the “the Santo Domingo massacre, in which Occidental Petroleum were part of an operation to bomb the Santo Domingo community.”
  • In a 2005 article for Z Net on the massacre, Kovalik and Luis Galvis explained: “On December 13, 1998, in what has become one of the most notorious war crimes in Colombia, the hamlet of Santo Domingo was attacked by a U.S. cluster bomb from a Colombian Air Force helicopter. Seventeen civilians, including 7 children, were killed as a result of the bombing.” In 2002, the Los Angeles Times revealed that the bombing had actually been carried out at the behest of, and with the assistance of, the Houston-based oil company which had its headquarters in Los Angeles at the time. Times staff writer T. Christian Miller wrote: “Los Angeles-based Occidental Petroleum, which runs an oil complex 30 miles north of Santo Domingo, provided crucial assistance to the operation. It supplied, directly or through contractors, troop transportation, planning facilities and fuel to Colombian military aircraft, including the helicopter crew accused of dropping the bomb.”
  • And, earlier this year, Gilberto Torres, a Colombian union activist, sued BP in London. He alleges that in 2002, he was kidnapped and tortured for 42 days by paramilitaries who were following orders from the oil giant.
Gary Edwards

The Purchase Of Our Republic | Zero Hedge - 0 views

www.zerohedge.com/...purchase-our-republic

shared by Gary Edwards on 06 Jun 14 - No Cached
  • The massive consolidation of wealth, combined with the removal of any limits on money in campaigns, has allowed for the purchase of our government. Today I am publishing a comprehensive and important guest essay, The Purchase of Our Republic, by longtime correspondent Y. Falkson.
  • Americans know that something is wrong, deeply wrong. They see signs of the problem everywhere: income inequality, growing concentration and power of mega corporations, political donations/corruption, the absence of jobs with decent salaries, the explosion of the US prison population, healthcare costs, student loan debt, homelessness, etc. etc.  However, the true causes and benefactors behind these problems are purposely hidden from view. What Americans see is Kabuki Theater of a functioning form of capitalism and democracy, but beyond this veneer our country has devolved into the exact opposite. Those who benefit from this crony capitalist state go to extreme lengths to paper over the reality and convince Americans that the system works, the American Dream is still a reality and that American democracy is in fact democratic. Below I hope to begin to outline some of the underlying dynamics and trends that have evolved in recent decades and led us so far from what we once were. As fun as it would be, the answer is not some evil conspiracy by the Illuminati, but rather the unfortunate result of three long term and mutually reinforcing components that have been attacking the fundamental roots of the structure of our Republic. The first is the increased concentr
  • ation of corporate and private wealth. Both of which are quickly yelled down in the media as anti-free market and class war hysteria. The second is the use of this wealth to capture all three branches of government in order to ensure the continued extraction of capital from the many and to the few.The rich might have climbed the ladder because they earned it, but they have then purchased government to pull up the ladder behind them. The consequence of the first two components is a democracy in name only that represents the very few.
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  • 1. Faux Capitalism = Wealth Consolidation / Income Inequality
  • While there is no true beginning to the story, we can start with the incredible build up and concentration of wealth among corporations in recent decades. The USA now boasts a cartel-like set of corporate titans in almost every industry. It goes beyond, but certainly includes, our Too Biggerer To Fail banks, merged from what was 37 banks in 1995 into a Frankenstein’s monster like 5 (Citigroup, JP Morgan-Chase, Bank of America, Wells Fargo and Goldman Sachs). In agriculture, Monsanto alone controls over 85% of all corn and soy bean crops, four companies control 83% of the beef market, 66% of the hog market and 58% of the chicken market. So while shopping at the grocery store might appear to be the manifestation of capitalism at its finest, it doesn’t take much digging to look behind the curtain to see how little competition truly exists.
