Ronald Jackson's GLOBAL PERSPECTIVES NOW: capitalism

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Capitalism is NOT Patriotism: Drug Maker Pfizer Merges With Ireland-Based Corp to Avoid Billions in US Taxes

Pharmaceutical giant Pfizer has sealed a more than $150 billion merger with fellow drug maker Allergan, marking one of the largest takeovers in the history of the healthcare industry. Because Allergan is headquartered in Ireland, the deal will allow Pfizer to avoid billions in U.S. taxes. It’s believed to be the largest example to date of a so-called tax inversion – where a U.S. firm acquires a firm based overseas in order to dodge U.S. taxes.—DemocracyNow

Illustration by David Goehring

By Beth Mole
In what’s called a “reverse-inversion,” Allergan, a small Dublin-based drug company that makes products such as Botox, will technically buy the US-based pharmaceutical behemoth Pfizer, which makes products such as Viagra and Lipitor.

The $160 billion merger, officially announced Monday, will allow Pfizer to move its executive offices to Ireland, thus lowering its tax rate, while also morphing into the world’s largest drug maker.

Such inversions, which are said to cost the American government billions in lost tax revenue, have drawn scorn from the Obama Administration and the Treasury Department. Last year, President Obama referred to the deals as “unpatriotic” loopholes and proposed to close them. And last week, the Treasury announced new rules to make such deals more difficult.

But Pfizer’s reverse-inversion skirts the rules, in part by keeping ownership split somewhat evenly between the two companies. After the deal is complete, current shareholders of Allergan, which has the majority of its operations in the US, will own 44 percent of the mega company. The remaining 56 percent will be owned by current Pfizer shareholders.

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Wall Street Parasite Who Increased Price of Drug by 5000% Investigated for Stalking, Fraud, Corporate Looting

Martin Shkreli: Wall Street parasite turns out to be a scam artist of the first order.

By Travis Gettys
This isn’t the first time Martin Shkreli, the most hated man on the Internet, has attracted criticism for his unscrupulous business dealings.

RELATED STORY: Drug Corporation that Hiked Price of Drug 5000% Overnight Gives Drug Back to Original Owner, Prices Gets Rolled Back

US pharma co rolls back TB drug price after 5000% hike

Read more at: http://www.moneycontrol.com/news/world-news/us-pharma-co-rolls-back-tb-drug-price-after-5000-hike_3186541.html?utm_source=ref_article

Shkreli has ignited a firestorm after purchasing the rights to Daraprim, a 62-year-old drug used for treating life-threatening parasitic infections in babies and AIDS patients, and raising the price overnight from $13.50 per tablet to $750.

He gave an interview Monday to Bloomberg, which has taken a “special interest” in the 32-year-old Shkreli after the “self-trained biologist” dramatically changed his position on biotech futures.

“We’ve wondered whether, after years of betting on biotech stocks to fall, he’d undergone a conversion or was using his knowledge to game the field,” wrote Bloomberg’s Peter M. Barrett last year.

Shkreli founded the biotech company Retrophin, but he was “unceremoniously dumped” Sept. 30, 2014, as chief executive after the company’s board of directors concluded “Shkreli had committed stock-trading irregularities and other violations of securities rules,” reported Bloomberg.

The company he founded in 2009 sued Shkreli last month for $65 million in damages, claiming the ex-hedge fund manager gave away Retrophin shares to friends and used the biotech firm’s assets to pay off personal debts and keep afloat his sinking investment firm, MSMB Capital Management.

A filing made in November 2014 with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission showed Shkreli pulled in nearly $3 million in gross proceeds as he continued selling company stock while simultaneously urging investors to buy into Retrophin — which the rapper-quoting then-CEO hyped on his Twitter account.

Shkreli began plundering Retrophin after his hedge fund — which eventually collapsed — made a “disastrous” investment in Orexigen, reported FierceBiotech.

MSMB Capital Management lost more than $7 million and went “virtually bankrupt” after the 2011 investment, but Shkreli formed a health care-focused branch of the hedge fund to keep the company afloat rather than telling investors he lost their money.

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Gentrification of US Cities and the Death of Black Communities

Gentrification – the displacement of Black and brown urban residents by more affluent whites – is a function of the same forces that emptied the cities of much of their white populations, generations ago: the movement of capital. Capital wants the cities back, and clears spaces for whites. “The system is stacked in favor of moneyed interests and white people.”

By Margaret Kimberley, BAR editor and senior columnist
There is no city in this country where black people are safe from the current method of displacement known as gentrification. Washington, DC, once had a majority black population and was known as Chocolate City. Perhaps it is now the Café au Lait city as the black population has fallen below 50%. That dynamic gathers steam in New York and other cities and continues to push people out of their homes, deprive them of needed services and erode their quality of life.

The situation in New York City is illustrative of this phenomenon. According to census data the city’s black population dropped by 5% between 2000 and 2010. Brooklyn alone lost 50,000 black residents during that time while the white population grew by 37,000 people. The impact of money is the explanation for this reversal of fortune. The same sources of capital that took money out of the cities in decades past are now changing course. These market manipulations determine where black people can and cannot live and create a cascade of negative impacts.

East New York was always one of New York’s poorest neighborhoods with a median income of only $32,000. Its majority black population and location in far eastern Brooklyn near the border of Queens had deemed it undesirable. That designation is now forgotten as big money sets its sights on new places to conquer. Now an area once thought to be too far from Manhattan is touted as being a 30 minute commute via public transportation. This formerly sneered upon and forgotten part of town is now “hot” and its residents have been identified as displaceable.

The phrase “prime real estate” can mean anything the market manipulators want it to mean. As the many headed hydra keeps sprouting heads, any place can suddenly be declared “hot” or “hip.” The inhabitants are pushed aside to make way for transplants who may come from the suburbs, another state or even from another country.

Gentrification is inherently racist, and Brooklyn shows the rest of the country how the dirty deeds are done. A recent article in New York Magazine included an interview with Ephraim, a pseudonym for a Brooklyn landlord and developer. He candidly described how black people facing foreclosure give him deeds to their homes or how renters are enticed to move out of rent regulated apartments in exchange for small sums of money.

“If there’s a black tenant in the house—in every building we have, I put in white tenants. They want to know if black people are going to be living there. So sometimes we have ten apartments and everything is white, and then all of the sudden one tenant comes in with one black roommate, and they don’t like it.”

