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Viewing Corporatism NEWS articles 151 through 225 of 380
- The company's reach and influence go far beyond the military. A New York Times profile of the company in 2004 opened with the sentence: "Lockheed Martin doesn't run the United States. But it does help run a breathtakingly big part of it."
- Move over, Mother Nature: Republicans want the National Park Service to make room for nonnative species. - Last week, McDonald’s announced its latest attempt to mutate into a responsible corporate citizen.
- Wal-Mart, the Alpha Dog of discount stores, has also become the Alpha Hog at the public trough.
- ...Wal-Mart has quietly recruited former presidential advisers, including Michael K. Deaver, who was Ronald Reagan's image-meister, and Leslie Dach, one of Bill Clinton's media consultants, to set up a rapid-response public relations team in Arkansas. - More and more that cigarette, or drink at home, that political candidate you supported, even your eating habits, are coming under the scrutiny of your boss.
- A week away from federal hearings on drug-marketing practices, more than 200 prominent medical academics signed on to a call for an end to pharmaceutical industry advertising practices aimed directly at consumers.
- Drug companies aren't known for their devotion to the Platonic ideal of truth. Just look at their TV ad campaign on behalf of the self-serving prescription discount plan they've placed on next month's ballot (Proposition 78), which they represent as a selfless contribution to the public weal.
- Oil giant Royal Dutch Shell reported a 68-percent surge in third-quarter net profit, owing to record energy prices and asset disposals... - Oil giant BP reported a sharp rise in its underlying third-quarter profit on Tuesday, in line with forecasts and due to high oil prices and strong refining margins... - ConocoPhillips, the No. 3 U.S. oil company, said third-quarter profit jumped 89 percent to a record $3.8 billion as supply disruptions and rising demand lifted prices to unprecedented highs. - Exxon Mobil Corp. had a quarter for the record books. The world's largest publicly traded oil company said Thursday high oil and natural-gas prices helped its third-quarter profit surge almost 75 percent to $9.92 billion, the largest quarterly profit for a U.S. company ever, and it was the first to ring up more than $100 billion in quarterly sales - In a memo that was distributed Tuesday to workers at Ford's Michigan Truck plant in Wayne, plant managers said too many of the factory's 3,500 hourly workers are spending more than the 48 minutes allotted per shift to use the bathroom.
- Washington has six times as many pharma-industry lobbyists as it does US senators. - Since Rumsfeld holds major portions of stock in Gilead, he will handsomely profit from the scare tactics of the government that is being used to justify the purchase of $2 billion of Tamiflu.
- Pro-corporate conservatives are thinking like drug addicts if they believe that drilling in ANWR will lower fuel prices or save our national parks. The solution is to start weaning ourselves off of our collective addiction to petroleum and support programs that conserve what we have left for our children.
- Eighty-five percent of prescriptions for Serostim, accounting for roughly $615 million in sales, were unnecessary, said Michael Sullivan, the U.S. attorney in Boston who led a four-year investigation into the marketing of the drug.
- If this is our philosophy for this new century, the era will create the sort of economic caste system we boasted of having overcome in the last.
- The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday handed cigarette makers a victory, rejecting a Justice Department appeal aimed at allowing a potential $280 billion penalty in the government's landmark racketeering case against the industry.
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The Bush administration proposed new regulations Thursday that could allow the nation's dirtiest power plants to release more air pollutants each year — and possibly undercut lawsuits aimed at forcing companies to comply with the Clean Air Act.
- This is what Pipelineistan is all about: a supreme law unto itself - untouchable by national sovereignty, serious environmental concerns (expressed both in the Caucasus and in Europe), labor legislation, protests against the World Bank, not to mention mountains 2,700 meters high and 1,500 small rivers.
- For about 1 hour beginning at 5 pm Monday afternoon, members of the Brooklyn Greens leafletted at the front entrance of the Atlantic Terminal against Chuck E. Cheese's showing of military videos to their 4-11 year-old clientele.
- by Ralph Nader - Hundreds of companies are rushing for the gold. During a Katrina reconstruction summit at the Senate Office Building, US News and World Report describes the scene: "Edward Badolato, a retired Marine colonel who is now an executive with the Shaw Group, reportedly reassured attendees. "Trust me", he said, "there's going to be enough for everybody down there.""
- Support and advice groups for parents of children with so-called behavioural disorders are being secretly funded by pharmaceutical firms, it can be revealed.
