No, GE Won’t Repay Its Tax Break

The Associated Press got punk’d by the Yes Men and U.S. Uncut:

The Associated Press published a story based on a fake email press release that said General Electric would respond to criticism over the amount of taxes it avoids by repaying its entire $3.2 billion tax refund for 2010 to the U.S. Treasury Department. Both the press release and AP's story said GE would repay its tax refund on April 18, that the company would phase out its tax havens over five years and start providing one job in the U.S. for every new job it creates overseas. The hoax release quoted GE CEO Jeffrey Immelt as saying, “All seven of our foreign tax havens are entirely legal ... but Americans have made it clear that they deplore laws that enable tax avoidance. While we owe it to our shareholders to use every legal loophole to maximize returns -- we also owe something to the American people. We didn't write the laws that let us legally avoid paying taxes. Congress did. But we benefit from those laws, and now we'd like to share those benefits. We are proud to be giving something back to America, and we are proud to set an example for all industry to follow.” President Obama appointed Immelt as chairman of his outside panel of economic advisers on January 21, 2011. AP failed to verify the information in the release and withdrew its story 35 minutes after its publication. Two groups took responsibility for the hoax: the Yes Men and U.S. Uncut, saying they did it to raise awareness of U.S. corporate tax policy.

In its rush to be first, AP didn’t even bother to verify what was so obviously a bogus story. That’s a major media fail, but of course the biggest fail of all is the corporate tax policy which allows companies like GE to dodge its obligation to America to begin with. I guess after they got busted for defrauding American taxpayers back in 1985 they just found a legal way to do it.

Meanwhile, the business press is not amused:

GE shares fell 1.6% from their preopen high. Not a huge move, but enough to briefly trim GE’s market capitalization by nearly $3.5 billion.

How much of that was caused by the Yes Men? On a morning when most other companies in the Dow Jones Industrial Average were pretty flat, it’s tempting to think that at least some of GE’s pullback was the result of the hoax. We may never know, but there probably are several lawyers already looking into it, either on behalf of the company or its shareholders.

The episode is also cause for concern over at the Securities and Exchange Commission. One of that agency’s many tasks is to make sure people don’t manipulate share prices, and that includes issuing false statements about publicly traded companies.

It’s far from clear whether the SEC has the bandwidth to mount an investigation. But if you were hoodwinked into selling GE stock this morning, you’d appreciate it if the regulators at least gave the Yes Men a severe tongue lashing.

Really? There are people who would sell their shares of a stock when they learned a company was going to pay its fair share of taxes, phase out overseas tax havens, and provide as many jobs in the U.S. as it does overseas?

Seriously? That would cause investors to flee a stock? I’m thinking ... no. I'm thinking MarketWatch writer Jim Jelter has fabricated a scenario he imagines existed. We'll never know because he never quotes any actual angry, duped investors. But it’s a nice little bit of hippie punching, is it not? Can’t let those young kids muck around in the marketplace, got to keep ‘em in their place. The free hand of the market demands it.

Jay Steele & Nashville Chamber: Keep Your Hands Off Our Kids

Metro Nashville Schools have been swept up in yet another contentious battle, this one over the firing of a beloved teacher (technically she is being fired from a program she started and ran for nearly 30 years, not fired from Metro. She’s to be moved to another school). For my non-Nashville readers, go to the link and brush up on the controversy.

The removal of Mary Catherine Bradshaw is a political not performance-based move. She appears to have stood in the way of our corporate overlords a shiny-sparkly new education philosophy:

Her firing from the program comes at a time when new Metro schools associate superintendent Jay Steele is restructuring the district's high schools into a collection of "career academies," a hand-in-glove enterprise with the Nashville Area Chamber of Commerce to funnel students into high-demand career tracks like information technology.

If the name Jay Steele sounds familiar it’s because I wrote about another of his “pet projects” last April:

Naming rights to academic programs in Metro Nashville's high schools are for sale, and one school has a buyer.

The Tennessee Credit Union now owns the signage to Antioch High School's academy of business and finance for a price of $150,000. The school board approved the two-year contract Tuesday night.

Administrators hope this is the first of many naming deals. It's the brainchild of Metro's new high school czar, Jay Steele, who had success with the idea as an administrator in Florida.

"It's not marketing to kids," Steele told The Tennessean in December. "It's tight guidelines that would align a targeted industry with a theme."

Tight guidelines that align a targeted industry with a theme! Just what Nashville’s schools need!

WTF does that even mean? It sounds like business school clap-trap to me. It seems Jay Steele is hell bent on turning our city’s youth into fodder for the jaws of commerce, and I guess we’re supposed to cheer along and marvel at what a great start in life our youth are getting, what great business skills they’re learning and how they will be wonderful worker bees for the corporatocracy. Is that it? Forgive me if I’m wrong here, but was there a problem of some kind I’m unaware of? Were businesses not choosing to locate in Nashville because our kids are dumb?

Look, I get that we need to educate our kids so they can go to college and get jobs; I get that we need to start them off in life on the right foot. I even applaud the idea of offering classes that educate kids for high-demand fields. But for crying out loud this Chamber of Commerce crap has got to stop. Y’all can just wait in line before you get your greedy paws on ‘em, okay? Let them be kids for a little while.

This is dehumanization, plain and simple. It’s telling our kids their value is only in their earning power. They aren’t human beings, they’re human doings. The message is: You’re not valuable to our community because you’re alive, because you’re a child of God and a member of the human family, because when we see you and your friends we’re reminded that there’s another generation coming behind us. You’re valuable because you have potential earning power, someday you too can fight and claw your way up to being an independent contractor with no benefits and a crappy credit score. And someday you can look forward to an exciting retirement, maybe when you’re 75, whereafter you can spend your days on your feet as a WalMart greeter.

This is a really hard concept to articulate and so many others have done it so much better. I just think commerce is a corrupting influence that does not belong in our schools. Anywhere. So to the Nashville Chamber of Commerce: wait your fucking turn. You can have our kids when we’re ready to give them to you. Right now, they belong to us.

And to Jay Steele, look: I know this is a radical idea for some of you young whippersnappers raised in a post-Reagan age, but I don’t happen to think that capitalism is the cure for every problem.

There’s an intellectual debate going on right now, and I’m going to refer folks back to my October 2009 post on the business of dehumanization. It's the one where I linked to Mark Slouka’s article in the September issue of Harper’s (“Dehumanized: When Math & Science Rule The School," and a subscription is required).

Slouka wrote:

Like a single species taking over an ecosystem, like an elephant on a see-saw, the problem today is disequilibrium. Why is every Crisis in American Education cast as an economic threat and never a civic one? In part, because we don’t have the language for it. Our focus is on the usual economic indicators. There are no corresponding “civic indicators,” no generally agreed-upon warning signs of political vulnerability, even though the inability of more than two thirds of our college graduates to read a text and draw rational inferences could be seen as the political equivalent of runaway inflation or soaring unemployment.

Of course, as I wrote at the time we do have those civic indicators: low voter turnout being a major one.

Slouka’s point was that an emphasis on math and science education at the expense of the humanities is a great way to create worker bees to feed the machinery of capitalism, and also a great way to starve the nation of critical thinking skills and knowledge which breeds dissent. It also devalues art, music, literature and the entire cultural spectrum of things which make life worth living.

