News Release Archive | corporations | Accuracy.Org

Journalist Questioning Honeywell CEO Stifled, Police Investigating Incident

June 4, 2012

On Thursday, journalist Mike Elk attempted to ask a tough question of Honeywell CEO David Cote at an event at the U.S. Capitol, but the microphone was ripped fromhis hand. See video, which has gotten 50,000 views on YouTube:

MIKE ELK, mike at inthesetimes.com, @MikeElk
A reporter for In These Times magazine, Elk said today: “On Friday President Obama appeared with Honeywell CEO David Cote at Honeywell’s Minneapolis facility for an event on the economy. While Cote claims Honeywell’s profitability is due to innovation, much of it actually rests on union busting that risks the safety of the public. I attempted to ask Cote about this on Thursday, but was blocked from doing so. Today, the Capitol police informed me they are investigating the incident. Here’s what happened:

“For the last two years, I have covered union busting efforts by Honeywell, their close connections to President Obama and how federal agencies have assisted Honeywell in three different labor struggles since Obama came to power. In particular, I covered a 14-month lockout at a Honeywell uranium plant in Metropolis, Illinois, where Honeywell cheated on tests for replacement workers, one of whom later caused several releases of radioactive gas into the atmosphere. Instead of joining the picket line with the striking workers as he promised to do during his campaign, Obama decided to fly with top Democratic donor and Honeywell CEO Cote to India while the lockout was still going on. …

“On Thursday, at an event on the Hill, I began to ask Cote about the uranium release caused by a non-union engineer working a job performed by a union worker. Cote began to frown and looked annoyed with my question. Immediately, I started getting dirty stares and smirks from the room of assembled corporate lobbyists and allies. The moderator of the panel interrupted me to say ‘Sir, if I can interrupt. This is to hear from entrepreneurs.’

“Within a few seconds, Nicolas D. Muzin, a senior adviser for Rep. Tim Scott (R-SC), grabbed me and attempted to physically remove me from the room.” After he attempted to follow Cote, Elk states that “Honeywell External Communications Director Rob Ferris barricaded me in a room for several minutes and afterwards had the Capitol Police detain me. They released me after 10 minutes when they realized I had done nothing more than try to follow a CEO down a hallway. Indeed, Capitol Police asked me if I wanted to press charges against Ferris for false imprisonment for barricading me into the room. Today, I was informed they are investigating the incident.”

Tagged With: CEO David Cote, corporations, economy, Honeywell, Journalist Barred, Mike Elk, Union Busting,

“Bain Actually Loves Dems”

May 29, 2012

DOUG HENWOOD, dhenwood at panix.com
Editor of Left Business Observer and author of the book Wall Street, Henwood just wrote the brief piece “Bain Actually Loves Dems,” which states: “All good Democrats are busily hating on Bain Capital right now. What they’re forgetting is how many Bain-affiliated political contributions have gone to Democrats.

“Plug the words ‘Bain Capital’ into an OpenSecrets.org search and you learn that while Bain people have lovingly contributed to their former CEO’s presidential campaign, almost three-quarters of their contributions to other candidates, 72 percent to be precise, have gone to Democrats. That’s a higher percentage to Dems than the AFL-CIO!”

“And among the top recipients are Dem headliners like Al Franken, Claire McCaskill, John Kerry, Mark Udall, Nancy Pelosi, and Sherrod Brown. They were also major contributors to the Democratic National Committee and the national Democratic party. There are very few Republican candidates on the OpenSecrets list, and no major gifts to the GOP itself.

“So [Newark, N.J., Mayor] Cory Booker’s defense of PE [private equity] against attacks by the Obama campaign has a very materialist explanation: PE titans like Bain have been funding Dems for ages — including Booker himself (e.g., ‘Cory Booker’s Bain Capital money‘). It was just a few years ago that HF [hedge fund] hotshot Paul Tudor Jones held a 500-guest fundraiser for Obama, back when ‘the whole of Greenwich’ (an epicenter of the industry) was behind him (‘Another top hedge fund chief backs Obama‘). Then he hurt their feelings with one intemperate use of the term ‘fatcats.’ But it’s not like Obama is about to expropriate the PE and HF types.”