- A controversial bill that offered abandoned U.S. military bases to private industry for the construction of oil refineries and granted federal insurance to refiners ensnared in litigation passed by a razor-thin margin in the House Friday afternoon 212-210 as Democrats chanted "shame, shame, shame." - Wal-Mart is the world's largest retail company and is more familiar in the UK as the supermarket chain Asda. Wal-Mart has built a global empire of supermarket stores on an image of 'always low prices'. This obsession with prices has led to poverty wages, ever-worsening sweatshop conditions and the destruction of local businesses and communities.
- The Bush administration and its industry pals are using the hurricane disasters to target the Arctic Refuge and offshore drilling, and get even richer in the bargain. - Rest assured, if there is an influenza outbreak, not only will Bush impose martial law, but as well force millions of us to take a poisonous Merck vaccine.
- ...the FBI is acting as a federally-funded paramilitary force for the cancer industry and Extinction, Incorporated, as the Pinkerton Agency and National Guard once did for Anaconda Copper and Standard Oil. - The pharmaceutical industry in the United States now spends more than $3 billion a year on direct-to-consumer advertising, promoting its most lucrative brands. Increasingly, however, these commercials are not just selling drugs but also the diseases that go with them.
- The Center for Justice & Democracy (CJ&D) today called the Bush Administration “the worst kind of hypocrite” for, on the one hand, denouncing injured consumers who file lawsuits, while at the same time filing its own case for civil damages against a manufacturer whose defective product endangered the President.
- "Factory farms are breaking the cycle between small farmers, their animals, and the environment, with collateral damage to human health and local communities."
- Rule changes would let firms emit more before reporting it
- Philip Morris and other cigarette giants take to subliminal style messages after cigarette advertising is banned - by Ralph Nader - After every national tragedy, large corporations move to cash in. They arrange for no-competitive bid contracts so that their cronyism can get them large government contracts awarded with few safeguards to prevent waste, fraud and abuse.
- In an August 10 action alert, FAIR wondered if ABC's reporting on corporate giant Wal-Mart was improperly influenced by Wal-Mart's status as a major advertiser on the network's news programming. While ABC failed to answer FAIR's charges, a September 20 World News Tonight report on Wal-Mart's business practices in China once again suggests favoritism toward the network's sponsor. - Taser International gave potentially lucrative stock options to six police officers from 2001 to 2003, most of whom promoted Taser's stun guns and, in some cases, urged their cities to buy them.
- The timing and strength of the latest storm could cause worse spike at the pumps than Katrina did.
- Since the beginning of the Iraq war, Halliburton, the Texas energy giant once headed by Vice President Dick Cheney, has seen its stock price more than triple in value. - "The credit-card companies are making almost as much as the oil companies." - Wal-Mart, the world's largest discount retailer and owner of Asda supermarkets in Britain, faced new legal difficulties yesterday as jurors in a California court heard claims that the company denied employees lunch breaks and forced them to work overtime without compensation.
- - by Ralph Nader - Corporations, like giant banks, have long been on Washington's list as being "too big to be allowed to fail" no matter how badly these banks behave.
- Over the last several years the top corporate executives at Northwest and Delta airlines negotiated retirement packages guaranteeing them millions in the event the companies declared bankruptcy and defaulted on their pension payments to employees.
- In a barely reported incident last week, two bombs exploded almost simultaneously in the Karachi outlets of Kentucky Fried Chicken and McDonald's.
- Last week, federal prosecutors in New York decided not to criminally prosecute WorldCom/MCI for an $11 billion fraud. This represents a travesty of justice.
- US retail giant Wal-Mart has been hit with a lawsuit that claims it ignores sweatshop conditions at many of its suppliers' factories around the world.
- The U.S. has a long-standing (and accelerating) policy of arming, training and aiding some of the world's most repressive regimes. - Multinational companies operating in the world's poorest countries are "dodging" around £270bn a year in tax, anti-poverty campaigners claimed today. - Oil profiteers are merely doing what comes naturally to them as rapacious capitalists. - ..the international market has been flooded with medicines to treat "American diseases" such as high blood pressure, obesity, heart disease and cancer, while drugs to tackle tuberculosis, malaria and water-borne diseases prevalent in the poorest countries have been neglected.
- A consortium of western oil companies, led by ExxonMobil, has drawn up legal agreements with African governments that potentially override the human rights of the local populations, according to a report published today by Amnesty International.
- Oil companies came under new fire yesterday when it emerged that ExxonMobil's profits are likely to soar above $10 billion this quarter on the back of the fuel crisis. - The Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights (FTCR) today exposed internal oil company memos that show how the industry intentionally reduced domestic refining capacity to drive up profits, RAW STORY has learned.