It’s hard not to see capitalism’s creep into our schools, and watch as teachers are being devalued at every step, and then read about efforts to roll back child labor laws around the country and not wonder if there’s a connection.

A Primer On Corporate Personhood

This is an excellent overview of corporate personhood and the Citizens United case. It’s just under 10 minutes but give it a look:



I first became educated about corporate personhood waaay back in 2003 when I read this Orion article on the issue, which also looked at several local efforts to restrict corporate power. Orion’s 2003 piece also delved into one aspect of this issue which we hear precious little about, which is how international trade agreements serve corporate interests and often undermine U.S. laws:

Through this process, WTO tribunals have overturned such U.S. laws as EPA standards for clean-burning gasoline and regulations banning fish caught by methods that endanger dolphins and sea turtles. The WTO has also effectively undermined the use of the precautionary principle, by which practices can be banned until proven safe—in one recent instance superseding European laws forbidding the use of growth hormones in beef cattle. A WTO tribunal dismissed laboratory evidence that such hormones may cause cancer because it lacked “scientific certainty.” On similar grounds, the U.S., on behalf of Monsanto and other American agribusiness giants, recently initiated an action under GATT challenging the European Union’s ban on genetically modified food.

Under NAFTA, which covers Canada, Mexico, and the U.S., a corporation can sue a government directly. The case would also be heard by a secret tribunal, such as when Vancouver-based Methanex sued the U.S. over California’s ban on a cancer-causing gas additive, MTBE. The company, which manufactures the additive’s key ingredient, claimed that the ban failed to consider its financial interests. Since July 2001, three men—one former U.S. official and two corporate lawyers—have held closed hearings on the thirteenth floor of World Bank headquarters in Washington, D.C., to decide whether, in this instance, a democratically elected governor’s executive order to protect the public should cost the U.S. $970 million in fines. The FTAA, recently fast-tracked for negotiations to put it into effect by 2005, would extend NAFTA’s provisions to all of Latin America.

GATS, the General Agreement on Trade in Services, a recent trade agreement under the WTO, takes the usurpation of democracy one step further. While GATT deals with the exchange of goods across international borders, GATS establishes certain privileges for transnational companies operating within a country. It covers “services,” meaning almost anything from telecommunications to construction to mining to supplying drinking water. It even includes functions that traditionally have been carried out or closely controlled by government, like postal services and social services such as welfare—even libraries. Activists point out that the primary focus of the GATS is to limit government involvement, “whether in the form of a law, regulation, rule, procedure, decision, administrative action or any other form,” to quote the treaty itself. Public Citizen’s Lori Wallach has called GATS a “massive attack on the most basic functions of local and state government.”

Under GATS, any activity the federal government agrees to declare a “service” would be thrown open to privatization. The supply and treatment of water is a timely example, since the European Union is currently pressing the United States to make water among the first of the services it places under GATS. If clean drinking water is so declared, no government body in the U.S. could insist that it remain publicly managed. If any government wanted to create a publicly owned water district, foreign corporate “competitors” would have the right to underbid the government for control of the service. Just as important, a transnational company could challenge any rules—including environmental and health regulations—that would hamper its ability to profit from a business that is related to a service under GATS.

This reminds me: we hear a lot of crazy-assed fearmongering from the Glenn Beck wing of the conservative movement about how the United Nations is usurping U.S. authority and all that, but no one talks about trade groups like the WTO helping corporations skirt U.S. law. Or how agreements like GATS have served as a Trojan Horse for corporate privatization schemes.

Any constitutional amendment or other effort to right the wrong that was Citizens United needs to address the international trade agreement issue, too, or else it will only be a cosmetic effort, at best.

(h/t, Fast Company)

False Advertising, Cultural Narrative Edition

Adding to my earlier post today .... Have you seen this Simpson’s Coca-Cola ad? I think it ran during last year’s Super Bowl. I missed it then, but they’re playing it at the movie theater now, so I’ve seen it a gazillion times:



What’s interesting to me is that during this current recession, billionaires didn’t go broke. The “C. Montgomery Burnses” of the country got giant bailouts from the taxpayers and are safely ensconced in their mansions surrounded by their family heirlooms. The people getting yanked out of their homes and selling mementos at the flea market are the middle class and lower class folks -- the people the ad shows enjoying the simple, carefree joys of a day in the park and a Coke.

So why does a corporate multinational like Coca Cola choose to present our current dilemma in this way? Was this rewriting of history deliberate? This misrepresentation of facts to put the wealthy in the same boat as everyone else: intentional? A blatant attempt to change the cultural narrative before our very eyes? I mean, unless you’re really paying attention, you might not even notice.

It’s all very fascinating.

Government Is Not A Business

Can we please, pretty please, retire that tired old canard that “government needs to be run like a business”? I absolutely despise that little piece of conventional wisdom which politicians repeat each election. It’s bullshit.

Government cannot run like a business because it’s a completely different entity.

As the Los Angeles Times’ Michael Hiltzik writes today:

It would be obvious to any business person who had spent a day in public administration that government and business are antithetical. That's not a flaw in the system. Government exists to take on precisely those tasks the private sector can't or won't do.

These include caring for the penniless; maintaining common amenities such as parks, schools, and universities; and creating infrastructure with broad value but unspecific beneficiaries, such as freeways and the Internet (which in coming days undoubtedly will be used by many readers to inform me by e-mail that they don't see how government serves any purpose).

Most of these functions can't be made to "pay" in the sense that a business strategy does. But they can be neglected or privatized only at great cost to society.

Thank you! Jeeebus, nothing annoys me more than hearing how government needs to be run like a business. No, it doesn’t! It can’t! I remember working for a Big Government Agency tasked with operating a National Recreation Area and being told we had to apply for-profit business practices to what we did. I’m sorry, but just how is that supposed to work? How do you make money break even off of maintaining hiking and mountain biking trails, campgrounds, and wildlife habitat? Especially when you have small businesses in the local town complaining about unfair competition from said Big Government Agency? If we operated like a business, then what would be left for the real businesses to do? It was laughable idea. We ended up having to explain that no amount of T-shirt and baseball cap sales and hunting permits would ever make us turn a profit break even. [Note: I hit send too soon on this one, but of course all government is not-for-profit -- another reason why it can't operate as a business. We weren't tasked with making a profit but they did want us to try to break even and they gave us a few years to do it which was just stupid.]

Government and business are separate entities. We need both to function as a democracy. Trying to turn one into the other is what has led to disasters like Soviet-style Communism and Mussolini-style fascism.

Another problem, which I've discussed elsewhere, is that we do not -- can not -- put a monetary value on things that are quite literally priceless. Things like watershed, clean air, clean water or the soil erosion protection which forests provide. As I wrote last spring:

But it’s bigger than that. We also don’t factor in the value of what we’ve lost when we destroy those mountains and streams. We don’t consider that a forest isn’t just a piece of land or something pretty to look at or even the economic value of its timber. It’s a living system and it performs a function. Forests and streams provide water storage, flood management, even reduce the severity of floods. Trees take the Co2 and pollutants out of the atmosphere and replace it with oxygen, earth’s natural breathing mechanism provided to us, free of charge.