Much has been made about this story but the outrage misses some important points. The emphasis for advocates should not just be that illegal practices should be stopped. The most important thing to remember is that black people have little stake in a system that will always find a way to disadvantage them. There can be no use for tired nostrums about black people making bad choices or not using their paltry “buying power” to better effect. The system is stacked in favor of moneyed interests and white people, no matter how well black people strive to behave in ways they are told will protect them.

The lack of assets means that even when black people own real estate they often do so precariously. Job loss or any other setback can mean financial crisis and foreclosure. That is where Ephraim comes in and gets these distressed home owners to give him their deeds.

Individual effort is no match for the rule of money. Black people who had money to buy and develop properties were prevented from doing so by redlining which prevented mortgages, bank loans and even insurance from being utilized in black neighborhoods across the country. Urban areas had large black populations because white people fled. White people left to get away from black people and capital paved the road to the suburbs. The tide is now turning because there is once again money to be made in the cities. Perhaps in the future the 1% will make different choices and make new determinations about where black people will live.

The nexus of corruption is vast. Real estate developers call the shots and politicians follow. That is how rent regulations in New York were eviscerated beginning in the 1990s. Now a vacant apartment can be decontrolled and no longer subject to regulated pricing if the rent rises above $2,500. A welfare program for developers, known as 421a, provides tax abatements meant to incentivize construction of low and moderate income housing. Instead, a developer recently received a 95% tax abatement on a $100 million condominium in Manhattan.

The demographic change generated by manipulations from the rich mean losses other than housing. Neighborhoods already considered “food deserts” are losing the few supermarkets they have if a developer buys those properties. Even defendants and plaintiffs in court cases pay a price. Juries in Brooklyn now have more white people with higher incomes which means they are more likely to decide in favor of the police or against plaintiffs in civil cases. One attorney explained it this way. “There’s an influx of money, and when everything gets gentrified, these jurors aren’t pro-plaintiff anymore.”

So black Brooklynites have fewer affordable places to live, to buy food or even to get the little bit of justice they once had. Gentrification is a destroyer and just one of the ways black people in this country are kept at the bottom. The fight against it must be fought on many fronts. The racism which gives white people a perceived right to be free of black people must be called out. The laws which give the wealthy advantages over everyone else must end. Politicians have to be called to account. If they aren’t, cities will become theme parks for the upper classes and everyone else will be pushed to the outskirts and to jail, the ultimate form of displacement.

Gentrification is just one of the ways in which capitalism manifests itself and it must be thought of in that way. If it isn’t, black people will be fooled into short sighted thinking and ineffective tactics. We can start with a new adage. As long as money wins, black people will lose.

________________
Margaret Kimberley‘s Freedom Rider column appears weekly in BAR, and is widely reprinted elsewhere. She maintains a frequently updated blog as well as at http://freedomrider.blogspot.com. Ms. Kimberley lives in New York City, and can be reached via e-Mail at Margaret.Kimberley(at)BlackAgendaReport.com.

Reprinted with permission from Black Agenda Report.

Obama's War Plans Against Venezuela: Another Act of Imperial Desperation

U.S. manic belligerence towards Venezuela may seem counterproductive, given Washington’s growing isolation in Latin America. But the logic of imperialism dictates that it must destroy the Venezuelan model of economic and political development. “Venezuela is no threat to US ‘national security,’ but its resistance to Empire is a threat to US hegemony.”

By Danny Haiphong

“Washington's increasingly isolated position in Latin America brought Obama to the conclusion that he had no other choice but to desperately threaten Venezuela into submission.”

President Obama has declared war on the Bolivarian government of Venezuela. The executive order, signed by Obama on March 9th, labeled the socialist country a "threat to national security." This came directly after the Obama Administration announced sanctions on Venezuela in December of late last year. Obama pushed the sanctions forward after engaging in talks with Cuba that freed the remaining members of the Cuban Five. Obama justified the sanctions as a necessary step to prevent "human rights violations" against the fascist right wing, US-backed opposition in Venezuela.

However, Obama's war on Venezuela has zero to do with concern for "human rights." Obama's open declaration of war is yet another attempt on the part of Washington to utilize the human rights industry to stave off imperial decline. US capital, now only 17 percent of the world's GDP, is waging worldwide military warfare to make up for severe losses in economic influence. The rate of profit, and thus US corporate and dollar hegemony, is on the path of collapse. Finance and corporate capital has calculated that escalated military force must be globalized if it is to sustain worldwide capitalist domination.

Venezuela is no stranger to US capitalism's desperate acts of self-preservation through military strangulation. In 2002, the fascist oligarchy and the CIA temporarily ousted former president and revolutionary leader Hugo Chavez. The Venezuelan people freed Chavez within days and set back Washington's agenda in Latin America. In 2014, Washington-backed fascists went on the offensive once again. The right-wing oligarchy burned government buildings, sabotaged social programs, and attacked pro-Bolivarian Venezuelans (especially Afro-Venezuelans) wherever they could be found. But despite the millions agencies like National Endowment for Democracy poured into the fascist uprising, the Bolivarian government prevented Washington's plot to destabilize Venezuela's sovereignty.

“Finance and corporate capital has calculated that escalated military force must be globalized if it is to sustain worldwide capitalist domination.”

Venezuela is no threat to US "national security," but its resistance to Empire is a threat to US hegemony. The Bolivarian revolution is an expression of self-determination. The capitalist dictators that rule Washington are on a war against self-determination all over the world. Neo-colonial robbery and plunder has become completely antagonistic to the interests of the oppressed. Venezuela's example has spread throughout Latin America through alliances such as ALBA and UNASUR, both of which have come steadfastly to the Bolivarian nation’s defense.

The Bolivarian revolution's primary inspiration to the world lies in the concrete ways it has worked to separate the nation from the misery of neo-colonialism. Through the redistribution of its oil wealth, Venezuela has reduced structural poverty more than any other nation in the region from almost 50 percent in 1998 to well below 10 percent in 2014. Housing, education, and healthcare are human rights in Venezuela. Bolivarian missions have vastly expanded working class Venezuela's access to the basic necessities of life. The socialist transition in Venezuela has eradicated illiteracy, dramatically reduced the infant mortality rate, and built mass organizations such as Bolivarian Circles that have placed the destiny of Venezuela in the hands of its working class majority.