A recent Bob Fitch memorial lecture by Henwood contains a broader critique of Wall Street and real estate support for many establishment Democrats. (Fitch was author of the book The Assassination of New York, which charged that elites seeking ever greater profits had effectively gutted New York City neighborhoods and productive economic sectors.)

Confronting the “Taboo of Public Ownership”

May 24, 2012

GAR ALPEROVITZ, via John Duda, jduda at democracycollaborative.org
THOMAS HANNA, tmhanna at democracycollaborative.org
Alperovitz, author of America Beyond Capitalism and co-founder of the Democracy Collaborative, and his co-author Thomas Hanna, have written an article published today in The Nation, “Beyond Corporate Capitalism: Not So Wild a Dream,” which states: “It’s time to put the taboo subject of public ownership back on the progressive agenda: It is the only way to solve some of the most serious problems facing the nation. … Take the financial sector where the current recession was hatched. Today, five giants control more than a third of all the deposits … all were deeply involved in creating the meltdown that cost taxpayers billions in bailouts and the overall economy trillions. Numerous economists, left and right, agree that their unbridled operations will inevitably lead to another crisis. JPMorgan Chase’s recent speculative loss of at least $2 billion should be fair warning. …

“If some of the most important corporations have a massively disruptive and costly impact on the economy in general and the environment in particular — and if regulation and anti-trust laws in many areas are likely to be subverted by these corporations — a public takeover is the only logical answer. …

The article highlights existing, successful examples of public ownership in America today: “public ownership … is not the radical departure most imagine it to be. Two of the most cost-effective health providers in the United States — Medicare and the Veterans Administration — are run by the U.S. government. So, too, the largest pension manager in the country is a public entity: the Social Security Administration.”

In an election year likely to be dominated by discussions of corporations and the economy, Alperovitz and Hanna lay out a clear mandate for progressives: “At a time when progressives are being called ‘socialists’ no matter what, there is little to lose and much to gain by clearly making the case for a new longer term direction that confronts — and ultimately overcomes — the centrality of corporate power.”

Alperovitz is a professor of political economy at the University of Maryland and a founder of the Democracy Collaborative. Hanna is a researcher at the Democracy Collaborative.

Tagged With: corporations, economy, Gar Alperovitz, Thomas Hanna,

JPMorgan is Biggest Contributor to Senate Chair Calling Them to Testify

May 21, 2012

THOMAS FERGUSON, thomas.ferguson at umb.edu
Ferguson is professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts, Boston and a senior fellow of the Roosevelt Institute. He just wrote the piece “Senate Banking Chair Calls Jamie Dimon to Testify: But JPMorgan Chase is His Biggest Contributor!” about Senate Banking Committee Chair Tim Johnson of South Dakota announcing his panel would call JPMorgan Chase Chair Jamie Dimon.

Ferguson said today: “Four years ago, the failure of Lehman Brothers precipitated a world wide financial collapse. Now policymakers in Europe are weighing whether to let not a bank, but a whole country — Greece — go down the drain. We have been repeatedly told that American banks have so carefully hedged their European exposures that there is no reason to fear contagion from such a disaster. The JPMorgan Chase case raises fundamental questions about these breezy assurances and whether American bank regulators truly understand what our Too Big To Fail Banks are really up to. We cannot afford another expensive policy failure by our money-driven Congress: Senator Johnson’s committee needs to start posing searching questions not in weeks, but immediately, before American banks and their regulators are once again overtaken by events.”

Also see Ferguson’s piece on Congress and money in the Financial Times.

See Johnson’s information from the Center for Responsive Politics at OpenSecrets.org

Bilking the Poor: America’s Poverty Taxes

May 17, 2012

Multibillonaire Pete Peterson’s Fiscal Summit concluded on Tuesday with a stand for no-compromise austerity and Speaker of the House John Boehner laying out the case for massive spending cuts. Yesterday the Senate voted down budget proposals that would have slashed Medicaid, cut SNAP, voucher-ized Medicare, and shrunk most other domestic human needs programs. At the same time, these proposals protect and even increase the military budget and cut taxes for those at the top. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities estimates that nearly two-thirds of those proposed program cuts would hit low-income people disproportionately.