And here’s the thing: we haven’t invented a substitute for these natural living systems! When they’re gone, we’re all screwed. We have no air-scrubbers, no one has created the photosynthesis machine. The reason we can’t put a value on this is because it is truly priceless. Once it’s gone, it’s gone.

I was writing about the environment but there are a whole bunch of non-easily quantifiable things. The education of your work force. The health of the population. The knowledge and experience of our senior citizens. Anyone who wants to be governor and tells you they plan to operate the state like a business is obviously not factoring in a whole bunch of things for which we cannot attach a dollar value because they are literally priceless.

And it's hard for me to take these business sector politicians seriously. So many of them have little respect for what government does anyway -- many of them don't even vote. As Hiltzik wrote:

Engagement in democracy starts with participation in the ballot box. That's the real significance of Whitman's and Fiorina's well-documented failures to vote over the years. This isn't a "mistake," as Whitman likes to call it. A mistake is getting the address of the polling place wrong, once. Not bothering to vote year after year? That's contempt for the very concept of democracy.

I couldn't agree more. Electing to office someone who not only holds the very concept of democracy in contempt but also misunderstands the function and role of government is the worst sort of mistake.

Shocking

Well, clearly the solution to this problem is more deregulation:

As early as February, oil-field service giant Halliburton was getting poor results in lab tests of the recipe for the cement it was planning to use, according to evidence collected by the National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling.

Three separate tests suggested that the mixture would be "unstable," according to a commission staff letter released Thursday.

Halliburton notified BP by e-mail about only one of the tests before the well explosion, according to the commission. The two companies went ahead with the cementing job anyway. Its failure became the first in a cascade of factors leading to the accident.

The results of a fourth Halliburton test - the only one indicating that the cement slurry might have been able to contain the high-pressure pool of oil and gas at the bottom of the Macondo well - were not available until the night of April 19 at the earliest and perhaps not until after the cement was poured, the commission staff said.

[...]

At the commission's request, Chevron recently carried out independent lab tests of a cement slurry that Halliburton said was the same as that used in the Macondo well. The commission staff said Chevron reported that "its lab personnel were unable to generate stable foam cement in the laboratory using the materials provided by Halliburton."

The commission staff said in the letter Thursday that the Halliburton tests before the Macondo well blowout and the new lab tests conducted by Chevron show that "Halliburton (and perhaps BP) should have considered redesigning the foam slurry before pumping it at the Macondo well."

Well, I’m sure the free hand of the market will take care of that. I mean, this is Halliburton, y’all! The company which fleeced taxpayers with its Iraq reconstruciton corruption, overcharged the U.S. government for fuel, tried to cover up a female employee’s alleged gang rape. The company which got fat off U.S. government warmongering then moved to Dubai to avoid paying taxes. Such a patriotic group of people.

So now BP can share some of the liability for the country’s worst oil spill with Dick Cheney’s old company. This should be fun to watch.

This Week In Greenwashing

One thing we’re always told to do is shop at farmer’s markets, which supposedly support local growers and give consumers a sustainable option when grocery shopping. I’ve been to plenty which are fabulous (my hands-down favorite is the one in downtown Santa Monica, California. The vegetables they sell there are quite literally works of art.) But I also know that not all farmer’s markets are created equal.

And now we learn that supermarket chains are trying to profit from the local food movement by setting up fake farmer’s markets to hawk their non-local produce. Another issue is vendors selling produce which they purchased at wholesale produce warehouses.

I caught wind of this practice right here in Nashville when I went to one of Johnny Howell’s red and white tents and saw the exact same packages of Chilean-grown red grapes, complete with UPC code, that I had seen at Kroger. And a lot of that is the same as what I see at Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s. So I knew right then that at least some of their produce comes from a wholesaler like Angelo Formosa.

This doesn’t necessarily mean they are a “fake” farmer’s market but it does mean that just because produce is merchandised in a rustic basket and sold out of a red tent by the side of the road we should assume it’s somehow better or different from the stuff you get at the grocery store. I mean, last I checked we don't grow avocados around here, and I'm not sure I've ever seen anything labeled "organic" at one of Howell's red tents.

And here’s another pet peeve: when I go to Whole Foods, why do I have to choose between organic or local/regional? Seems like most of the produce they label local or regional is never organic; the stuff that is organic is shipped up from South America. I’d rather have organic and I’d rather it hadn’t spent a week in transit from Peru.

Anyway, the point is: buyer beware. Consumers have increasingly been sending the message that they want "green" and sustainable options in everything from their household cleaning products to what they put on the dinner table. Instead of listening to consumers and adjusting their behavior accordingly, some factions of corporate America are cravenly trying to exploit consumers' green instincts to make a buck by selling the same ol' shit as something it's not.

Anti-American American Businesses

You know, nothing makes me want to “go Galt” liberal-style more than reading shit like this. Businesses have apparently told Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC) that they want “complete gridlock” in Washington. And the best part is the “clarification” from DeMint’s camp:

A spokesperson for DeMint reached out to ThinkProgress and provided the following statement: "The story about 'gridlock' was a glimpse of how upset businesses are with President Obama and Democrats in Congress, not DeMint's legislative goals."

Okay, assuming DeMint isn't pulling this out of his ass and is in fact repeating some Chamber of Commerce bullshit, here's my response to that line: Oh, whah. I have a sad.

You’re upset? You despoil our environment and ship our jobs to China and Mexico and locate your corporate headquarters in a Cayman Islands-based Mailboxes-R-Us so you can dodge taxes and set up phony astroturf front groups to deceive the citizens over the public airwaves and you’re upset?

Fuck you. With a rusty slide-ruler. Sideways.

You simply cannot expect to be allowed to rape, pillage and plunder America and not have a few citizens think that maybe this isn’t in the country’s best interests.

I’m tired of hearing that we need to bend and scrape before grand and glorious “business interests” who apparently think a non-functioning government is just peachy. We’ve been doing that for a generation and look where it got us. I’m tired of hearing that being “pro-business” is the be-all and end-all of every legislative endeavor. Whatever happened to being pro-people? Business has its place but it’s not our purpose. There is more to this life than business. And President Obama has done double back flips for business interests, at the expense of the peoples’ interests. And somehow these assholes are still unhappy?

Y'all can just quit yer whining because this consumer is tired of hearing about it. You guys do not deserve one dime of the tax breaks and government contracts that’s making your wallets fat, when you turn around and spit in the American peoples’ collective face spouting some bullshit about how you want “gridlock” in Washington.

American consumers do not want gridlock in Washington, you fools. We want and deserve a government that functions. We elected a president and a Congress to do that.

I am about this close to selling all of my worldly possessions and living off the grid in a yurt somewhere, eating hippie tofu and home-grown vegetables. At least then I won’t be part of your bullshit game.

And They Said It Couldn’t Be Done

Yet another round of corporate whining, moaning and fear mongering over a very simple consumer protection proves unfounded:

Only three commercial flights among the thousands that operated nationwide in June sat on the ground loaded with passengers for three hours or longer, the Obama administration said Tuesday, touting the impact of a new consumer-protection rule that threatens stiff fines against airlines for excessive tarmac delays.

[...]

Nationally, the three United flights stranded on June 18 marked a sharp drop in long tarmac delays from the same month last year, according to the U.S. Department of Transportation. In June 2009, 268 flights nationwide were delayed at airports for at least three hours, according to the department's Air Travel Consumer Report.