In 2015, Venezuela's national assembly announced a "Socialist Offensive" to curb the challenges presented by its enemies. The fascist, US-backed oligarchy's ability to conduct economic terrorism in Venezuela has held back the Bolivarian process. US imperialism hopes that the oligarchy, with Washington's support, can wrestle dominance in Venezuela back from the people. However, the oligarchy has failed to destabilize the Bolivarian revolution. Washington's increasingly isolated position in Latin America brought Obama to the conclusion that he had no other choice but to desperately threaten Venezuela into submission.

“Everywhere China invests, Washington seeks to engulf in flames.”

Another factor in Washington's war on Venezuela not mentioned in the corporate media is the growing influence of China in Latin America. In January, China announced that it would invest 250 billion in Latin America over the next decade. Venezuela is set to receive 20 billion over this period for infrastructure development. China, despite having a large stake in the US capitalist economy, is at the top of the list of Washington’s destabilization agenda. The permanent capitalist crisis has stripped Washington of the title of top economic superpower. That title now belongs to China. So, everywhere China invests, Washington seeks to engulf in flames. In response to Chinese investment in Africa, the US has sponsored the destabilization of Sudan, Libya, and has installed over 50 AFRICOM installations spread across all but two African nations. As China seeks to develop relations with Russia, Eurasia, and Latin America, expect Washington to escalate global warfare in these regions regardless of the consequence.

During my participation on a panel entitled "The inescapable reality of Neo-liberalism", I was scoffed at by a professor at Skidmore College who did not believe that "humanitarian intervention" and imperialist warfare constituted examples of neo-liberalism. Yet, every US imperial intervention (all seventy plus of them) since 1945 has been conducted for neo-liberal capitalism’s geopolitical and economic interests. To separate imperialist warfare from the interests of neo-liberal capitalism is inherently misleading and backward. Washington's declared war on Venezuela is case in point. The neo-liberal Empire is dying and losing influence in a region that was once under its brutal neo-colonial control. It has no choice but to point its guns in every direction in hopes of bringing Venezuela back into its orbit. Don't expect the people of Venezuela to take the bait.

___________
Danny Haiphong is an organizer for Fight Imperialism Stand Together (FIST) in Boston. He is also a regular contributor to Black Agenda Report. Danny can be reached at wakeupriseup1990@gmail.com and FIST can be reached at bostonfist@gmail.com.

Reprinted with permission from Black Agenda Report.

Climate Change – Point of No Return

"A Scorched and Burnt Future Earth" (Illustration by Kevin Gill)

The Russian Arctic belches deadly methane as global warming pushes the biosphere beyond the tipping point. We have a choice: revolution or extinction. “The profit motive must be eliminated in favor of managed economies that limit growth, fairly distribute resources, regulate the polluting industries and activities, and end the gross inequalities of this gilded age.

By Margaret Kimberley, BAR

“A temperature rise of only two degrees centigrade is enough to make permafrost thaw and begin a chain of terrible events.”

Time’s up, or so planet earth seems to be telling humanity. Extreme weather conditions around the globe, including rising temperatures, droughts, crop failures, melting sea ice, rising sea levels, disappearing glaciers and the loss of plant and animal species all point in only one direction. The tipping point towards the sixth great extinction is taking place right now.

It is clear that these problems are all human made. Rising carbon dioxide levels caused by fossil fuel emissions are creating a series of catastrophes in ecosystems around the world. The processes are clear to anyone who pays attention.

Two large craters, one more than 200 feet in diameter, were recently discovered in the remote Yamal peninsula of northern Russia. In an extreme case of irony, Yamal is said to mean “end of the world” in the local Nenets language. Scientists have concluded that the holes were formed when a mixture of salt, water and natural methane gas exploded underground. They theorize that rising temperatures made the permafrost unstable and released methane, the key ingredient in the explosions. A temperature rise of only two degrees centigrade is enough to make permafrost thaw and begin a chain of terrible events.

“The tipping point towards the sixth great extinction is taking place right now.”

All of the bad news is relevant as the United Nations prepares to host a Climate Summit on September 23, 2014 in New York. Past climate conferences haven’t provided much in the way of relief, as the United States and other industrialized nations subverted the 2009 Copenhagen climate accords. The supposedly environmentalist president Barack Obama and his European cohorts forced an agreement that allowed a two degrees increase in temperature. This seemingly small amount will kill humans and other species and brought the giant holes to Siberia and now more dangerously, methane from the sea. Climatologist Jason Box recently made this pithy comment on Twitter. “If even a small fraction of Arctic sea floor carbon is released to the atmosphere, we're f'd.”

As the situation is dire, so must the solutions be truly radical. The free for all of capitalism is deadly in so many ways as financial collapse, exploitation and wars bring misery to millions of people. Money is the problem and not individual decision making. We may feel useful when recycling trash or driving hybrid vehicles but these are bandages when the world needs major surgery. “Green capitalism” is doomed because capitalism can’t be green. The imperative to maximize profits is in direct conflict with environmental and human sustainability. The profit motive must be eliminated in favor of managed economies that limit growth, fairly distribute resources, regulate the polluting industries and activities, and end the gross inequalities of this gilded age.

Money is the elephant in the climate change room. Corporations are beholden to no one but themselves, only claiming to be like human beings when they really want to get their way with governments and citizens around the world. “Corporate personhood” is a one way street and everything from income inequality to planetary destruction is the proof.

“Green capitalism is doomed because capitalism can’t be green.”

Recently residents of Toledo, Ohio and southeast Michigan literally had no water to drink for three days. A combination of sewage, live stock manure, and fertilizer run-off create algae blooms which spread more rapidly because of rising temperatures. If the amount of algae grows enough it contaminates drinking water from lake Erie. The causes of this recurring problem are well known but the obvious solution of regulating the businesses responsible for the problems doesn’t happen and the inaction is a direct result of corporate power flexing political muscle. The Fertilizer Institute is the industry lobby which makes sure that neither federal nor local regulators restrict the use of fertilizers which deprived 500,000 people of drinkable water. Acquiescence to corporate interest makes life itself untenable.

Unfortunately, the elites will not suffer in the collapse as much as the rest of us will. Poor Detroit residents live with the threat of a privatization plan which begins with the loss of access to water, while golf courses and publicly financed stadiums owe the city $30 million in unpaid water bills without facing any loss of this resource. On the very same day that struggling people were forced to accept pension cuts, the wealthy owners of the Detroit Red Wings hockey team unveiled plans for a publicly financed stadium and said nothing about paying the overdue water bill at Joe Louis arena.