  • When the average American goes to pick up some groceries, they are shopping at Walmart and buying something from P&G that is mostly made of Monsanto corn. Is that true choice? The same story plays out with our news and media (and other industries) where we have gone from 50 companies in 1983 to the big 6 which control over 90% of all media. Is choosing to watch one of 30 news channels, all of which are owned by News Corp (Rupert Murdoch) a real choice? This is not capitalism and they are not competing, not in the true sense of the word. Along with this consolidation of corporations in recent decades, their senior leaders have taken up a larger and larger piece of the pie at the expense of their employees. In particular, the ratio of CEO-to-worker pay has increased 1,000 percent since 1950. Unsurprisingly, Walmart is both the largest employer in the country and the worst CEO pay offender with a ratio of over 1000:1. This is at a time where worker productivity has increased significantly, something that historically correlated with increased pay. But no more. It’s a new twist on the old Soviet saying “we pretend to work and they pretend to pay us”, but now it’s closer to “we do all of the work and they pretend to pay us”.
  • Private Wealth: As a consequence of the royal tribute we pay to the C-suite class these days, we have likely surpassed the pre-Depression Roaring Twenties in terms of inequality.
  • This, amazingly, has only accelerated since the crisis in 2008 in thanks to bailouts, Quantitative Easing and other gifts from Congress and the Fed. The wealthy 1% and in particular the .01% have now grown their fortunes to levels that tax comprehension and even their ability to spend it (the decisions by a few billionaires such as Bill Gates to essentially donate his fortune is a tacit acknowledgement that our current system over provides wealth to a select few).
  • So what is an incredibly wealthy capitalist CEO of a mega-corporation do once they control their industry and have essentially limitless wealth? Well in a competitive market, the only way to go from the top is down and the only thing that can make that happen is competition. Consequently, competition must be avoided whenever possible.
  • To squash or prevent competition, the oligopolies and oligarchs target their resources on the one place that can make competition illegal, our government.Something to keep in mind the next time you see a corporate billionaire grandstanding about the importance of “Free Markets” when their strategy is quite the opposite. As this capture of the government has taken place we have essentially shifted from capitalism and to crony capitalism. So we now have industries that have mastered the art of faking capitalism by turning our government into one that fakes democracy. This government takeover took time, but the purchase of all 3 branches of government has almost been completed by 2014. You don’t have to take my word for it, luckily that has now been empirically proven in an analysis of over 20 years of government policy where the clear conclusion was that policy makers respond solely to those in the top 90th percentile and essentially ignore the large majority of Americans.
  • 2. Wealthy Purchase of Government Institutions / Elections
  • Purchase of the Executive Branch:
  • Let’s take a step back and take a glimpse at how the government was purchased, beginning with the executive branch. In 1980, Reagan’s election cost less than $300 million. When Bush beat Kerry in 2004, it cost almost 3x times as much, almost $900 Million. 4 years later, the 2008 election cost a record $1.3 Billion. It was in this election where Obama hammered the final nail in the coffin for government funded for elections. Obama, more so than any other candidate in recent decades had the widespread support of millions of small donors, but in the end I guess it wasn’t enough. So when Obama “leaned to the green”, it forever set the precedent that you can’t win without the backing of our nation’s oligarchs. Consequently, the money has only gushed in since as the cost of Obama’s reelection in 2012 skyrocketed to an unfathomable $7 billion. Needless to say this is slightly above the rate of inflation. Our Presidents are now preselected exclusively by a tiny fraction of Americans can have the money to fund what has become necessary for a legitimate run. Summary: Candidates spend years courting the super-rich to build up a multi-billion dollar war chest. Only those who succeed can actually run a campaign that an average American will be aware of. Then Americans get to choose one of the pre-selected “candidates”. No wonder voter turnout is so low… Executive branch, check!
  • – Note that media corporations benefit doubly as they can use their cash to fund elections, but are also the beneficiary of all that money as it is used for campaign spending.
  • Purchase of the Legislative Branch:
  • The process has progressed similarly in Congress. In 1978, outside groups spent $303,000 on congressional races. In 2012 that was up to $457,000,000. That is over 1,500 times the level in 1978. It would be funny, if it was so blatant and terrifying. By many accounts, our “leaders” in Congress spend 50% or more of their time working the phones or fundraisers rather than trying (and failing) to actually do the “people’s business”. Let’s also take a minute to appreciate the hypocrisy of anyone that pretends that the money doesn’t influence our government. Businesses do not give to politicians for charity. This is a payment for services that has proven exceedingly reliable and profitable. The ROI for money invested in purchasing Congressman is what CEO dreams are made of. No wonder the incentive is to invest in Congress rather than R&D or marketing. There are very few places in the world or times in history where you can find ROI’s in the thousands, or even the tens of thousands.
  • Review: Congressmen beg for money to get elected, make sure to vote the way your benefactors would like, consequently get more money to get elected again. If at any point they do lose or quit, they take the big payday to work for those who have been paying them all along. Legislative Branch, Check!
  • In addition, increasingly those who work on Congress (and regulators) were previously employed by these large corporations or expect to work there later. A recent example is Chris Dodd who left the Senate the head lobbyist for Hollywood at the MPAA, the guys behind SOPA and PIPA, but there are many many others.
  • Judicial Branch Endorsement of the Purchase of Government:
  • Last but not least, we have the enabling Judicial Branch. It only took a few purchased presidents to ensure the appointment of a majority of “free market” and “pro-business” judges. For instance, and disgracefully, Clarence Thomas was once legal counsel for Monsanto, but has not once recused himself from any cases involving Monsanto and always votes in their favor. These radicals have now fully endorsed and enabled the influx of money used to purchase the other branches. Specifically, 2 major decisions have completely opened the floodgates, Citizens United and McCutcheon. The first allowed unlimited contributions of corporate money into elections and brought us the notorious declaration that “corporations are people” and that “money is free speech”. This was more recently followed up with the private wealth equivalent in McCutcheon. In this ruling, Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts said as part of his majority opinion (presumably with a straight face) “… nor does the possibility that an individual who spends large sums may garner influence over or access to elected officials or political parties”. And with this, the Supreme Court has fully endorsed both major sources of immense wealth to purchase our elections and consequently our government. Review: The rich fund Presidential elections, Presidents nominate “business-friendly” judges and then the bought Congress approves their nominations. New judge then votes to ensure even more money is allowed to purchase elections. Judicial Branch, CHECK!
  • 3. A Faux Republic Dependent Upon the Funders and Not the Voters
  • The Founder’s Hope and the Sad Reality:
  • Acknowledging where we are as a country, it is often helpful to look to where we started for some perspective. Unsurprisingly, this type of problem was not overlooked back in the 18th century. In 1776, James Madison stated that his goal was to design a republic in which “powerful interest groups would be rendered incapable of subdoing the general will”. Madison hoped, perhaps naively, that factions would be thwarted by competing with other factions. Sadly, we are now in a time where factions (aka wealthy special interests) subdue the will of the people and ensure the government responds to them alone on those issues where they have a “special interest” and consequently asymmetric stakes in the game (Charles Hugh Smith). As a result, these groups essentially collude to allocate their resources to their own issues, but do not “thwart” or compete with other factions as they do the same. It’s a pretty great system, as long as you’re one of the wealthy few who can use their money to drown out the poor and voiceless many. And just like that, what was once a Republic has become a corrupt shell of its past self. All the signs are still there; votes, elections, campaigns, branches of government, etc., but behind the scenes the only ones represented are those who can afford to be heard.
  • Summary: This massive consolidation of wealth, combined with the removal of any limits on money in campaigns, has allowed for the purchase of our government, or as Dick Durban once stated, “frankly they [the banks in this case] own the place”. If money = free speech, then those with all the money, have all the free speech.
