The Nullification of Science

Exxon did this for decades. They'd discovered that continued use of fossil fuel would warm the climate, raise the oceans and make large growing areas into deserts. What did they do? They hid the information. Why? So the owners of oil shares could continue to reap high profits from peak oil and their top executives could pull down decades of multimillion dollar paychecks.

Recently we've learned that pesticides manufactured by powerful multinational corporations have begun killing off bees and butterflies necessary for the pollination of a large percentage of our food crops. But powerful multinational corporations know how to reach deep into academic research institutions and shut the science down. Because they sponsor those institutions. (Nobody else has enough money and they do. They hold the purse and the veto power.) These multinationals also can dictate government policy. A story on public radio yesterday told of how a USDA bee scientist was upsetting the pesticide companies with his findings. They shut him down.

The Four Stage Policy of Climate Change Denial

A series of stories in the LATimes has been explaining how EXXON knew very early that fossil fuel use was causing potentially catastrophic climate change and how they decided to cover it up and tell the public nothing was wrong.

This bit of dialogue from a BBC political comedy sums up the trick that’s been played on humanity by the oil companies and their Republican stooges.

Sir Richard Wharton: In stage one we say nothing is going to happen.

Sir Humphrey Appleby: Stage two, we say something may be about to happen, but we should do nothing about it.

Sir Richard Wharton: In stage three, we say that maybe we should do something about it, but there's nothing we can do.

Sir Humphrey Appleby: Stage four, we say maybe there was something we could have done, but it's too late now.

Meanwhile our tax dollars subsidize the oil giants with billions of dollars a year and their shareholders pocket trillions of dollars of profits year by year. By the time the oceans rise and global food production collapses they will be beyond prosecution and their riches will be safely stashed somewhere beyond our reach. Because of what they knew all along their offshore bank will not be on a Caribbean island but Switzerland.

Here's Bill McKibben's damning article about what EXXON knew, in the New Yorker.

And in The Nation, again by Bill McKibben.

How Corporations Became People (Or Did They?)

A brief clear video summary first.


What’s interesting is that the crucial decision in Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific never stated that the corporation was a person entitled to rights of personhood.

How it became the invalid cornerstone for every corporate personhood claim since is a mystery. Either the judge erred and prejudged the case or the clerk assigned to summarize the decision invented corporate personhood. Was he in the employ of the railroad? This excellent article about the case sorts out the case and finds nothing written in the decision supporting corporate personhood, an issue that wasn’t even properly argued. Was this creation of corporate “persons” done out of bias or error or conflict of interest?

The point is all the subsequent law saying that corporations are persons is based upon a fiction. And corporations have become "super persons" as a result, with rights larger than other citizens. Despite the fact they cannot be jailed, cannot be poisoned by their malfeasance or that of other corporate “persons”, cannot be killed except by their own hand, and are granted extraordinary methods of evading the obligations and hazards that living, breathing persons cannot evade. Today they represent a special class of protected super persons, more powerful than the rest of us and held to fewer obligations. A class virtually above the law. A class, as we see in the case of their proxies in the lobbying group ALEC, that writes the laws the rest of us must live under.

And the point is it was never made law by the Constitution or by Congress or by the courts. Is it possible to undo something that was never done in the first place?

One thing we can do is amend the Constitution. Join the movement. Join MoveToAmend.org and right this wrong.

Between $20 and $30 TRILLION are hidden offshore by the Super Rich

"The very existence of the global offshore industry, and the tax-free status of the enormous sums invested by their wealthy clients, is predicated on secrecy," according to James Henry, former chief economist for the global business consulting firm McKinsey.

This is the financial club Mitt Romney belongs to.

This story broke on the front pages of the British newspapers The Guardian and The Observer over the weekend. The articles discuss the burden wealthy tax evaders place on everyone else, not just by evading taxes but by removing their massive cash hoards from the economies where they earned them (and evaded taxes). The amount of hoarded cash is greater than the GDPs of Japan and the US combined. Need a reason for the global recession? This is it.

The summary in the Guardian

The details, in the Guardian

The world of private banks where our economy is being held hostage

Analysis of the problem

The white paper with all the numbers

Mitt Romney is the poster child for this elite group of super rich. They may have homes in this country, but their wealth is safely offshore where what they earn can't be touched to build roads or schools or hospitals. Or, for that matter, to pay the lifetime of healthcare for wounded veterans. They are above obligation to any country, especially the United States. We all try to minimize our tax bill, but for people like Romney it is a major effort of evasion that employs many banks and very complex schemes.