The 1% will make the rest of us suffer slowly before suffering at all themselves. They will still get plenty of water, or energy, or land or whatever the rest of us lack. The end will not come as Hollywood tells us, with a sudden cataclysm. It is moving surely but slowly enough to keep some people safe while others suffer.

“Maintaining the status quo means the end of life on the planet.”

The People’s Climate March scheduled to take place on September 21 in New York cannot be just a feel good precursor to the United Nations meeting. It must have as part of its agenda a critique of the world financial system. The criminals who must be exposed aren’t just in New York and London either. India and China poison the air and their citizens in a mad dash to catch up with the other industrial polluters of the world.

There are many villains in this story but there is only one important point. Maintaining the status quo means the end of life on the planet. The 1% will limit their exposure for a time but eventually the end will come for them too.

All of the bad news is relevant as the United Nations prepares to host a Climate Summit on September 23, 2014 in New York. Past climate conferences haven’t provided much in the way of relief, as the United States and other industrialized nations subverted the 2009 Copenhagen climate accords. The supposedly environmentalist president Barack Obama and his European cohorts forced an agreement that allowed a two degrees increase in temperature. This seemingly small amount will kill humans and other species and brought the giant holes to Siberia and now more dangerously, methane from the sea. Climatologist Jason Box recently made this pithy comment on Twitter. “If even a small fraction of Arctic sea floor carbon is released to the atmosphere, we're f'd.”

As the situation is dire, so must the solutions be truly radical. The free for all of capitalism is deadly in so many ways as financial collapse, exploitation and wars bring misery to millions of people. Money is the problem and not individual decision making. We may feel useful when recycling trash or driving hybrid vehicles but these are bandages when the world needs major surgery. “Green capitalism” is doomed because capitalism can’t be green. The imperative to maximize profits is in direct conflict with environmental and human sustainability. The profit motive must be eliminated in favor of managed economies that limit growth, fairly distribute resources, regulate the polluting industries and activities, and end the gross inequalities of this gilded age.

Money is the elephant in the climate change room. Corporations are beholden to no one but themselves, only claiming to be like human beings when they really want to get their way with governments and citizens around the world. “Corporate personhood” is a one way street and everything from income inequality to planetary destruction is the proof.

“Green capitalism is doomed because capitalism can’t be green.”

“Maintaining the status quo means the end of life on the planet.”

Margaret Kimberley's Freedom Rider column appears weekly in BAR, and is widely reprinted elsewhere. She maintains a frequently updated blog as well as at http://freedomrider.blogspot.com. Ms. Kimberley lives in New York City, and can be reached via e-Mail at Margaret.Kimberley(at)BlackAgendaReport.com.

Reprinted with permission from Black Agenda Report.

Capitalism is NOT Patriotism: These Are the Companies Abandoning the U.S. to Dodge Taxes

A List of Companies
And Where They Are Running To

Courtesy the Washington Post.

Stop Using Growth as an Excuse to Pollute — African Activists Say

Extreme flooding hit Dar es Salaam, Tanzania after unusually heavy rains saturated
the East African capital city in April 2014. (Photo by Peter Stanley. Copyright Demotix)

By Abdoulaye Bah, Translated by Jane Ellis
On World Environment Day (WED) 2014, environmental activists across Africa took the opportunity to caution against forsaking the environment in the rush to promote economic growth. This is not a zero-sum game, they warned.

The theme for the U.N.-sanctioned day this year on 5 June was ‘raise your voice, not the sea level‘ with a focus on island nations facing the treat of climate change. Many regions throughout the African continent are vulnerable to climate change — mainland and islands alike. Blog newsmada.com out of Madagascar explained in a post earlier this year:

With the development of coastal cities in Africa and Asia, the poorest residents are jettisoned to the margins of residential areas, places where the consequences of climate change pose the greatest dangers.

Researchers in sub-Saharan Africa identified the main challenge as compromised food safety due to rainfall pattern changes and the risks of drought and flooding. A temperature increase of between 1.5 to 2°C could cause drought and aridity and render 40 to 80% of agricultural land unfit for cultivation of maize, millet and sorghum by the 2030s.

The Congo Basin Forest Partnership (CBFP), an initiative launched by former U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell in 2002, published various studies and articles on the environment over the year. On March of 2014, prior to WED, Dr. Denis Sonwa analyzed the difficulty reconciling forestry protection with the needs of development in an article on the CBFP website:

Contrary to perceptions in the developed world, development and conservation were seen as mutually exclusive in developing countries. Intensive agricultural production seems to be incompatible with forestry. According to a recent report by the World Bank, some of the conditions (remoteness, low level of funding and investment in the agricultural sector, little mining, low energy consumption per household, etc.), which have contributed to maintaining of biodiversity and forest carbon storage in Central Africa, will change in the near future, with a risk of increasing deforestation. Without great will or profound change, such as going outside the biodiversity sector to save it, current efforts are likely to be in vain.

In Mauritania, singer and human rights activist Malouma dedicated a video to WED with lyrics set to images by Frederic Bacuez and published on ornithondar.blogspot.fr. She sings:

Let's stop killing / Let's stop polluting / Using growth as an excuse / Will there be a savior? / The sky, your protector / And the earth, your mother / Plants, your sisters / And the water, your spring / And friends! / Protect nature

Raphael Kafando analyzed the link between food self-sufficiency and climate change on blog cnpress-zongo.ning.com, comparing the concept of green economy to the realities of his own country, Burkina Faso:

In a country where food self-sufficiency remains a priority, industry is still in its infancy and which is keen to attract investors at any price, is the environment the number one concern? In a country where the mining boom is regarded as a godsend and the priority is getting the unemployed into work without actually considering the pollution produced by these industries, can we really talk about the green economy?

Julien Dembele of Senegal wrote impassioned tribute to former United States Vice President Al Gore for his ‘personal crusade’ for the environment. Dembele also wrote a French-language article entitled ‘Top 10 Reasons to Protect the Environment‘ stating:

A healthy environment equates to good health [...] In 2003, the WHO reported that 21% of human diseases were directly linked to the environment. Three main factors have been identified as causing nearly three-quarters of environment-related diseases or poor health. These are – water, sanitation and hygiene – domestic air pollution – physical injury. Action on these three factors would enable a significant reduction of diseases directly and indirectly related to the environment.