  • What Might Help? Now that I have likely and thoroughly depressed the reader, let’s bounce around some ideas for what can be done. As stated in the beginning, this is not an unknown problem and many people are promoting a number of ways to fix or at least ameliorate the problem. I will briefly describe just a few which I think provide some direction any of us could easily implement or support.
  • Change the Rules: Laurence Lessig of Harvard Law has put forward a visionary proposal for re-writing the way that campaigns are financed in his book, Republic, Lost: How Money Corrupts Congress--and a Plan to Stop It. Put simply, he would like to empower every voter with a stipend, say $150 per election to give to whatever candidate or candidates they prefer. If you would like to accept this money, you would need to forgo any other contributions or support (one would hope including the indirect PAC kind). This would actually provide even more money than is used in current elections, but would effectively democratize the funding process. While there would still be a “funding election” that takes place before the actual election, the funding would not be unequally provided. Lessig’s work has only begun, as this sort of bill or likely constitutional reform is nearly impossible to achieve, but he has undertaken and I assume will continue to implement many brave and creative ways of bringing about the change all American’s should support. Most recently he has suggested we begin to fund, ironically enough, a Super PAC to end all Super PACs. It would be funded with the solitary goal of changing how money impacts our elections. Please support them here: www.mayone.us/
  • Change Our Day-to-Day: At the more micro level, Charles Hugh Smith believes that we will inevitably see our overly centralized and inefficient system erode away as it is replaced by more resilient, local and efficient businesses and societies outside of the current system. With that in mind, he recommends that “all anyone can do is the basic things--lower our energy footprint, stay healthy and avoid unnecessary medications and procedures, support local businesses, organic food growers, etc. In other words, what we can do is support local businesses that are part of the emerging economy rather than support corporate cartels.” Your Vote Does Matter: Do you live in Ohio, Florida or New Hampshire? Probably not. Despite what we are told every 4 years, there are actually states outside of the “swing states”, and even more surprising, the very large majority of Americans live in those states where your “vote doesn’t matter”. New Yorkers an Californians all know their state will turn Blue no matter who the candidates are and either don’t vote at all, or often vote for the Blue team in order to feel like they are on the winning side.
  • The truth is that if you see the election as Red vs. Blue, you vote probably doesn’t matter. But here is the trick, if all the people who think their vote didn’t matter decided to vote for whom they might actually believe in, then their votes just might matter.
  • What if all the growing number of “Independents” (who usually still vote Blue), chose to vote for a third party? What if a third party candidate won a state like New York or California? What if that candidate was one whose primary promise to the voters was to champion a change to the role of money in government (perhaps in line with what Lessig proposes)? Would you vote for such a person?I would argue you should. If California alone (with 55 electoral votes) were to vote for a 3rd party that would likely prevent either Red or Blue candidate from winning the requisite 270 electoral votes.
  • Think about the message that would send to both parties. I would predict that both sides would start to bend over backwards for an endorsement from that 3rd party and they would have to get it by taking up the same primary cause for reforming money in government. Consequently, at the root of our corrupted system which is perpetually ignored as both sides might suddenly become the big issue of the election. Then maybe we might begin to turn things around.
  • Sources: Charles Hugh Smith (oftwominds, Surivival+, etc.), Yves Smith (Naked Capitalism, Econned), Laurence Lessig (Republic Lost, multiple TED Talks), Matt Taibbi (blog at Rolling Stone and now at The Intercept), Zero Hedge, John Robb, Max Keiser, Clay Shirky (Cognitive Surplus), Aldous Huxley (Brave New World, Brave New World Revisited), George Orwell (1984), Michael Lewis, Daniel Kahneman (Thinking Fast and Slow), James Richards (Currency Wars), Han Joon Chang (23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism) and Joseph Stiglitz (Mismeasuring Our Lives) 
Paul Merrell