The report also found there was no increase in the rate of canceled flights in June compared with the same month last year. Airlines canceled 1.5 percent of their scheduled domestic flights.

Some aviation experts have predicted that, faced with the possibility of multimillion-dollar fines for every seriously delayed plane, airlines would implement wholesale cancellations in poor weather well before the three-hour tarmac limit, inconveniencing the flying public more deeply than by waiting out long flight delays and eventually taking off.

Ah, yes. “Some aviation experts.” Remember them? Like this one?

But wait! If a flight is canceled, then the fine is void. Too bad no one can see the future to know what will happen next. Just kidding. We know exactly what will happen next.

So let's just go ahead and make this an official announcement: Starting in April, every flight that is delayed more than three hours in the United States of America is canceled. The flight that was delayed for the rainstorm that shows signs of clearing at 2 hours and 55 minutes? Canceled. The flight delayed for a repair that will take 3 hours and 4 minutes? Canceled.

Hmm, amazingly none of that happened! Shocking, I know. Here's another "expert":

The potential price for violating the rule means that in the short term, many domestic airlines will likely act “with an abundance of caution,” says Jami Counter, senior director of TripAdvisor Flights, and that planes sitting on the tarmac getting too “close to the three-hour bubble will [return to the gate] and be cancelled,” he says.

But my favorite is the “Out of Control Policy Blog” which always tells us free market fairies will sail in to solve every problem, right after they tell us there really isn’t a problem of course, just some whiny hippies who want to be pampered with glasses of chardonnay and plates of truffle oil-coated tofu. After repeating the same tripe about airlines cancelling each and every flight that even hinted at being three hours on the tarmac, he suggested the same tired “solutions” of “competition” and pointed out how the airlines which treat their passengers like crap suffer “big reputational penalties.” Oh noes, that's gotta hurt!

This last part was priceless:

In short, the feds should butt out, and let competition, pricing, and airport-airline cooperation continue developing workable solutions.

What these folks don't seem to understand is that "competition" is meaningless in an era of unrestrained monopolies and corporate consolidation (and no free-marketeer has ever come out in favor of government regulation of monopolies). In the last two years alone we've seen Delta and Northwest merge, and Continental and United merge. This has prompted industry observers to speculate that American Airlines, no longer the big player, will have to merge with another carrier (US Airways, which merged with America West in 2005, is often named as a likely partner. I think I need a scorecard!).

All of which means to say, when I fly somewhere, which is a few times a year, 90% of the time I have very little choice over which carrier I use. My decision is largely made for me by my destination because airlines have signed agreements with airports. Beyond that, my decision is made by my schedule and price. Never do I think, "Gee, now which carrier got negative press this year?"

But beyond that, I love these people who keep trying to tell us that free market fairies will protect consumers, even though the entire reason we are having a debate about something is because there is a problem, which means the free market fairies have not protected consumers. You know what protects consumers? The government telling them if they don't do the right thing they will get slapped with a big, fat fine. Problem solved.

One Thing We Liberals Could Do Better

Liberals are always asking how can we make our voices heard, why aren’t we out rallying in the streets like, say, the Tea Partiers (lack of major corporate money and backing by a major cable news network are to blame there, IMHO), why don't Democrats in Congress pander to their base the way Republicans do, etc. etc.

There’s obvious disagreement over how we can best utilize our time and organizing skills (and many folks disagreed with me when I said this was not helpful.)

One thing we could definitely do better is engage our elected representatives when they are back home during things like the August recess. We could fill up the town hall meetings with liberals and challenge people like Lamar Alexander when they spout obvious bullshit like this:

“Finally, part of the way this bill is paid for is through almost $10 billion of permanent tax increases on multinational corporations that would have the effect of driving jobs overseas. Just one more action by the Democratic majority and this administration in the middle of a recession, at a time of near 10 percent unemployment for the nation, that makes it harder to create new jobs in the United States.”

Well look who finally woke up and realized jobs are going overseas! Where ya been, buckaroo? Jobs have been going overseas for years. During the entire time you've been in the U.S. Senate. All of your sucking up to corporations hasn't stemmed the tide of greedy, cheap-labor loving corporations and all of your votes for NAFTA and CAFTA and every other free trade legislation has only sped up the exodus. Thanks for playing.

Corporate tax rates are the lowest in U.S. history. Meanwhile Republicans already nixed a bill that would aid sick 9/11 emergency responders because it was paid for by closing a corporate tax loophole that allows U.S. corporations to operate offshore, tax-free.

Umm ... Senator, I think keeping crap like that and all of the other corporate tax loopholes on the books does more to ship jobs overseas than keeping teachers employed so the American workforce is educated. Just sayin’.

We’re losing ground to the rest of the world, fast. Today MoveOn is holding rallies across the country to protest corporate influence in our government. Yes, there’s a rally planned for Nashville.

But I’ve also heard (though I have found nothing confirming this) that there is going to be a town hall meeting where Senator Alexander will address the teacher aid bill. I don’t know where it is or when it is. Maybe it doesn’t exist. Anyone else hear this? Regardless, I'd rather MoveOn send people to an event like this (if it is indeed happening, or another event of its kind) than gathering on a street corner for yet another rally that will once again be ignored by the media. Again, just sayin’.

Anyway, we need to find a better way to present our issues.

Big Oil Will Get Right On That

I’m sure this effort will be about as successful as this one was. Meaning, squat.

But at least people are trying. I don't think these corporations give a shit, but so what else is new.

Punishing BP

More ideas on punishing BP here. And it turns out my idea for giving BP the equivalent of the corporate person's death penalty isn't so crackpot after all:

And killing BP in return would hardly be unprecedented: In America's first 100 years, we shut down an average of 2,000 "rogue corporations" each year.

Heh.

------------------------------

Yes, we can. It’s called “discretionary debarment” and it seems to be the best way to finally stand up to the oil giant:

Over the past 10 years, BP has paid tens of millions of dollars in fines and been implicated in four separate instances of criminal misconduct that could have prompted this far more serious action. Until now, the company's executives and their lawyers have fended off such a penalty by promising that BP would change its ways.

Yeah, that worked out swimmingly, didn’t it?

I don’t know why our regulatory agencies are content to let corporations like BP get away with repeated misconduct while looking the other way. Oh wait, yes I do know why. We all know why: it’s just another case of corporations infiltrating every aspect of our government. From regulatory capture to lobbying to astroturfing to outright bribery and graft, our government now represents corporate interests, not the peoples' interests. And this is the predictable result.

However, it’s the only government we’ve got, and we do have the power to change it. I love right wingers who tell me this is all an example of how “government doesn’t work,” when in fact it is the corporate interests which have corrupted government to begin with. So what are we supposed to do, turn our government over to the fraudsters? Plus, I may not be able to influence BP’s board of directors but I sure as hell have a say over who represents me in Washington.

Anyway, the government can suspend all of its contracts with BP via discretionary debarment:

Federal law allows agencies to suspend or bar from government contracts companies that engage in fraudulent, reckless or criminal conduct. The sanctions can be applied to a single facility or an entire corporation. Government agencies have the power to forbid a company to collect any benefit from the federal government in the forms of contracts, land leases, drilling rights, or loans.