But authors Barbara Ehrenreich and Gary Rivlin argue that any discussion of the safety net and poverty alleviation has to include the ways that local and state governments and private enterprise actively prey on the poor.

BARBARA EHRENREICH, via Beth Schulman, barbara.ehrenreich at economichardship.org,
Ehrereich is the author of “Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America” and is most recently the founder of the just-launched Economic Hardship Reporting Project, which supports innovative journalism on poverty . In her report “Preying On the Poor,” released today by TomDispatch, she writes: “Before we can ‘do something’ for the poor, there are some things we need to stop doing to them. … The amounts extracted from the poor by the private and public sector are comparable to the amounts ‘given’ to the poor through the safety net. It’s not just the private sector that’s preying on the poor. Local governments are discovering that they can partially make up for declining tax revenues through fines, fees, and other costs imposed on indigent defendants, often for crimes no more dastardly than driving with a suspended license.”

She said today: “I am surprised by the size of these numbers, and made all the more impatient with the standard liberal discourse on poverty. We can’t go on talking about poverty without talking about how it is being manufactured and intensified all the time.”

GARY RIVLIN, grivlin at mindspring.com
Journalist and author of five books, including “Broke USA,” and co-editor of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project with Ehrenreich, Rivlin just wrote the piece “America’s Poverty Tax,” where he reports on the exorbitant fees the poor and the working poor pay because they have lousy credit or because they have no savings. Rivlin said today: “The numbers show it’s very expensive to be poor.” The article states: “Add up all the profits pocketed by all those payday lenders, check cashers, subprime auto lenders, and other Poverty, Inc. enterprises and divide it by the 40 million households the Federal Reserve says survive on $30,000 a year or less. That works out to around $2,500 per household, or a poverty tax of around 10 percent.”

Filed Under: Electoral Issues, The U.S. Economy Tagged With: Barbara Ehrenreich, corporations, economy, Gary Rivlin, poverty,

Standing Up to JPMorgan’s Dimon and “Hedginess”

May 15, 2012

STEPHANY GRIFFITH JONES, sgj2108 at columbia.edu
Stephany Griffith Jones is Financial Markets Program Director at the Initiative for Policy Dialogue at Columbia University. With José Antonio Ocampo, and Joseph E. Stiglitz she co-edited “Time for a Visible Hand: Lessons from the 2008 World Financial Crisis.” She said today: “Two billion dollar losses in JPMorgan give us further confirmation of the need to regulate the financial system much more, particularly increasing transparency of derivatives, forcing all derivatives on exchanges, and tightening the Volcker rule. Dilution of regulation by financial interests must be resisted strongly. More radical questions need to be asked: whether such complex financial activity, where risks are impossible to measure, and with no positive effect on the real economy, should be allowed at all?”

“However, JPMorgan led the effort to gut the Volcker Rule and the provision that requires transparency. JPMorgan is the world’s largest proprietary purchaser of financial derivatives — precisely what the Volcker Rule sought to end. The bank claims that it does not engage in proprietary trading and that it purchases derivatives solely to hedge. That claim is an example of what Stephen Colbert meant when he invented the term: ‘truthiness.’

“A hedge is an investment that offsets losses in another investment. JPMorgan’s supposed hedges aren’t hedges under accounting rules because they haven’t been shown to perform as hedges. JPMorgan bought tens of billions of dollars of derivatives that increased its losses rather than reduced them. It calls these anti-hedges ‘hedges’ — in other words, it practiced ‘hedginess.’”

On Friday, Black will be speaking at a United Nations summit on the “State of the World Economy and Finance in 2012.”

GERALD EPSTEIN, gepstein at econs.umass.edu
Professor of economics and a founding co-director of the Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Epstein just wrote the piece “Standing Up to Jamie Dimon: Is it Safe?” which states: “How do we stand up to Jamie Dimon and the other tax payer subsidized bankers that use the privileged position of tax payer underwritten banks to engage in risky activity that harms the real economy and generates massive salaries and bonuses for the bankers (Ina Drew is reportedly in line to make $14 million this year).