He also penned a protest letter addressed to the director of Senegalese Television (RTS-TV) after it broadcast an advert for an insecticide considered unsafe for humans.

Awareness of the environment's importance is certainly on the rise in Africa. But will this mean that countries sacrifice some of their bad habits for a cleaner, healthier future?

Reprinted with permission from Global Voices.

Secret Document Proves Corporations Pushing To Make Their Corrupt Practices Global and Permanent — World's Citizens Would Have Fewer Rights and Little Legal Recourse

Illustration by DonkeyHotey.

By Wikileaks
Today, WikiLeaks released the secret draft text for the Trade in Services Agreement (TISA) Financial Services Annex, which covers 50 countries and 68.2%1 of world trade in services. The US and the EU are the main proponents of the agreement, and the authors of most joint changes, which also covers cross-border data flow. In a significant anti-transparency manoeuvre by the parties, the draft has been classified to keep it secret not just during the negotiations but for five years after the TISA enters into force.

Despite the failures in financial regulation evident during the 2007-2008 Global Financial Crisis and calls for improvement of relevant regulatory structures 2, proponents of TISA aim to further deregulate global financial services markets. The draft Financial Services Annex sets rules which would assist the expansion of financial multi-nationals -- mainly headquartered in New York, London, Paris and Frankfurt -- into other nations by preventing regulatory barriers. The leaked draft also shows that the US is particularly keen on boosting cross-border data flow, which would allow uninhibited exchange of personal and financial data.

TISA negotiations are currently taking place outside of the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) and the World Trade Organization (WTO) framework. However, the Agreement is being crafted to be compatible with GATS so that a critical mass of participants will be able to pressure remaining WTO members to sign on in the future. Conspicuously absent from the 50 countries covered by the negotiations are the BRICS countries of Brazil, Russia, India and China. The exclusive nature of TISA will weaken their position in future services negotiations.

Read the Secret Trade in Services Agreement (TISA) - Financial Services Annex
Read the Analysis Article - Secret Trade in Services Agreement (TISA) - Financial Services Annex

Is China a Fascist State?: The Nation Went from 'Communist' to 'Capitalist' Long Ago — But It's Still a Dictatorship

Members of the Communist Party of China, 2013.

By John Weeks
We need to understand China in the context of a rise of authoritarian political parties and governments throughout the world. South America, far from perfect, is the only region of the world without a clear rise in the influence of anti-democratic, authoritarian parties and governments.

As the prime minister of China prepared to meet Her Majesty (or, to quote Bette Midler, "Her Royal Heinie"), the deputy prime minister (his name is Nicholas Clegg) referred to the Beijing regime as a "communist one party state", to which the people of China are "shackled".

The deputy prime minister has the ‘one party’ part correct, but is the Chinese state ‘communist’? To put it another way, should this overtly authoritarian regime be assigned to the politics of the left, yet another example of Marxism-socialism-communism leading to dictatorship? Or is the Beijing dictatorship something quite different that has no kinship to the politics of the left?

This same question occurred to me recently when I participated in a discussion in London, at a private dinner party with about a dozen people who included several trade unionists, a member of parliament and a prominent television journalist known for his progressive views - probably the most left-wing mainstream journalist in the United Kingdom. In the course of the discussion the journalist told us that on the basis of his many trips to China, he had reached the conclusion that far from communist or socialist, the Chinese regime was fascist.

The nature of the regime in China has been on my mind ever since that discussion. My concern to understand the political orientation of the Chinese regime is part of broader worries about the rise of authoritarian political parties and governments throughout the world. It is my strong impression that South America, though far from perfect, is the only region of the world without a clear rise in the influence of anti-democratic, authoritarian parties and governments. In a recent Real News video interview with friend and colleague Trevor Evans, concerns about the rise of the far right in the European Union elections last month played a central role.

Is branding the Chinese regime fascist more than name-calling? If the F-word applies to China, does it enhance our understanding of China and the anti-democratic movements elsewhere? I believe that the answer is ‘yes’--an ‘authoritarian communist China’ has quite different political implications than a ‘fascist-authoritarian China’. The twenty-fifth anniversary of the suppression of the Tiananmen Square protests would seem an appropriate moment to address this issue.

Hitler youth, date unknown.

The first step is to define ‘fascism’ in an operational manner that distinguishes it from other types of authoritarian ideologies and regimes. The standard, dictionary definition, "an authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization", is too vague to be useful. In its place I characterize a fascist regime first and foremost as capitalist and anti-labour. The two are related because suppression of the working class holds wages low, which facilitates the faster growth of profit. Suppression of the standard of living also allows for export-oriented capitalism, though historical evidence shows that wages can rise in fascist societies.

Almost all capitalist dictatorships are aggressively anti-labour, but not all are fascist--the Pinochet regime was authoritarian, anti-labour but not fascist. To qualify as fascist an anti-labour capitalist dictatorship must boast (the appropriate word) other characteristics. As Hitler and Mussolini demonstrated, fascist regimes are more than nationalist, they are expansionist.

In addition to chauvinistic expansion, fascist regimes are anti-liberal in the strict sense of explicitly denying the values of the Enlightenment--individual freedoms including the principle of open inquiry. This is a distinguishing characteristic of fascism--that the elimination of the rights of the individual is not presented as a temporary measure to counter some perceived threat (such as an external enemy). It is defended as a necessary and appropriate way to organize society on a permanent basis. To quote from a fascist founder,

Fascism combats the whole complex system of democratic ideology, and repudiates it, whether in its theoretical premises or in its practical application. Fascism denies that the majority, by the simple fact that it is a majority, can direct human society... [Benito Mussolini speech in 1932, "What is Fascism?"]

An additional characteristic of fascism, closely related to the rejection of the role of the individual (except the Leader) is corporatist social organization. In the garden variety dictatorship, civil society continues to function as long as its organizations manifest no political opposition. Under fascism, the regime seeks to destroy and replace civil society with corporatist structures, the most important of which is a mass political party subservient to the regime and its faux participatory organizations, for youth (the Hitler Youth), the working class (the German Labour Front), and even exercise and fitness groups (Nationalsozialistischer Reichsbund für Leibesübungen). The linguistic link between ‘corporation’ and ‘corporatist’ is not accidental. Fascism is capitalist to its core.