The most serious, sweeping kind of suspension is called "discretionary debarment" and it is applied to an entire company. If this were imposed on BP, it would cancel not only the company's contracts to sell fuel to the military but prohibit BP from leasing or renewing drilling leases on federal land. In the worst cast, it could also lead to the cancellation of BP's existing federal leases, worth billions of dollars.

Yes that's right. You folks diligently boycotting BP in a show of solidarity with our neighbors on the Gulf Coast might like to know that the U.S. government is currently giving billions of your tax dollars to BP to fuel our military. How many billions? This report I've linked to estimates around $4.6 billion over the past 10 years.

Yes that would be the same military currently deployed in the Middle East to protect "our" (read: BP and other western oil companies) access to oil. Wow, wrap your ahead around that one for a second. All of which leads most folks to believe that a full-scale discretionary debarment won't happen:

Discretionary debarment is a step that government investigators have long sought to avoid, and which many experts had considered highly unlikely because BP is a major supplier of fuel to the U.S. military. The company could petition U.S. courts for an exception, arguing that ending that contract is a national security risk. That segment of BP's business alone was worth roughly $4.6 billion over the last decade, according to the government contracts website USAspending.gov.

Yeah, see when you've got the world's largest military deployed around far-flung reaches of the globe and that military needs the juice, then a little thing like an eco-disaster in the Gulf of Mexico probably doesn't amount to a hill of beans. Our military needs its juice, because the juice is what enables us to protect the West's access to oil.

Got that? No wonder our empire is crumbling. It is being crushed by the staggering weight of its own stupidity.

Anyway, if you’d really like to punish BP for its reckless behavior, you might start with this petition advocating debarment. It's worth a shot.

Hey TN: Who’s Looking Out For You?

It seems Republicans in the Tennessee legislature are bending over backwards to do the corporate world’s bidding, none more so than Diane Black, who has gone to unprecedented lengths to make sure the ALEC-written anti-healthcare reform bill bypasses the committee process and makes its way to the floor. Something about sick Tennesseans no longer being denied health insurance because of pre-existing conditions really burns people like Diane Black; guess she thinks free market fairy dust will help people like Demitrie Maralescu.

As I mentioned yesterday, ALEC (American Legislative Exchange Council) is the corporate lobby working to repeal healthcare reform across the land through state legislative efforts:

These state-based efforts to repeal reform may be supported and championed by the Tea Party movement (like the Ohio Liberty Council), but they’re being orchestrated and organized by the American Legislative Exchange Council [ALEC], a “business-friendly conservative group that coordinates activity among statehouses.” The Council is currently pushing model legislation to protect “the rights of patients to pay directly for medical services” and prohibit the individual mandate. At least 35 states are using the legislation as a model for their own repeal efforts, including Ohio and Alabama.

ALEC is no fan of health reform or health, for that matter. “For years the tobacco industry has been one of ALEC’s chief underwriters” and has generally been used as a vehicle by which large corporations advance their agenda in state legislatures The National Resources Defense Council reports that “the tie that binds is money, and ALEC’s major underwriters have included the now-disgraced Enron Corporation, as well as the American Nuclear Energy Council, the American Petroleum Institute, Amoco, Chevron, Coors Brewing Company, Shell, Texaco, Chlorine Chemistry Council, Union Pacific Railroad, Pharmaceutical Research & Manufacturers of America, Waste Management, Philip Morris Management Corporation, R.J. Reynolds Tobacco and many other of the nation’s major corporations and trade associations.”

If ALEC succeeds in repealing health care reform, some corporations may benefit, but the residents who live in these states certainly won’t. As a new Center for American Progress Action Fund report concludes, thousands in Ohio, Alabama and the other states considering repeal would lose access to expanded Medicaid coverage and affordability subsidies.

Note to Demitrie Maralescu and everyone else for whom pre-existing conditions makes getting affordable health insurance an unreachable dream: if the Tennessee Legislature takes away the relief the Federal government just gave you, go ahead and thank Diane Black, the Tennessee Republican Party, a handful of Tennessee DINO’s, and most of all, the corporations at PhRMA who dominate ALEC.

A look at ALEC’s “model legislation” is an eye-opener: these boiler plate bills, crafted by corporations and sent down the conveyer belt to state houses via ALEC’s state chairmen (Hello, Rep. Curry Todd!) is a Tenther/free market freak show. Out with the minimum wage! Out with limits on ATM fees! In with charter schools! Out with the EPA enforcing the Clean Air Act! In with guns on campus! And, not surprisingly: Out with ACORN! Yes, state defunding of ACORN is here too. In fact, quite a few of these bills look familiar.

Meanwhile, considering dirty energy’s considerable presence in ALEC (Koch Industries, Exxon Mobil and Peabody Energy have reps on their “private enterprise board”) I found this turn of events interesting. If bypassing the committee process is good enough for Diane Black to yank back healthcare reform, Sen. Andy Berke thinks it should be good enough to ban mountaintop removal mining:

In response to the move, Democratic Sen. Andy Berke of Chattanooga said he'll seek to revive the mountaintop mining bill (SB1398) through the same process on Saturday.


"If they don't want to use the committee system, then we should allow votes on overwhelmingly popular items like mountaintop removal," Berke said.


Ramsey said he doesn't see why the mountaintop removal bill should get a new hearing.

Of course he doesn’t!

The Problem With Privatization

Bloggers and journalists across the country are starting to ask the question: is America’s privatized prison industry lobbying for more Arizona-style immigration laws to help their profits?

It’s a good question.

Nationwide there has actually been a drop in the jail population: this should be good news, but in a country where the profit motive has been inserted into every arena of the public good, it actually presents some ethical problems.

(And by the way: lower prison population doesn’t necessarily mean less crime: tight budgets across the country have prompted the early release of inmates to save money.)

Regardless of the reasons, if there’s a steady decrease in the number of incarcerated individuals at the same time that we have outsourced our government’s corrections responsibility to a for-profit private industry, then it makes sense that this industry will look for ways to find more people to put in prison. Its profits and shareholders depend on it. And what better way to do that then to go after the most vulnerable, voiceless population out there: illegal immigrants.

Is that happening? It’s certainly big business in Arizona:

CCA operates three prisons in Arizona that house detainees for the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency. Theoretically, more arrests mean more detainees, which means more money coming into the company.

“There are winners and losers in the business of immigrant detention,” wrote Tennessee Immigration and Refugee Rights Coalition spokesman Elias Feghali in an email. “The winners are often the companies that have a direct financial interest in seeing people detained, regardless of the merits of detention.”

As this City Paper article reveals, Tennessee's passage of a new bill that basically extends Davidson County’s 287(g) program statewide will mean big business for Nashville-based Corrections Corp. of America, the biggest player in the privatized prison business. Not surprisingly, CCA’s PAC made generous donations to Tennessee politicians, including the very legislators who sponsored this bill.

This makes me extremely uncomfortable. The moment our government decided it was okay to allow the profit motive to become part of the people’s gravest responsibilities--fighting wars, and incarcerating and rehabilitating those who break the law--we entered an ethical abyss. And just as there have been abuses in our privatized military, we have seen problems at CCA facilities: violating state laws, even charges of outright abuse.

But even if CCA’s prisons and jails operated as model facilities, I still say: You should not make money off of human suffering, and that includes war and prisons. If we were truly a “Christian” nation we would never allow companies like CCA to exist.