“First, we must unmask the Republican and Democratic politicians that have actively served to eviscerate the Dodd-Frank rules on proprietary trading, derivatives and swaps regulations and other parts of the Dodd-Frank regulations, in the name of job creation and liquidity enhancement. The regulators at the Federal Reserve, Securities and Exchange Commission and others must be badgered to write and enforce rules that implement strict enforcement of the Dodd-Frank rules against proprietary trading, controls over derivatives…

“But such provisions will not be enough because banks will eventually find ways around them and continue to act like the world is one big casino and ponzi palace. There is increasing recognition by economists and public officials that the too big to fail banks need to be cut down to size. Senator Sherrod Brown has introduced the SAFE banking act”

Epstein was just interviewed by The Real News

Filed Under: The U.S. Economy Tagged With: corporations, economy, Gerald Epstein, JP Morgan, JP Morgan Trading Loss, JP Morgan Volcker Rule, Stephany Griffith Jones, William K. Black,

JPMorgan “Shock Disclosure” a “Wake-Up Call We Dare Not Ignore”

May 11, 2012

The Financial Times reports today: “JPMorgan Chase announced a surprise $2 billion trading loss on credit derivatives trading, which chief executive Jamie Dimon blamed on ‘errors, sloppiness and bad judgement’ and warned ‘could get worse.’

“The shock disclosure, made after the market closed on Thursday in a regulatory filing, prompted renewed calls for tougher regulation. Investors reacted by sending the bank’s shares down by more than 9 percent when Wall Street opened on Friday. Other U.S. banking stocks also suffered sharp falls.”

STEPHANY GRIFFITH JONES, sgj2108 at columbia.edu
Stephany Griffith-Jones is Financial Markets Program Director at the Initiative for Policy Dialogue at Columbia University.

WILLIAM K. BLACK, blackw at umkc.edu
Available for a limited number of interviews, Black is now an associate professor of economics and law at the University of Missouri, Kansas City and the author of “The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One.” He was the deputy staff director of the national commission that investigated the cause of the savings and loan debacle. He said today: “JPMorgan has announced that it has suffered large losses, and remains exposed to far greater losses, because purported ‘economic hedges’ did not perform as ‘expected’ because they were poorly designed. These purported hedges are not real. JPMorgan was speculating wildly and its panicky releases reveal that it is afraid that the positions it took exposed it to grave risks. The experience demonstrates the importance of the Volcker rule, the largest banks’ efforts to gut and evade the rule, and the continuing refusal of bank regulators to say ‘no’ to practices of the systemically dangerous institutions or SDIs (the roughly 20 ‘too big to fail’ banks) that are unsafe and unsound. As long as we permit the SDIs to remain so large that regulators fear that their failure will produce a global crisis we are rolling the dice 20 times a day wondering when (not ‘if’) the next SDI failure will occur and blow up the economy. JPMorgan’s losses on its faux hedges are the wake-up call we dare not ignore.”

Also see: “‘JOBS Act’ a ‘Recipe for Fraud’ Creating a ‘Race to the Bottom’.”

Filed Under: Electoral Issues, The U.S. Economy Tagged With: corporations, economy, JP Morgan, JP Morgan Speculating, JP Morgan Stocks Fall, JP Morgan Trading Loss, Stephany Griffith Jones, William K. Black,

Is Inequality Good?

May 4, 2012

A new book by one of Mitt Romney’s former business partners at Bain Capital, scheduled to be the featured New York Times Magazine cover story on Sunday,argues that inequality is good.

CHUCK COLLINS, Bob Keener, bob at wealthforcommongood.org
http://99to1book.org
Collins, a long-time inequality activist was certainly born into the 1%. He went to the same high school as Mitt Romney — and is the great-grandson of Oscar Mayer. His brand new book is called, “99 to 1: How Wealth Inequality is Wrecking the World and What We Can Do About It.”

Collins said today: “Inequality is destroying everything you care about. Whether you care about public health, education, civic society, sports, business — inequality is making things worse. And unless we interrupt the process, this destruction will keep increasing. We’re in an inequality death spiral, where concentration of wealth and power is enabling the wealthy and powerful to rig the rules to make themselves more wealthy and powerful — at the expense of everyone else. This is why the 1% versus 99% lens is so
meaningful to people. It reflects their lived reality.”