Few would deny that China is a capitalist society, with an economy organized around and driven by corporate profit. Thus, at the outset we can dismiss suggestions or arguments like those of Clegg that present China as socialist and/or communist. If those words have any meaning, they cannot apply to a capitalist society (and if China is not capitalist, the Pope is not a Catholic).

In my experience the Chinese regime and the Communist Party ideology satisfy the anti-Enlightenment test. The central planning regimes of the Soviet Union and East and Central Europe claimed to have or aspire to workers' democracy (not "bourgeois democracy"). They even had the formal institutions to mimic this aspiration, as well as claiming a form of free expression, perverse and disingenuous as it was.

In discussion after discussion in meetings with Chinese officials, I have encountered what might be called the "Asian values" argument--"Chinese people want an improvement in their material conditions, not western democracy". As for freedom of intellectual inquiry, it is my experience that Chinese academics based in China tend to endorse variations of rote learning in the social sciences and humanities (I cannot comment on teaching and research in the sciences).

As for corporatism, the Chinese regime has strong qualifications. The Communist Party of China is a mass organization and subservient to the regime. Its supposedly non-political activities reach into many aspects of daily life, mimicking the non-existent civil society.

That leaves chauvinistic expansionism. Like the issue of capitalism in China, almost no one would deny the rampant chauvinism of the Chinese regime and the (so-called) Communist Party. But, chauvinism is not the monopoly of fascists. To go from chauvinistic authoritarianism to fascist authoritarianism a regime has to adopt militaristic expansionism. Whether the Chinese regime has taken that step is not clear to me. There can be little doubt that the regime is quite prepared (in more ways than one) to use the explicit or implicit threat of force to achieve diplomatic and territorial gains.

The first post-WWII military expansion by a Chinese regime was long before the society had even a hint of capitalism, the ‘Sino-Indian’ border war in 1962 (when Mao Zedong was firmly in charge). The ‘Sino-Vietnamese’ war occurred just as the Chinese regime began the shift from central planning to aggressive capitalism, thus should not be taken as evidence of fascist tendencies to militarism.

However, more recent disputes over territory have provoked considerable belligerence from the Chinese regime, among these, the aggressive assertion of Chinese territorial claims in the South China Sea. To that can be added the dispute with the Japanese government over the Senkaku Islands, in which the US government has weighed in on the Japanese side, a clear example of capitalist super-power rivalry (I do not refer to Japan).

The overlap of fascist characteristics with the concrete aspects of the Chinese regime suggest at least two possible interpretations. First, the key fascist traits of corporatism in place of civil society, including a mass party, may be a vestige of the central planning period that the Chinese leadership plans to discard when it is no longer useful in building a capitalist superpower.

In other words, the regime is a familiar capitalist dictatorship in the process of shedding the trappings of socialism. If this is the case, the possibility exists that at some point in the future the regime will undergo democratic reform. This could be generated from below by working class protests as well as the putative democratic aspirations of the rising middle class (see report of the former in Aljazeera).

Alternatively, the regime may be in the process of transforming the structures of the central planning period into institutions to consolidate and render permanent a dictatorship of capital. If that is the case, hopes for democratic reform have no basis. Change would require insurrection and overthrow of the regime.

In this context it is sobering to recall that the fascist regimes established before WWII fell as a result of world war not internal insurrection. More sobering still is another comparison to the first half of the twentieth century. In the early twenty first century there is no militarily powerful government like that of the United States under Franklin D Roosevelt to lead an alliance of bourgeois democracies against the rise of a neo-fascist coalition.

Reprinted with permission from openDemocracy.

Global Warming is Economic Imperialism: The Tie to Capitalist Production is Incontrovertible

Carbon Emission are Tied to Economic Production

Graph (1) above: the claim that ‘we,’ humans broadly considered, are responsible for global warming is more precisely explained as capitalist production is responsible for it. The graph relates carbon emissions over the last century to more recent GDP (Gross Domestic Production) data, a broad measure of economic production; to show that carbon emissions are closely related to economic production. Russia, China and India fit into the global capitalism explanation through oil and gas production (Russia) and through ‘outsourced’ industrial production (China, India). China and India are increasingly adding to carbon emissions by building out their domestic economies and through export strategies that target the capitalist West as primary customers. Sources: The World Bank and the World Resources Institute.

By Rob Urie
Global warming unites the interests of ‘the world’ that would otherwise be particular through the everyday relations of complex interconnectedness. It is an unnatural ‘natural’ phenomenon in that it is an accumulation, an aggregation, of a large number of like acts. These like acts tie directly to capitalism in history as ‘a way of doing things,’ as a broad approach to ‘the world.’ The tie to capitalist production is incontrovertible— the rise in greenhouse gases correlates with the rise in capitalist production and these gases can be directly related to it as its known ‘byproducts.’

To state what is becoming increasingly obvious, unless global warming is resolved the fate of the world in any form recognizable to ‘us’ is at stake. The problem goes beyond the particulars— rising sea levels and increasing droughts and floods, to threaten the breadth of living relations. Given its genesis in capitalist production the question of resolution is one of the nature of capitalism, of the approach to ‘the world’ that brought ‘us’ from there to here in two short centuries?

With the U.S. historically being the largest emitter of carbon and other greenhouse gases it is overwhelmingly responsible for global warming. The shift in emissions from China in recent years has by degree been a function of Chinese manufacturing for export to the West. Global resolution is indeed necessary, but the American frame of a global ‘we’ who is responsible is an effort to deflect culpability from the U.S. as the primary source of global environmental dysfunction. In the realm of the political American Republicans are the more straightforwardly corrupted impediments to environmental resolution within the U.S. However, after five years in office where he and his administration mumbled hardly a word about global warming while undermining international efforts at resolution through backroom ‘deals’ in international ‘negotiations,’ Democrat President Barack Obama has finally come out in a year of likely tough mid-term elections to back the EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) in suggesting that someday, somebody, somewhere really ought to do something about carbon emissions. As is typical with American politicians trying to take credit for passing warm gas while assuring that nothing gets resolved, Mr. Obama’s promise to reduce carbon emissions is as vague and institutionally pliable as it is far out in the distance of time.

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Jews in America — A Conflicted Heritage

Two young girls wearing banners that read "Abolish child slavery" in English and
Yiddish. Credit: Creative Commons

By Rabbi Michael Lerner
On the one hand, Jews are deeply grateful that America provided us with a safe haven when so many other Christianity-dominated cultures had represented us as demon Christ-killers and created the preconditions for the rise of both secular and religious anti-Semitism.