The article about Romney's tax havens in this month's Vanity Fair

The question then is: should Mitt Romney be running instead for the presidency of Bermuda?

Or the Cayman Islands? Or the Bahamas? Or Switzerland? It doesn't really matter what it says on his birth certificate. What matters is what it says on his tax returns. Where is he invested? Whose economy does he care about? Does he fulfill the basic duty of citizenship, the duty we all fulfill? Does he pay the taxes that pave the roads and educate our kids? Or does he evade them?

This matters.

The collusion of the big banks to rig global interest rates matters.

The involvement of major banks in money laundering for international terrorists and drug cartels matters too.

What's disturbing is they are laundering billions for ordinary American billionaires as well, helping them hide what they earn from the tax obligations that are a vital part of citizenship.

Corporatocracy

There isn't a Doctor Evil plotting world domination in some remote bunker. No, it's done at Davos and Jackson Hole and the Bohemian Grove, whenever the rich and powerful get together over cocktails. They know each other, they do deals, they share interests and goals. They own us. Now there's science to prove it.

Do you think these very well organized corporations don't know how to rig wages worldwide?

Do you wonder if, maybe, they collude to profit from shortages and panics? If they profit from them, do you think they might be tempted to cause them?

Ever suspected that drug companies might actually conspire to cause shortages to keep drug prices high? How clever. (They're so carefully protected by the Republicans that Obama has had to use executive orders to fix the problem.)

Did you realize these very rich corporations also know how to avoid taxes? They're actually pretty good at it.

The word for this kind of dominance is "oligopoly". It's the opposite of a free market and very anti-democratic.

This is what the 99% are angry about. Too big to fail is too big altogether. It makes the world economy unstable and unworkable.

Trading with Our Enemies–Treason or Patriotism?

From Bloomberg News: the Koch Brothers flouted U.S. law prohibiting trading with enemies of the U.S. They did business with Iran, who funded the recently convicted underwear bomber and other terrorists far more competent and dangerous. The person who uncovered the wrongdoing was a Koch employee whose job it was to check company compliance with laws and ethics. When she found non-compliance she was quickly transferred and subsequently fired.

Is this new? No. Unique? Not at all.

Trading with the enemy used to have the quaint label of "Treason", but no longer. When Dick Cheney was chief executive of Halliburton, his company traded with Iran too. They broke explicit U.S. laws in doing so. A grand jury was empaneled and a Senate Committee reported on the lawbreaking, but Mr. Cheney did not go to jail. Maybe because he'd become George W. Bush's Vice President.

Forbes magazine reported on Halliburton's ingenuity in evading laws. But Halliburton isn't the only company mentioned. Dell, Hewlett Packard and Microsoft are also tagged. Treason? Corporations are (thanks to the Republican majority in the Supreme Court) legally classified as "people" ––except when they commit treason. Then they aren't people and are immune from capital punishment.

A BBC report from 2002 shows Cheney was also linked to charges of stock manipulation and corporate fraud. Again nothing happened. He was Vice President.

A good summary of the corruption at Halliburton under the leadership of Dick Cheney and during his period as Vice President when he fed contracts to the company and continued to receive payments from the company can be found at Business Ethics magazine.

This way of doing business may be treasonous but it is commonplace and seldom punished. Halliburton has since moved its headquarters to Dubai as a way of evading American taxes, regulation and legal liability. It still earns its billions off the American taxpayer but it keeps its offices and profits safely offshore.

CBS Marketwatch published this in 2003, as America went to war:

"When individual Americans are accused of helping terrorists, they're thrown in jail and their names are dragged through the mud. But when major U.S. corporations are caught trading with the enemy, they get just a slap on the wrist from the government. In the past two weeks, the government has revealed that 57 companies and organizations have been fined for doing business with terrorists, despots and tyrants."

"However, neither the government nor the companies are forthcoming with the public about the details of the illicit trade with rogue governments like Iraq, Cuba, North Korea, Iran and Sudan."

Not done yet. This article from The Guardian outlines how the father of George H. W. Bush and grandfather of George W. Bush helped finance the Nazi war machine, funneling investment money to the companies that used slave labor to prepare Germany to invade Poland, France, Belgium, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Belgium Norway, and rain bombs on London. His firm helped build the war machine that precipitated the global war that killed (by conservative estimates) 60 million people. This financing of the Nazis was legal until war broke out. The war declaration finally made it a crime and the capital investments were seized in 1942. He lost lots of money but Senator Bush didn't go to jail. Why was Prescott Bush less immune than Dick Cheney?