5 Big Banks Expected to Plead Guilty to Felony Charges, but Punishments May Be Tempered... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...nishments-may-be-tempered.html

banksters litigation UBS Barclays JPMorgan Chase Citigroup Royal-Bank-of-Scotland guilty-pleas SEC-waivers

shared by Paul Merrell on 16 May 15 - No Cached
  • The Justice Department is preparing to announce that Barclays, JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup and the Royal Bank of Scotland will collectively pay several billion dollars and plead guilty to criminal antitrust violations for rigging the price of foreign currencies, according to people briefed on the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity. Most if not all of the pleas are expected to come from the banks’ holding companies, the people said — a first for Wall Street giants that until now have had only subsidiaries or their biggest banking units plead guilty.
  • The Justice Department is also preparing to resolve accusations of foreign currency misconduct at UBS. As part of that deal, prosecutors are taking the rare step of tearing up a 2012 nonprosecution agreement with the bank over the manipulation of benchmark interest rates, the people said, citing the bank’s foreign currency misconduct as a violation of the earlier agreement. UBS A.G., the banking unit that signed the 2012 nonprosecution agreement, is expected to plead guilty to the earlier charges and pay a fine that could be as high as $500 million rather than go to trial, the people said.
  • Holding companies, while appearing to be the most important entities at the banks, are in less jeopardy of suffering the consequences of guilty pleas. Some banks worried that a guilty plea by their biggest banking units, which hold licenses that enable them to operate branches and make loans, would be riskier, two of the people briefed on the matter said. The fear, they said, centered on whether state or federal regulators might revoke those licenses in response to the pleas. Advertisement Continue reading the main story Behind the scenes in Washington, the banks’ lawyers are also seeking assurances from federal regulators — including the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Labor Department — that the banks will not be barred from certain business practices after the guilty pleas, the people said. While the S.E.C.’s five commissioners have not yet voted on the requests for waivers, which would allow the banks to conduct business as usual despite being felons, the people briefed on the matter expected a majority of commissioners to grant them.In reality, those accommodations render the plea deals, at least in part, an exercise in stagecraft. And while banks might prefer a deferred-prosecution agreement that suspends charges in exchange for fines and other concessions — or a nonprosecution deal like the one that UBS is on the verge of losing — the reputational blow of being a felon does not spell disaster.
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  • The foreign exchange investigation, which centers on accusations that traders colluded to fix the price of major currencies, will test the Justice Department’s strategy for securing guilty pleas on Wall Street.
  • In the case of UBS, the bank will lose its nonprosecution agreement over interest rate manipulation, the people briefed on the matter said, a consequence of its misconduct in the foreign exchange case. It is unclear why that penalty will fall on UBS, but not on other banks suspected of manipulating both interest rates and currency prices.
  • the bank is expected to avoid pleading guilty in the foreign exchange case, the people said, though it will probably pay a fine. While UBS was unlikely to plead guilty to antitrust violations because it was the first to cooperate in the foreign exchange investigation, the bank was facing the possibility of pleading guilty to fraud charges related to the currency manipulation. The exact punishment is not yet final, the people added.The Justice Department negotiations coincide with the banks’ separate efforts to persuade the S.E.C. to issue waivers from automatic bans that occur when a company pleads guilty. If the waivers are not granted, a decision that the Justice Department does not control, the banks could face significant consequences.For example, some banks may be seeking waivers to a ban on overseeing mutual funds, one of the people said. They are also requesting waivers to ensure they do not lose their special status as “well-known seasoned issuers,” which allows them to fast-track securities offerings. For some of the banks, there is also a concern that they will lose their “safe harbor” status for making forward-looking statements in securities documents.
  • In turn, the S.E.C. asked the Justice Department to hold off on announcing the currency cases until the banks’ requests had been reviewed, one of the people said. As of Wednesday, it seemed probable that a majority of the S.E.C.’s commissioners would approve most of the waivers, which can be granted for a cause like the public good. Still, the agency’s two Democratic commissioners — Kara M. Stein and Luis A. Aguilar, who have denounced the S.E.C.’s use of waivers — might be more likely to balk.
  • Corporate prosecutions are a delicate matter, peppered with political and legal land mines. Senator Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts, and other liberal politicians have criticized prosecutors for treating Wall Street with kid gloves. Banks and their lawyers, however, complain about huge penalties and guilty pleas. Continue reading the main story Recent Comments AvangionQ 14 hours ago These are the sorts of crimes that take down nations, jail sentences should be mandatory. Lance Haley 14 hours ago I find this whole legal exercise not only irrational, but insulting. I am a criminal defense attorney. Punishing the shareholders and the... loomypop 14 hours ago There is much more than Irony in the reality of how America treats criminal action and punishment when the entire determination and outcome... See All Comments And lingering in the background is the case of Arthur Andersen, an accounting giant that imploded after being convicted in 2002 of criminal charges related to its work for Enron. After the firm’s collapse, and the later reversal of its conviction, prosecutors began to shift from indictments and guilty pleas to deferred-prosecution agreements. And in 2008, the Justice Department updated guidelines for prosecuting corporations, which have long included a requirement that prosecutors weigh collateral consequences like harm to shareholders and innocent employees.
  • “The collateral consequences consideration is designed to address the risk that a particular criminal charge might inflict disproportionate harm to shareholders, pension holders and employees who are not even alleged to be culpable or to have profited potentially from wrongdoing,” said Mark Filip, the Justice Department official who wrote the 2008 memo. “Arthur Andersen was ultimately never convicted of anything, but the mere act of indicting it destroyed one of the cornerstones of the Midwest’s economy.”
  • Paul Merrell on 16 May 15
     