As we hand off more of the public good to for-profit corporations, we see corporations exerting their muscle over a wider array of public life. Companies like CCA, Koch Industries, and RJ Reynolds and industry groups like the American Petroleum Institute don’t just lobby legislators and make donations to political PACs to ensure favorable attention: Through groups like the industry-funded American Legislative Exchange Council, they are actually writing their own laws:

Though it calls itself "the nation's largest bipartisan, individual membership association of state legislators," ALEC might better be described as one of the nation's most powerful -- and least known -- corporate lobbies. While other lobbyists focus on the federal government, ALEC gives business a direct hand in writing bills that are considered in state assemblies nationwide. Funded primarily by large corporations, industry groups, and conservative foundations -- including R.J. Reynolds, Koch Industries, and the American Petroleum Institute -- the group takes a chain-restaurant approach to public policy, supplying precooked McBills to state lawmakers. Since most legislators are in session only part of the year and often have no staff to do independent research, they're quick to swallow what ALEC serves up. In 2000, according to the council, members introduced more than 3,100 bills based on its models, passing 450 into law.

Through a quick Google search I learned that ALEC is behind the many state legislative efforts to opt-out of healthcare reform.

So yes, there is a mechanism in place by which companies such as CCA can write legislation favorable to their profits, legislation that is ultimately adopted by state legislatures across the country virtually verbatim. And yes, there is a precedent: CCA apparently worked through ALEC in the past to draft pro-incarceration legislation ultimately adopted in over 40 states:

In another instance of profitable policymaking, ALEC drafted a model "truth in sentencing" bill that restricts parole eligibility for prisoners, keeping inmates locked up longer. One of the members of the task force that drafted the bill was Corrections Corporation of America, the nation's largest private prison company, which stands to cash in on longer sentences. By the late 1990s, similar sentencing measures had passed in 40 states. "There was never any mention that ALEC or anybody else had any involvement in this," Walter Dickey, the former head of Wisconsin's prison system, told reporters after his state passed a version of the measure.

No wonder CCA touted “exciting growth opportunities” in its investor presentations:

Both “high recidivism” among felons and “inmate population growth following prior recessions” are highlighted as positives for the company in the 48-page report.

Conflict of interest much? It’s bad enough that corporations have so much power in America, but this is nothing new. We’ve been beating a pro-corporate drum since the 1950s when we first heard “What’s good for General Motors is good for the country.” But when that corporation makes its megamillions off of human suffering, then what’s good for the corporation isn’t necessarily good for America. Where is the incentive for peacemaking? Where is the incentive for rehabilitation of prisoners? A company that profits from recidivism put in charge of our prisons is the kind of company that gives rise to a place dubbed the “Gladiator School.” Shame on us.

Allowing anyone to profit off of human misery, while giving them the power to write laws on a local, state and national level, virtually ensures that human misery will spread. This isn't a path to progress. This is a path to wretched misfortune. It starts with the lowly and least powerful, but make no mistake: it's a hungry beast and it won't stop until its worked its way up the food chain.

Some things should not be for sale. Some things do not benefit from a liberal sprinkling of free market fairy dust. Some parts of the common good should be left in the peoples’ hands.

I mention all of this as a warning. Keep your eyes open and pay attention to what your state legislatures are doing, and who is behind them.

Brands Are Dead

Via Balloon Juice I am introduced to the brilliant wit behind the @BPGlobalPR Twitter account (and if you have been living in a hole for the last few weeks and aren’t familiar with @BPGlobalPR, check his Twitter feed here).

Anyway, he’s become something of an internet phenomenon. Here he gives corporate America some advice:

So what is the point of all this?  The point is, FORGET YOUR BRAND.  You don’t own it because it is literally nothing.  You can spend all sorts of time and money trying to manufacture public opinion, but ultimately, that’s up to the public, now isn’t it?

You know the best way to get the public to respect your brand?  Have a respectable brand.  Offer a great, innovative product and make responsible, ethical business decisions.  Lead the pack!  Evolve!  Don’t send hundreds of temp workers to the gulf to put on a show for the President.  Hire those workers to actually work!  Don’t dump toxic dispersant into the ocean just so the surface looks better.  Collect the oil and get it out of the water!  Don’t tell your employees that they can’t wear respirators while they work because it makes for a bad picture.  Take a picture of those employees working safely to fix the problem.  Lastly, don’t keep the press and the people trying to help you away from the disaster, open it up so people can see it and help fix it.  This isn’t just your disaster, this is a human tragedy.  Allow us to mourn so that we can stop being angry.

Ay fucking men. This is exactly what I’ve been trying to articulate lately, notably here. I’m just so sick of the bullshit. I’m sick of the dog and pony show. Nobody buys it anymore--hell, we haven’t bought it for years. Why don’t you guys get that?

Hey Corporate America: instead of trying to “manage” your PR and orchestrate some goodwill with marketing gimmicks, greenwashing and astroturfing, how about not doing some of the crap you do? How about not implementing a phantom recall of your product? How about not hiring former regulators to help you dodge safety regulations? How about not designing your cell phone so that users can’t help but get charged $1.99 for having a fat finger malfunction? How about not taking millions in government grants while shuttering your U.S. factories and moving production to Mexico?

Seriously, save the marketing budget. Save the lobbying budget. Just quit being dicks.

Corporations Behaving Badly, Vol. 5,789

Apparently McNeil, a division of Johnson & Johnson, tried to avoid negative publicity last year by implementing a “phantom recall” of its Motrin product:

The FDA said it became aware of the alleged Motrin scheme after it obtained a memo that detailed instructions to contract workers to buy up Motrin from stores. The memo was first sent anonymously to Oregon state regulators.

"You should simply 'act' like a regular customer while making these purchases. There must be no mention of this being a recall of the product!" reads the memo dated June 12, 2009.

I’m trying to wrap my head around how much doing something like that must have cost. Instead of contacting retailers and having the product removed from store shelves--which I guess would have been far too public--they hired people to go into every drugstore in America and buy up all the Motrin. Didn’t they think drug stores would wonder why there’s a mad rush for Motrin all of a sudden? A nationwide outbreak of PMS, perhaps?

Boggles the mind. Look, corporate America: just do the right thing the first time, Okay? Enough with the sleazy astroturf underhanded marketing PR bullshit. You’re not doing yourselves any favors. This shit always catches up with you eventually and you end up looking like even bigger assholes.

Stop Me If You’ve Seen This Movie Before

You know, I’ve about lost my patience with corporate America:

With salt under attack for its ill effects on the nation’s health, the food giant Cargill kicked off a campaign last November to spread its own message.

“Salt is a pretty amazing compound,” Alton Brown, a Food Network star, gushes in a Cargill video called Salt 101. “So make sure you have plenty of salt in your kitchen at all times.”

The campaign by Cargill, which both produces and uses salt, promotes salt as “life enhancing” and suggests sprinkling it on foods as varied as chocolate cookies, fresh fruit, ice cream and even coffee. “You might be surprised,” Mr. Brown says, “by what foods are enhanced by its briny kiss.”

Oh fer crying out loud. Give me a fucking break. Its “briny kiss”? Are you people serious? Do you really believe anyone buys that bullshit? Alton Brown should be ashamed of himself.