There's another kind of treason that doesn't involve aiding fascist dictators bent on destroying America. If it's homegrown is it more patriotic? Prescott Bush was also one of the Wall Street figures behind a 1934 plot to overthrow the Roosevelt presidency. Here is a recent BBC program about the plot which nearly turned America into a fascist state.

Today's Wall Street bigshots may be losing the ability to be traitors here at home. They've exported so many jobs and so much of our manufacturing muscle to China that America isn't really worth overthrowing anymore.

It will be interesting to see whether Immelt does anything to repair his anti-American record. This article in Foreign Policy Magazine asks the same question. He's now in charge of restoring the American jobs picture, hired by Obama much as Wall Street pirate Joseph Kennedy was hired by FDR to set up the SEC. Who knows the criminals better than these guys?

Getting back to massive criminal extortion, and back to the Koch Brothers–––the Koch Bros have now been implicated in the 2008 spike in gasoline prices––at a time when demand was slack and supply was sufficient prices still went to record highs. How much did these manipulations steal from Americans? And how much did this theft of household liquidity contribute to the near collapse of our economy in late 2008?

This is predatory behavior similar to the kind of market gaming that Enron traders laughingly executed against the utilities customers of California.

Listen to those tapes, reported years later when obtained by CBS News, and you get a sense of the cold-bloodedness of the traders involved, and the cold-bloodedness of the game Enron set up and exploited. Enron did its damnedest to bankrupt the largest state in the nation rather than let up when public finances imploded and citizens suffered rolling blackouts.

"They're f------g taking all the money back from you guys?" complains an Enron employee on the tapes. "All the money you guys stole from those poor grandmothers in California?"

"Yeah, grandma Millie, man"

"Yeah, now she wants her f------g money back for all the power you've charged right up, jammed right up her a------ for f------g $250 a megawatt hour."

Traders or traitors? Businessmen or criminals? It's hard to tell the difference. Sometimes, not often but sometimes, corporations are run by psychopaths. (I covered this in an earlier post.) When this happens, it happens because there's lax regulation, because there's a sense of impunity, because the government watchdogs have been defanged and defunded, and there's too much money available to be stolen. When this happens it's very hard for an ethical company to compete. And there are ethical companies. Most corporations are pretty good employers and good citizens. By cracking down on the bad actors wouldn't we be helping them? Maybe a few good corporations should join the protests on Wall Street.

How American Corporations Plundered Employee Pensions

Wall Street Journal reporter Ellen E. Schultz discusses her new book RETIREMENT HEIST in this interview with Salon.com. How did many major American corporations plunder their employees' retirement funds? It wasn't complicated. It was surprisingly easy for them to do. First they hired expert help. Legal and accounting experts. Then they went to work. Read and share this interview. RETIREMENT HEIST is an important book.

"Think of pensions as a debt. If a company can reverse a debt, it can record it as income. And that income is the same as if they got it from selling trucks or whatever it is the company sells. There were billions in promises to retirees for pensions and healthcare and death benefits and life insurance, and the companies figured out that if they cut or eliminated them altogether then they could get those billions in profit -- and even use them for executive compensation."

But what are promises? What are obligations? Why do large profitable companies steal pension funds? Because they can, and their executives instruct them to do so. They are rewarded for doing so.

Remember, a corporation is properly called a "limited liability corporation". In a legal sense, in a purely capitalistic sense, they are formed and operated to avoid obligations, to evade responsibilities, to figure out ways of delivering as little as possible for as much money as possible. "Innovation" often involves devising ways to give poorer, cheaper, delayed and/or non- service for as much as they can charge. Companies that do this are admired for "outcompeting" their competitors, and their shareholders are the envy of the shareholders whose companies have more scruples.

Not all corporations behave this way, but without regulations to keep the game fair the ones that do cheat have a competitive advantage.

This is happening more and more because consulting companies and corporate leadership pow-wows and business schools have taught business leaders to ignore two of the three loyalties corporations have, the loyalty to the customer and to the employee, and to put all effort and dedication to pleasing the third group––the owners and shareholders. Corporate executives usually belong to this group. When possible the loyalty is confined to the executives themselves, leaving shareholders holding the bag.