- - by Ralph Nader - The unfolding megadisasters in New Orleans, Mississippi and Alabama have torn the propaganda curtain away from this arrogant President and is showing the American people just what results for their daily livelihoods from an administration obsessed with the fabricated Iraq war and marinated with Big Oil.
- Whistleblowers -- those who go public with allegations of waste, fraud and abuse -- continue to have a tough time, despite a law protecting them and repeated assurances from the White House, many government agencies and Congress that they maintain a policy of zero tolerance for retaliation.
- Giffen denies wrongdoing. His lawyers, Steven Cohen and William Schwartz, say in court papers that Giffen's actions were condoned by the Central Intelligence Agency, White House and State Department to curry favor with Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev, 65.
- The ratio of average CEO pay (now $11.8 million) to worker pay (now $27,460) spiked up from 301-to-1 in 2003 to 431-to-1 in 2004. If the minimum wage had risen as fast as CEO pay since 1990, the lowest paid workers in the US would be earning $23.03 an hour today, not $5.15 an hour.
- TeenScreen is being used to push drugs on a population of kids who, in the eyes of many experts, are already overmedicated. An estimated 10 million children in the US are now taking mind-altering drugs that have documented side-effects of suicidal ideation, mania, psychosis, and future drug dependence.
- The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled corporations have a right to spend unlimited corporate funds to influence ballot questions. As citizens in dozens of communities have learned, that power enables giant corporations to turn ballot measures -- theoretically the purest form of democracy -- into yet another sphere of corporate dominance. - "Yomango is a brand name whose principal objective ... is not the selling of things," according to the movement's manifesto, "but the ... promoting of shoplifting as a form of disobedience and direct action against multinational corporations. Buying is an action based on obedience; (we are) taking to the extreme the free circulation of goods." - The Securities and Exchange Commission has subpoenaed documents from Chicago Bridge & Iron Co. as part of an investigation into Halliburton Co.'s business dealings in Nigeria, the company said in filing. - According to Tehran authorities, Oriental Oil Kish, a subsidiary of Halliburton operating in the Middle East, won the contract last January thanks to bribes. - A former employee of Halliburton subsidiary KBR has admitted taking $110,300 (£61,225) in bribes from an Iraqi firm it awarded a US contract
- About 1,200 union jobs have been eliminated since mechanics and plane cleaners walked off the job three days ago, Northwest Airlines said Monday, as it uses the strike to impose many of the cost-cutting changes it demanded during months of contract negotiations.
- We already have enough evidence on Roundup to be concerned about its effects on human and animal health. - Will the last person leaving the last health food store, who purchased the last bottle of non-prescription 500mg, vitamin C, please turn out the lights?
- In the end it was the "generosity" of Coca-Cola in distributing cadmium-laden waste sludge as "free fertilizer" to the tribal aborigines who live near the beverage giant's bottling plant in this remote Kerala village that proved to be its undoing. - A global coalition of unions is launching an unprecedented campaign to organize workers around the world at US retail giant Wal-Mart, seeking to bring a new level of globalization to the labor movement.
- What country has the most advanced animal protection legislation in the world? If you guessed the United States, go to the bottom of the class. The United States lags far behind all 25 nations of the European Union, and most other developed nations as well, such as Switzerland, Australia, New Zealand and Canada. - Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon, General Dynamics, Honeywell and United Technologies have all done well in the first half of this year and have a huge backlog of orders. With US President George W. Bush and Congress ready to spend, they can expect robust sales for years to come.
- A measure designed to create jobs is instead rewarding the companies that are most adept at stashing overseas profits in tax havens, allowing them to bring money home at a severely discounted tax rate. - Merck killed 19 times as many Americans with Vioxx than the 9/11 hijackers did with their planes, according to David Graham, MD, of the FDA. And it was intentional. - Today Donald Rumsfeld is known throughout the world as the zealous U.S. Secretary of Defense who is waging a global "war on terror" in search of "terrorists" and "weapons of mass destruction." Most people, however, are not aware that Rumsfeld himself unleashed a chemical weapon of mass destruction upon the world in 1981—and it’s still out there destroying people all over the world. That "WMD" is aspartame and it has been scientifically and anecdotally linked to millions of chronic illnesses and deaths.
- Corporations' efforts to curb free speech through lawsuits are unfortunately succeeding. - Gag Order Against Speaking with Legislators and at Scientific Conferences on "Emerging Contaminants"
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