Now, tell me if this scenario doesn't sound awfully familiar:

When health advocates first petitioned the federal government to regulate salt in 1978, food companies sponsored research aimed at casting doubt on the link between salt and hypertension. Two decades later, when federal officials tried to cut the salt in products labeled “healthy,” companies argued that foods already low in sugar and fat would not sell with less salt.

Now, the industry is blaming consumers for resisting efforts to reduce salt in all foods, pointing to, as Kellogg put it in a letter to a federal nutrition advisory committee, “the virtually intractable nature of the appetite for salt.”

Geez, you’ve gotta be kidding. First you resist food labeling laws, then you dance around mandatory nutritional labeling by manipulating portion size, and then you use a bunch of astroturf campaigns to sell us some bullshit line about consumer choice, and then you say we want to eat this crap? That’s really rich.

You’re handing consumers a shit sandwich and telling them it’s a delicious, nutritious meal. And when we say, “Hmm, sorta tastes and smells like a shit sandwich to me,” you say “SHUT UP AND EAT YOUR SHIT SANDWICH!”

I’ve about had it with you people. I really don’t understand why companies like Cargill keep playing the same games with consumers. Once upon a time your job was to provide what consumers wanted. Now you create products first and then go out and find suckers to foist them on. You guys are doing it wrong.

You know, not too long ago, tobacco companies spent oodles of money extolling the health benefits of cigarettes. Today the Corn Refiners Assn. has spent oodles of money trying to convince us that corn syrup “is fine in moderation.” Yeah, good luck with the “moderation” part. High-fructose corn syrup is so ubiquitous--in everything from ketchup, mayonnaise, soups, bread, soft drinks, and other beverages--that the average American supposedly eats 60 pounds of the stuff a year. And you can’t even avoid the stuff if you tried, because food companies love to exploit loopholes in the food labeling law.

Ditto salt. Of course salt is necessary for life, but Americans eat more than twice as much as they should. And the reason we eat so much salt and so much high-fructose corn syrup is because we eat so much packaged foods. Salt and sugars are a way companies like Cargill and ConAgra can load your microwaveable dinner with a bunch of garbage and call it Healthy Choice, and they don’t want anyone in Congress telling them they can’t. Instead of just making food that’s healthy and nutritious but maybe costs more, they’d rather spend bazillions of dollars on PR and lobbying.

Corporate America loves to spend money on propaganda instead of just doing the right thing. This is how I know there’s no such thing as Free Market Fairy Dust: because corporate America has never, ever done the right thing unless Congress has forced them to. And if you need any more examples of that, look no further than the Gulf of Mexico, where millions of barrels of oil are still despoiling a major ecosystem on which millions of jobs depend.

Of course, we’ve all heard for years how safe offshore oil drilling is. We’ve all heard how safe modern nuclear reactors are. We’ve all heard that global warming is a fake, that clean coal is real, that trans-fats aren’t bad for you. We’ve all heard that "there is 'no
 difference' in the milk from untreated and rbGH-injected cows”, that Bispenol-A and pthalates are perfectly fine. And then along comes reality--an oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, a Yale medical study, a flood of coal sludge, or radioactive fish to show us all that corporate America was lying the whole time. I'm kinda done being shocked at this point, y'know?

I think we’ve all become accustomed to the corporate hucksterism routine by now. I have to wonder why these folks even bother. Do they think we’re stupid? After all these years? Or are they just on autpilot, doing what they’ve always done because they’re completely out of ideas?

Now let me say: we eat very little processed food in our house. I cook, and when I say cook I do mean I cook from scratch, because I have the time and I enjoy it and so that's what we do in our house. But that doesn't mean I'm not eating Cargill's crap because Cargill doesn't make processed foods, they make the crap that goes into processed foods, and they make the crap that goes into flour and sugar and animal feed. And so even if I wanted to avoid it by buying, say, an organic brand, most of those are now owned by multinational food conglomerates, too. So unless I grow my own wheat and grind my own flour and butcher my own hogs, I have very little control over the crap that's in our food, even someone like myself who would go hungry rather than microwave her dinner.

And what's really interesting to me is that while you have corporations spending bazillions lobbying for "consumer choice," at the same time they're trying to undermine things like organic food standards. So "consumer choice" and groups like Rick Berman's sham Center For Consumer Freedom are not about consumer freedom at all, they are about EATING THAT SHIT SANDWICH, BY GOD, AND LIKING IT.

It’s very bizarre. I’m sure we’ll be hearing lots about how harmless salt can be “in moderation,” even though consumers are given little control over how much salt they consume.

I’m sure newspapers like The Tennessean will happily run another pro-Cargill op-ed from one of Rick Berman’s flunkies, just as they have in the past. I’m sure we'll get a round of lobbying as Cargill spends millions of dollars buying members of Congress ads for the next election, especially now that the Supreme Court has given them its blessing.

And Americans will be dying of hypertension and heart disease and kidney disease and cancer until folks finally wake up or we're all too damned sick to care anymore.

Modern Corporate Patriotism

Under the new Republican mantra of “privatize gains, socialize losses,” yesterday Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski defeated a bill that would cap BP’s liability at $10 billion, an increase from $75 million. That means us taxpayers have to pay for the rest of the cleanup if BP opts not to.

How’s that for a Big Oil bailout? Let them make as big of a mess as they want, and we taxpayers will pay for the cleanup. Easy peasy.

The reason, she claims is that

It would be impossible or perhaps close to impossible for any energy company that is smaller than the supermajors, smaller than the national oil companies, to operate in the O.C.S.

which is patently dishonest because, for one thing, drilling on the Outer Continental Shelf is already prohibitively expensive, and thus only something the “supermajors” can tackle. And too:

Sen. Robert Menendez, D-New Jersey, said Murkowski's argument didn't hold up. "The risk is what has to be calulated here. If you drill, you need to be able to pay for the damages," Menendez said.

Interestingly, there is a similar law over on the nuclear energy side called the Price–Anderson Nuclear Industries Indemnity Act. In the event of an accident at a nuke plant, the federal government pays all liability claims above $10 billion. So much for that free hand of the market stuff!

The American taxpayer needed to come to the rescue of the nuclear power industry because, as Wikipedia notes,

At the time of the Act's passing, it was considered necessary as an incentive for the private production of nuclear power — this was because investors were unwilling to accept the then-unquantified risks of nuclear energy without some limitation on their liability.

Ah yes, just another way the “free hand of the market” isn’t really all that “free” but instead gives a generous government assist to the oil and nuclear industry--an assist I daresay the solar and wind power industries never see.

So don’t talk to me about how “competitive” green energy could never be, not when the game is rigged.

Anyway, all of this is preamble to what’s really outrageous about the whole “privatize gains, socialize losses” tactic at play here. Because where the BP oil spill is concerned, none of these players are American companies. They are all headquartered overseas, and therefore pay few U.S. corporate taxes.

Transocean Ltd.? They’re based out of Zug, Switzerland. They moved there two years ago--from the Cayman Islands. Formerly based out of corproate-friendly Delaware, they haven't called America home since 1999.

Halliburton? Once based in Houston, they now call Dubai home. This despite raking in billions in U.S. government contracts.

BP, as we all know, stands for “British Patroleum.” They are based out of the United Kingdom.