American Jews rejoiced in the promise of freedom and equality before the law, and played a major role in organizing, shaping, and leading social movements that could extend that promise to all of America’s citizens.

The role of the United States in defeating Nazism at the expense of so many American lives remains an enduring source of pride even for the grandchildren and great grandchildren of those who fought in World War II, and an enduring source of appreciation for this amazing country. And the generosity of the American people toward Jews has made it possible for us to thrive and feel the kind of safety we haven’t felt for two thousand years of exile and diaspora.

On the other hand, Jewish well-being in America came not because this society didn’t seek scapegoats, but rather because it already had a scapegoat long before most Jews arrived on these shores – African Americans, Native Americans, and other targets (most recently, feminists, homosexuals, and “illegal” immigrants).

While other immigrant groups from Europe found their safety in part by identifying with the dominant culture and becoming “white” (a social construct for all light-skinned people who bought into the existing systems of privilege and power), a significant section of the Jewish people in the past 150 years of presence in the United States chose instead to identify with the oppressed – most significantly with African Americans, but also with the poor (of which we were a significant part in the years 1880-1940), the oppressed, the homeless, and the hungry.

Was this simply a matter of self-interest from a new immigrant group seeking to find a way to integrate into the society? If so, why wasn’t it chosen with equal energy by the Irish, the Polish, the Italians, etc.? In my view, Jews chose this path because of two radical messages in the Torah:

1. Remember that you were slaves in Egypt, that you were “the Other” (ha’ger), so when you come into your own power, do not oppress the stranger, but instead, Love the Other.

2. Do not accept reality as it is currently constructed – there is a force in the universe that makes possible the transformation from “that which is” (reality as given) to “that which ought to be” (the utopian possibilities of a world based on love, generosity, social justice, peace and joyous celebration of the universe). We called it YHVH – mistranslated as Jehovah, but actually a concept rather than a name, calling our attention to the reality that the world could be fully transformed and that we humans were created in the image of that force and with the responsibility to do tikkun (the healing and transformation of the world). It was this heritage that seeped into the collective unconscious of the Jewish people and that made us flock to social change movements in numbers not only out of proportion to our percentage of the population, but also more frequently than many other immigrant groups.

Unfortunately, the allure of fitting in and becoming like everyone else had a particularly strong effect on the distinctively American kind of Judaism that emerged in the temples and synagogues of American life. Seeking to imitate the decorum and respectability that WASPS had shaped for themselves, Jews in America created a Judaism that became increasingly like the other conformist religions of American society, embracing capitalist values and embracing patriotism even when it led to supporting American imperialist assumptions about the rest of the world.

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You're Not Paranoid: The Economic Collapse of 2008 Was Likely a Deliberate Act by a High Finance Cabal - Suggests Latest Research

Occupy Citibank protest - Apr 24, 2013.(Photo by Michael Fleshman)

Is there a case for re-examining the collapse of 2008 in light of Thomas Piketty's new book?

"Just because you're paranoid,
it doesn't mean they're not out to get you!"

-Anon

By Dick Pountain
To be frank I can't be arsed to Google for long enough to discover the originator of this well-known aperçu (it may have been Joseph Heller, it certainly wasn't Nirvana, though they did put it into a song). All that matters about it to me is that while I once thought of it as a joke, I've recently begun to consider it as a profound truth. And I'm not talking, as you might perhaps expect, about the NSA and GCHQ and their clandestine mass surveillance of our communications. I'd accepted long ago that was happening, and what's more - regardless of whether you accept them or not - there are publicly-aired justifications for such actions as necessary functions of the modern State.

No, I'm talking about an altogether deeper and more dangerous kind of paranoia, on a par with "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion", the Zinoviev letter or the Fu Manchu novels, fantasies about tiny cabals of malign actors who have the power to alter the course of history. As a marxisant social commentator I've spent the last 50 years rejecting, refuting (perhaps even pooh-poohing) all such paranoid theories. Capitalism isn't a thing, let alone a person who could have malign intentions. It's a form of organisation of human labour that has no overall director apart from abstract property laws, and which follows its own unpredictable logic to produce a multitude of different outcomes, some better, some worse, for some people and not for others. This tendency to imagine dark conspirators plotting the spread and development of capitalism is something I've been resisting for most of my life.

So what happened to make me start doubting the viability of such scepticism? It was reading Paul Krugman's review of Thomas Piketty's seminal book "Capital in the Twenty-First Century" in the New York Review of Books. But surely neither Krugman nor Piketty is a conspiracy theorist? Of course not. What Piketty has done is analyse the overall development of capitalism over the last centuries, using new and powerful analytical tools. What Krugman's review does is to explain Piketty's analysis with admirable clarity, and bring out its social implications, which are so alarming that it was they that introduced this doubt into my mind. Given the facts presented in this review (I've yet to read Piketty's book itself: regrettably too busy for next few months). The only way I can explain Krugman/Piketty's findings to myself is by supposing that the financial crash of 2008 may have been in some way an act of deliberate sabotage by some conscious group of actors, rather than just the working out of impersonal market forces.

Krugman's excellent review is entitled "Why We're in a New Gilded Age", a nod to one of the key facts emerging from Piketty's analysis, namely that income inequality is set to revisit levels last seen during the first US Gilded Age between 1870 and 1910. That was the period when the great monopolistic fortunes were being accumulated in oil, railroads, steel and banking by family dynasties like the Rockefellers, Mellons, Carnegies and Morgans. I won't waste space and your time by repeating all the facts Krugman picks out here: do try to read his review for yourself. He reproduces a pair of Piketty's graphs that plot After Tax Rate of Return to Capital and Growth of the World Economy from antiquity (0 BCE) up past the present day and projected forward to 2050:

(click to enlarge)

The profit graph is nearly flat for most of recorded history, with only a shallow rise from the Renaissance to World War 1, then a precipitous V-shaped descent spanning the whole 20th century which represents the dramatic decrease in inequality between the two world wars caused by the power of organised labour. The growth graph rises steadily from the 1500s up until the 1970s, a steady 500-year increase in equality caused by growth spreading wealth more widely.