    In related news, the Dept. of Justice announced that it would begin using its "collateral consequences" analysis to decisions whether to charge human beings with crimes, taking into account the hardships imposed on innocent family members and other dependents if a person were sentenced to prison.  No? Sounds like corporations have more rights than human beings, yes?
Paul Merrell

Wall Street: The Trump-China missing link - RT Op-Edge - 0 views

www.rt.com/...61057-wall-street-trump-china-

economy China globalism banksters Trump Auction 2016 musto-read

shared by Paul Merrell on 01 Oct 16 - No Cached
  • The yuan is about to enter the IMF’s basket of reserve currencies this coming Saturday - alongside the US dollar, pound, euro and yen. This is no less than a geoeconomic earthquake. Not only does this represent yet another step in China’s irresistible path towards economic primacy; the Chinese currency’s inclusion in the Special Drawing Rights (SDR) basket will also lead central banks and hyper-wealthy funds – especially from the US – to increasingly buy more Chinese assets.At the first US presidential debate, Donald Trump took no prisoners, criticizing China’s currency manipulation. This is what he said:“You look at what China’s doing to our country in terms of making our product, they’re devaluing their currency and there’s nobody in our government to fight them… They’re using our country as a piggy bank to rebuild China, and many other countries are doing the same thing.”
  • Well, China is not “making our product”; the manufacturing process is Made in China – then exported to the US. Most of the profits benefit US corporations – everything from design, licensing and royalties to advertising, financing and retail margins. If the mantras manage to spell out a partial truth - the US has lost manufacturing jobs to China, China is the “factory of the world” – they don't spell out the hidden truth that those who profit are essentially major corporations.China does not “devalue their currency”; the People’s Bank of China periodically adjusts the yuan according to a very narrow band. The major practitioners of quantitative easing (QE) are actually the US, as well as Japan and the European Central Bank (ECB). And the currency of global consumer goods manufacturing continues to be the US dollar, not the yuan.
  • Beijing also is not “using our country as a piggy bank to rebuild China.” This is all about balance of payments. What US consumers spend on Made in China products – many of them delocalized by US corporations – is pumped back to the US as capital inflows that keep interest rates down and help to support the Empire of Chaos’s global hegemony.
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  • For all his incapacity to formulate thoughts above the language skills of a third grader, Trump has been piling up astonishing proposals that resonate wildly, way beyond the “basket of deplorables” spectrum.
  • The bottom line is that to recover US manufacturing jobs – as Trump has been forcefully promising – he will have to stare down the whole Wall Street finance oligarchy.So no wonder these oligarchs – responsible for shipping all those US manufacturing jobs to Asia and lavishly profiting from bailouts to the 'Too Big To Fail' racket – hate him with all their golden-plated guts.
  • Trump’s attention span is notoriously minimalist. If his advisers managed to imprint – tweet? - a few one-liners on his brain, he would be able to explain to US public opinion how the US-China game is really played, something that all relevant parties in both nations know by heart.And the – crucial - missing link in the whole game is Wall Street.This is how it works.
  • He is against Cold War 2.0 and the pivot to Asia, when he says “wouldn’t it be nice to get along with Russia and China for a change?”He no less than pre-empted WWIII when he said he would be against a US nuclear first-strike.He totally abhors global “free trade” – from NAFTA to TPP and TTIP - because it has “hollowed out the lives of American workers”, as US corporations (under Wall Street’s “incentive”) delocalize and then import back into the US tariff-free.
  • Trump was even open to nationalizing Wall Street banks after the 2008 financial crisis.
  • So we’re faced with the ultimate surrealist spectacle of a billionaire denouncing corporate globalization, which has been responsible for stripping the US lower middle classes of countless, decent blue-collar jobs and social benefits – not to mention turning them into hostages of rotting public infrastructure. And all that with absolutely no one among the US establishment condemning the most astonishing wealth transfer to the 0.0001% in history.If in the next two presidential debates Trump points to the crucial missing link in the whole plot – Wall Street - he might as well lock on as a surefire winner.
Paul Merrell