So there you go. American taxpayers will be paying for this oil spill in a lot of ways: loss of jobs in affected industries such as tourism and fishing. There’s the damage to the ecosystem. There will be health costs associated with the toxic mess. And while Lisa Murkowski blocks raising BP’s liability, meaning Joe and Jane taxpayer will pay for more of the cleanup, we’ve got three two major players who have dodged paying their full share of corporate taxes by moving to overseas tax havens. Talk about "starving the beast"!

Even worse, as I frequently remind my readers, all of this talk about us "needing" to drill offshore for our "energy security" is just a load of bull. We don't have a nationalized oil industry in this country. Oil is traded on the world market. That oil pulled out of the deep sea bed is as likely to end up in South America, China, or the EU as it is American SUVs.

So how about this. Since American taxpayers are paying to clean up this mess anyway, why don't we make sure we're the ones reaping the rewards of offshore drilling? How about nationalizing the oil companies, or at the very least creating a nationalized oil company. If you're going to drill in U.S. waters, then that's who's going to have to do it. Hell, we're paying for it anyway.

Sound too socialist for you? Maybe. But the alternative isn't looking much better.

Corporate Hegemony Alert

Yes, I have a problem with this:

Nashville schools offer naming rights to academic programs

Credit union pays $150,000 to put name on Antioch program

Naming rights to academic programs in Metro Nashville's high schools are for sale, and one school has a buyer.

The Tennessee Credit Union now owns the signage to Antioch High School's academy of business and finance for a price of $150,000. The school board approved the two-year contract Tuesday night.

Administrators hope this is the first of many naming deals. It's the brainchild of Metro's new high school czar, Jay Steele, who had success with the idea as an administrator in Florida.

"It's not marketing to kids," Steele told The Tennessean in December. "It's tight guidelines that would align a targeted industry with a theme."

Oh bullshit. Don’t kid yourselves. Marketing to kids is exactly what this is.

Look, kids are marketed to from the day they leave the womb. They are assaulted on every side by consumer messaging everywhere they go, from the shopping mall to television programming to family destinations like Disney World and that horrid museum of corporate logos disguised as an aquarium in Atlanta. New media has made advertising all-pervasive: sales pitches are embedded in “product placement” ads in books targeted to our youth. At school corporate logos dominate the lunchroom, sports and other after school activities.

And now Metro Schools has opened up academics to corporate sponsorship, with only a promise that it would be “tasteful.”

There is nothing tasteful about advertising to kids, no matter how you do it. One has to ask the obvious question: What are we teaching our kids? To be good citizens? Or to be good consumers?

Look, I don’t think it is ultimately in the nation’s best interests to raise a generation of consumer drones, indeed, I think it’s terribly short-sighted (for more on this, read my The Business Of Dehumanization post from last October).

Advocacy group the Campaign For A Commercial-Free Childhood has looked at marketing in our schools and has raised some alarm bells:

• 67.2% of students are exposed to corporate advertising for foods of minimal nutritional value or foods high in fat and sugar in their schools.

[...]

• A review of seventy-seven corporate-sponsored classroom kits found nearly 80% to be biased or incomplete, “promoting a viewpoint that favors consumption of the sponsor’s product or service or a position that favors the company or its economic agenda.”

[...]

• Nearly 3/4 of schools that participated in income-generating activities with corporations that sell foods of minimal nutritional value and foods high in fat and sugar did not receive any income in 2003-2004.11

For more I urge people to read this report from EPIC (Education & the Public Interest Center). EPIC has tracked commercialism in our nation’s schools for around 15 years and as the latest report shows, the advent of new media and viral marketing makes advertising to youth more pervasive and insidious than ever.

Corporate-sponsored academics was a horrible idea from day one. Jay Steele may think it’s not “advertising” to sell naming rights to an academic program but he’s delusional (and as the Tennessean story makes clear, this program goes waaay beyond naming rights, anyway.)

It’s a pretty sad state of affairs when our school budgets are so thin that we’re happy to sell businesses access to our kids in exchange for a few bucks. It shows a deterioration of our values for one thing: suddenly we’re okay pimping out our kids to corporations? Have we lost our minds?

Law School Boogaloo

I sounded the alarm about corporate influence over higher education last month with this post, "When Corporations Go To College.”

Now I’ve been alerted to an even more nefarious mechanism by which major corporations are wielding their influence and stifling those who challenge them. By trying to block legal challenges made by law school clinics:

ANNAPOLIS, Md. — Law school students nationwide are facing growing attacks in the courts and legislatures as legal clinics at the schools increasingly take on powerful interests that few other nonprofit groups have the resources to challenge.

On Friday, lawmakers here debated a measure to cut money for the University of Maryland’s law clinic if it does not provide details to the legislature about its clients, finances and cases.

The measure, which is likely to be sent to the governor this week, comes in response to a suit filed in March by students accusing one of the state’s largest employers, Perdue, of environmental violations — the first effort in the state to hold a poultry company accountable for the environmental impact of its chicken suppliers.

Wow. That’s some serious hardball. Sounds to me like Perdue used its cronies in the state legislature to threaten the university’s law school with a cut in funds because it didn’t like a case the law clinic took. (Perdue denies such intimidation, of course.)

Sound fantastical? No stranger than Lt. Gov. Ron Ramsey allegedly pressuring a state senator to drop his mountaintop removal ban bill at the behest of a big contributor . Or the time the coal industry tried to weaken state clean water laws regulating selenium with generous campaign donations. Or the time King Pharmaceuticals tried to buy the Tennessee Republican Party. I mean come on, people. Shit like this happens in Tennessee all the time.

I wonder what would happen if the University of Tennessee College of Law’s clinic took on, say, King Pharmaceuticals? Would Vanderbilt’s Legal Clinic have taken on Massey Energy when Gordon Gee was VU chancellor? One has to wonder: he served on their board of directors.

Back to our story:

Law clinics at other universities — from New Jersey to Michigan to Louisiana — are facing similar challenges. And legal experts say the attacks jeopardize the work of the clinics, which not only train students with hands-on courtroom experience at more than 200 law schools but also have taken on more cases against companies and government agencies in recent years.

“We’re seeing a very strong pushback from deep-pocket interests, and that pushback is creating a chilling effect on many clinics,” said Robert R. Kuehn, a law professor at Washington University in St. Louis, citing a recent survey he conducted that found that more than a third of faculty members at legal clinics expressed fears about university or state reaction to their casework and that a sixth said they had turned down unpopular clients because of these concerns.

Of course, corporate interests and politicians have all sorts of defenses for what is basically a baltant intimidation tactic. The truth is, small non-profit groups like environmental and citizens organizations don’t have the massive legal resources of a big corporation like Perdue or a government agency. Law clinics are often their only legal resource.

States American Bar Association President Carolyn Lamm of the Maryland case:

As president of the American Bar Association, I urge those who would undermine clinical law school programs to step back and remember that the rule of law cannot survive if pressure prevents lawyers from fulfilling their responsibilities to their clients. I call on lawyers in every state to remember their professional obligation to uphold the independence of their profession, and speak out against intimidation whenever they see it. Just as lawyers who represent unpopular clients are fulfilling the responsibilities of all lawyers, so too are law students who assist clients in clinical legal programs.

Corporations continue to grow in might and power, using their considerable weight to stack regulatory agencies and control the government in the interest of their profits over the public good. This is just one more example. Keep your eyes open, people.