That growth rate has been declining now for more than 60 years and the graphs crossed sometime in the '80s so that by 2050 Piketty projects that inequality will be back to levels not seen since 1820. There's a significant difference between earnings inequality and inherited inequality, and inheritance of wealth among the top 0.01% has become such as to generate a new crop of dynasties (highly visible among Hollywood and Rock brats in the pages of Tatler for some years now). Krugman also remarks that one difference between this New Gilded Age and the first is that income inequality now trumps asset wealth by numbers, though not by total worth: those managerial and financial classes who pay themselves multi-million-dollar fat-cat salaries far outnumber the 0.01% who live solely off *ownership* of huge corporations.

What struck me so forcibly was that Piketty's book and Krugman's review bring together, and make sense of, several disparate themes that I've been banging on about in this blog, and in my book reviews for The Political Quarterly, for the last decade: a crucial turning point in the mid-1970s when labour began to lose out, which is often blamed on the "oil crisis" but actually far more than that; and the concept of the "surplus wage", paying salaries that are no longer remotely connected with productivity as a legal way to loot the assets of companies.

One of the more important books I've reviewed in recent years was Winner-Take-All Politics by two US economics professors Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson, in which they painstakingly unravel the ways in which the Republican party helped turn the tide against organised labour since 1971, in the face of complacency, collaboration and incompetence from the Democrats. Contrary to conservative mythology it wasn't Reagonomics that turned that tide but a blunder by Carter Democrats in refusing tax and regulatory measures offered by Nixon that were more liberal than anything Obama can dream of. It was also a tax law of Nixon's that permitted clever and diligent Republicans to pay for George W. Bush's upper-class tax cuts by trapping the middle-classes in a higher tax band, thus turning them into enraged tax-cutters and paving the way for the Tea Party. By dominating those boring committees that actually run America, Republicans have permanently shifted the balance from labour back to capital. As Krugman has it:

"Nor is this orientation toward capital just rhetorical. Tax burdens on high-income Americans have fallen across the board since the 1970s, but the biggest reductions have come on capital income—including a sharp fall in corporate taxes, which indirectly benefits stockholders—and inheritance. Sometimes it seems as if a substantial part of our political class is actively working to restore Piketty’s patrimonial capitalism. And if you look at the sources of political donations, many of which come from wealthy families, this possibility is a lot less outlandish than it might seem."

And there you have the germ of my paranoia, "a lot less outlandish than it might seem". Krugman's statement is fairly radical for a mainstream US economist, in that it acknowledges that the Republican Party pursues class politics (a forbidden topic that neither party nor the US voting public like to hear spoken). My concern however goes way beyond that: is it "too outlandish" to suggest that a small cabal of libertarian Republican bankers and lawyers actually forsaw and abetted the crash of 2008?

Harvard Law School, Skull and Bones, Goldman-Sachs' boardroom, the ratings agencies, the Fed under Ayn-Rand-libertarian Alan Greenspan. It doesn't require the hypertrophied imagination of a Thomas Pynchon or a Bruce Sterling to conjure up from those ingredients the possibility, if not probability, of a small, informal clique with the determination, technical know-how and prescience to understand that unfettering mortgage-lending might bankrupt the public finances, thus cripple the State's regulatory capabilities and open up a once-only opportunity to reverse all the gains made by labour over the course of the 20th century...

The conclusion of Piketty's book, more or less endorsed by Krugman, is that in democracies we could still do something about this rising inequality if we wanted, the more obvious measures being steep progressive taxation on both incomes and wealth, transaction taxes and the breaking up of monopolies (as was done by the Anti-Trusters before World War 1). But it's perfectly clear that the political will is lacking for such measures both in the UK and the USA, where both parties and electorate have largely bought into an anti-tax, austerity agenda. Add to this the fact that US democracy itself has now become so dysfunctional as to prevent any significant reforms from being passed.

To add to my paranoia, we're entering a period where our giant corporations are no longer the railroads and steel but in electronics, and they're finally poised on the brink of a technical revolution that's dogged both the radical political and science fiction imaginations for a century - the possibility of employing robots to displace human workers. Superimpose this onto Piketty's projections of wealth-concentration and dynastic succession and you glimpse the outlines of a very grim society indeed, dominated at one end by shanty-towns and favelas (the World as Detroit) and at the other by gated communities and private islands.

In that world only a minority of the population would be in paid employment, medicine and policing are privatised, and the suppression of civil disturbance is automated and terribly effective. Sounds like a script treatment for yet another dystopian sci-f/action movie starring Vin Diesel, but it's not that far from the vision Guy Debord arrived at in his (paranoid?) "Comments on the Society of the Spectacle" in 1988. Another theorist I greatly admire was Thorstein Veblen, he who best analysed the first Gilded Age and influenced the first Anti-Trust movement: so I'll fade out to a characteristically sarcastic commentary of his on unearned income:

"... in modern times and in the civilised countries, those immemorial principles of privilege equitably vested in the master class have fallen into discredit as being not sufficiently grounded in fact; so that mastery and servitude are disallowed and have disappeared from the range of legitimate institutions. The enlightened principles of self-help and personal equality do not tolerate these things. However, they do tolerate free income from investments. Indeed, the most consistent and most reputable votaries of the modern point of view commonly subsist on such income." (The Vested Interests and the Common Man, 1919)

Reprinted with permission from openDemocracy.

10 Corporate Behemoths Stifling Competition and Delivering Awful Service to You

Photo by Eric Houser.

There's no real free enterprise, free market, or open and fair competition in the capitalist system as practiced in the United States. In the U.S., mega corporations agree to carve up entire segments of the economy and then set high prices and provide poor services. They then push a carpet of laws and regulations that lock out competition and stifles government oversight.

By Alex Henderson
One of the fundamentals of free-market capitalism is that consumers benefit when competition is plentiful. If a business is selling a weak or inferior product, consumers can turn to the competition for a better deal. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt understood that, which is why a key element of his New Deal was the anti-trust, anti-monopoly legislation of the 1930s. Roosevelt firmly believed that large companies should be forced into a competitive environment whether they liked it or not, and that belief served the U.S. well for many years. But in recent decades, a variety of corporate lobbyists, far-right Republicans and neoliberal Democrats have shredded the New Deal and undermined anti-trust laws—thus encouraging corporations to grow larger and larger and engage in monopolistic practices.

Here are 10 mammoth corporations that detest free-market competition and do everything they can to stamp it out or greatly reduce it.

Comcast

Monsanto

Blue Cross

Bank of America

Verizon

American Airlines

Wells Fargo

Koch Industries

Goldman Sachs

JPMorgan Chase


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