Former Oil Tycoon Launches Pro-European Political Movement within Russia | nsnbc intern... - 0 views

nsnbc.me/...litical-movement-within-russia

war & peace Russia Khodorkovsky color-revolutions

shared by Paul Merrell on 19 Oct 14 - No Cached
  • September the 20th marked the launch of Open Russia, a pro-European political movement spearheaded by former Russian oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky. Russia’s former wealthiest man was released from prison in December 2013 due to a pardon by Vladimir Putin, after serving close to 10 years in jail following his conviction in 2005.
  • Although officially convicted of tax evasion and embezzlement, it seems that Khodorkovsky was singled out among the Russian oligarchs due to him using his mass fortune to interfere in domestic Russian politics, in an attempt to overthrow Putin for the benefit of the Western elite. Open Russia is the rebirth of the Open Russia Foundation, which was launched in 2001 by Khodorkovsky to foster animosity in Russia but was later shut down after the tycoon was behind bars. The board of the Open Russia Foundation included two Anglo-American titans, namely Henry Kissinger and Lord Jacob Rothschild, revealing the mindset and intentions of the individuals who steered the foundation.
  • Khodorkovsky profited immensely from the mass privatisation of state assets following the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1990’s, at a time when corruption and back-door deals was the norm in Russia. He was the Chairman and CEO of the Russian based ‘Yakos Oil Company’ from 1997 to 2004, where he acquired an immense fortune leading him to be named the 16th wealthiest person on earth by Forbes magazine in 2004, worth a staggering $15 billion. Immediately after his release from prison at the end of 2013, Khodorkovsky declared on numerous occasions that he had no desire to enter politics. Yet only months after his initial statements he has launched a pro-European political movement within Russia, openly called for the overthrow of Putin in Moscow, announced he would be interested in leading Russia as President in the coming years, as well as asserting that Ukraine is the “model” for Russia to follow in the future. “I feel it imperative that the section of the population that is Europe-centered would have the opportunity to impact the way the country develops…. Without a doubt, Putin’s leaving is one of the necessary elements of Russia being able to take a European path of development…. It’s clear that Ukraine is that model that Russia is ready to accept and it’s precisely for this reason that Putin was so not interested in seeing the success of that revolution”, Khodorkovsky told the Daily Beast in an interview earlier this month.
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  • Khodorkovsky recently demonstrated that he still has very close links with the Anglo-American Establishment after speaking at the most distinguished think tank in America, the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). He also delivered a speech at Freedom House, an organisation that has been involved in the majority of Western orchestrated colour revolutions that have erupted across the planet over the past two decades.
Paul Merrell

A Resource Guide for Resolution #4 UCC General Synod 30 - 0 views

www.uccpin.org/#!pressrelease/c1a36

war & peace Israel Palestine BSD Church-of-Christ

shared by Paul Merrell on 30 Jun 15 - No Cached
  • FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE June 30, 2015     United Church of Christ Votes to Boycott & Divest from Companies Profiting from Israel's Occupation   The United Church of Christ Palestine-Israel Network (UCC PIN) is pleased to announce that today the plenary of the 30th General Synod taking place in Cleveland passed Resolution #4, calling for boycotts and divestment from companies that profit from Israel's occupation of Palestinian lands.
  • The vote, which was 508 in favor, 124 against, with 38 abstentions, was the culmination of a process that began in 2005, to end the Church's complicity in Israel's nearly half-century-old occupation and other abuses of Palestinian human rights. It also comes as a response to the Christian Palestinian community’s call for Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions, as embodied in the Kairos Palestine document, which seeks to achieve Palestinian freedom and rights using peaceful means, inspired by the US Civil Rights and South African anti-Apartheid movements.   In passing Resolution #4, the UCC is following in the footsteps of sister mainline churches like the Presbyterian Church (USA), which passed a similar resolution last year divesting from Israel’s occupation, and the United Methodists, who voted to boycott products made in Israeli settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories and whose pension board divested from G4S, a prison service company, due in part to its dealings with the Israeli military.
  • UCC PIN hopes that this modest initiative will help encourage the Israeli government to end the occupation, and looks forward to working in covenantal relationship with the UCC Pension Boards and the UCC Funds to implement this resolution moving forward.
Paul Merrell

One of the World's Safest Places for Banking Is Rocked by Scandals - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...lm-banking-industry-1528092559

banksters Australia criminal-prosecution

shared by Paul Merrell on 05 Jun 18 - No Cached
  • Commonwealth Bank of Australia ’s oversight of money transfers from that account to Lebanon last year was among many failures cited by the Australian federal government’s financial intelligence agency in its nearly US$530 million fine of the bank on Monday. If approved, the fine—meant to settle a lawsuit brought by the agency and founded on breaches of the country’s Anti-Money Laundering and Counter-Terrorism Act—would be the largest corporate civil penalty ever paid in Australia. Australia’s banks have long held a reputation for being among the world’s safest for investors. But a series of scandals over the past year has rocked the country’s top financial institutions. Commonwealth Bank has seen separate penalties for conduct in alleged interest-rate rigging and bad governance. On Friday, Australia & New Zealand Banking Group Ltd. said it would defend against criminal prosecution for alleged cartel conduct in a 2015 capital raising. A public inquiry into the sector, launched last autumn by Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, has heard accusations against Australia’s leading financial firms of inappropriate lending, collecting fees from dead customers for financial advice and lying to regulators. The tribunal has already claimed several big scalps. Beginning in late April, the chief executive, chairman and several board members at Australia’s largest wealth management company, AMP Ltd. , resigned after the company admitted it had misled regulators and been slow to compensate customers for fees charged for financial advice it didn’t deliver.
  • Disoriented investors now fear tighter regulation of a sector that has reliably returned a run of record annual underlying profits and solid dividends. The government has already beefed up penalties for corporate wrongdoing, including prison time, and strengthened the corporate regulator’s investigative powers. Commonwealth Bank shares recently tumbled to 5-year lows.
  • Those mistakes included not assessing the inherent risk of so-called intelligent deposit machines before mid-2015. Commonwealth Bank also didn’t limit the number of times that customers could deposit money each day, or create reports on thousands of deposits of A$10,000 (US$7,569) or more at the machines. These flaws created an architecture that money launderers could exploit, the financial-intelligence agency said.
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  • ANZ last month said it would scrap sales-based bonuses for financial planners while paying compensation in about 9,000 cases where it had provided inappropriate advice. And the banking industry has agreed to binding changes around conduct, including tightened background checks for employees and improved transparency around fees.
Paul Merrell

Where is the Money Going? - More than Two-Thirds of Afghanistan Reconstruction Money ha... - 0 views

www.allgov.com/...y-dyncorp-international-140428

war & peace war-profiteers Afghanistan

shared by Paul Merrell on 02 May 14 - No Cached
  • If not for the federal government, contractor DynCorp International wouldn’t be in business. Virtually all of its revenue (96%) comes from government contracts. That includes the vast majority of the taxpayer dollars that the State Department has awarded to companies to help rebuild Afghanistan. The Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) says that of the $4 billion allotted by the State Department from 2002 to 2013, 69.3% went to DynCorp. In terms of actual dollars, DynCorp took in $2.8 billion. Giving so much to one company might not have been a good idea, given DynCorp’s record. The Project on Government Oversight (POGO) notes the contractor’s “colorful history” includes “instances of labor smuggling, weak performance and overpayments on a base support services contract, botched construction work on an Afghan Army garrison, and lawsuits filed by disgruntled subcontractors.”
  • The second largest recipient of contracts for work in Afghanistan has been PAE Government Services, which received $598 million (or 15% of all State Department reconstruction funds). PAE has also had its troubles, according to POGO. The former subsidiary of Lockheed Martin, one of the biggest defense contractors in the U.S., saw a former program manager, Keith Johnson, and his wife, Angela Johnson, go to prison for conspiring to defraud the military over purchases of vehicle parts. In addition to jail time, the Johnsons were fined $2 million for funneling taxpayer money to a shell company they controlled and to subcontractors in exchange for kickbacks.
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