Collins was recently on C-SPAN’s Washington Journal:
http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/305321-4

Background:
Paul Krugman “Rich Guy Says We Should Be Grateful For His Wealth”

Dean Baker recently wrote the piece “Mitt Romney’s Partner in Crime: Ed Conard’s Unintended Consequences,” which states: “Did Conard really miss the story of Fabrice Tourre (a.k.a. ‘Fabulous Fab’) the Goldman Sachs mortgage trader who put together collaterized debt obligations that were designed to fail and then hawked them off on unsuspecting clients? Does he not know about the flash traders who make fortunes by designing sophisticated programs that allow them to front-run major trades? (This means that they can detect major trades and jump in ahead, thereby capturing some of the profit.) …

“How much has the pharmaceutical industry profited from using its political power to get Congress to give it ever longer and stronger patent monopolies? We now spend almost $300 billion a year on prescription drugs that would cost us around $30 billion in a free market. …

“Conard and Romney’s own industry provides an excellent example of using political power to promote private wealth. One of the major ways that private equity companies make money is by taking advantage of the tax deductibility of interest. Private equity companies typically load the firms they buy with as much debt as possible. This is because the interest payments on debt are tax deductible and they don’t really care if the company ends up going bankrupt. They expect a substantial portion of their firms to go into bankruptcy.”

Filed Under: Electoral Issues, The U.S. Economy Tagged With: 99 to 1: How Wealth Inequality is Wrecking the World and What We Can Do About It, Chuck Collins, corporations, economy,

BP Disaster Two Years Later

April 18, 2012

This Friday, April 20, is the two-year anniversary of BP’s Deepwater Horizon rig explosion in the Gulf of Mexico, which killed 11 workers and poured 200 million gallons of oil into Gulf waters. Sunday, April 22, is Earth Day.

CHRIS KROMM, chris at southernstudies.org
Kromm is executive director of the Institute for Southern Studies, which is releasing a report today titled “Troubled Waters: Two Years After the BP Oil Disaster, a Struggling Gulf Calls for National Leadership for Coastal Recovery.” The report states: “The BP oil disaster has not gone away. Despite BP’s rosy ad campaign, fishing families are struggling to make ends meet and coastal residents are still reporting widespread illnesses from the spill. Gulf communities need national leadership to restore the coast and rebuild the economy — but in Washington, the BP disaster and Gulf recovery have fallen off the national radar. On the two-year anniversary of the BP spill, there are several key steps lawmakers can take to honor the nation’s promise for a full Gulf recovery.”

Kromm said today: “Two years later, Congress has yet to pass one piece of legislation addressing the BP oil spill, and Gulf recovery has slipped off the political agenda. But oil is still washing up on Gulf shores, and coastal communities are still reeling from hard hits to the fishing industry and widespread reports of illnesses related to the spill. Gulf residents are looking for national leadership to help restore the coast and fully recover.”

DERRICK EVANS, tccidirector at gmail.com
Evans is a resident of Gulfport, Mississippi and advisor to the Gulf Coast Fund, a community foundation. He attended BP’s shareholder meeting in London on April 12, 2012, and in an address to the gathering he said the response to the disaster has been a “fiasco.” Evans also invited BP executives and shareholders to visit the Gulf communities still affected by the disaster, and received a positive response from one BP board member.

He said today: “It was good to be able to meet with BP board member Ian Davis, who is the chairman of the Gulf of Mexico Committee and so has responsibility for ensuring that BP is keeping its promises to the people of the Gulf Coast. However, we were disappointed to learn that he knew nothing about the problems we are facing on the ground. He has now agreed to visit affected communities and see for himself what’s really happening, and so we look forward to helping him fulfill that promise.”

AARON VILES, aaron@healthygulf.org
Viles is deputy director of the Gulf Restoration Network, based in New Orleans. He said today: “As we take stock two years into the worst oil drilling disaster we’ve ever seen, it’s clear an honest assessment brings cause for alarm. From dying dolphins to ongoing problems in the oyster fishery, the impacts to wildlife and the communities which rely upon a healthy Gulf remain. Even more outrageous is the inaction from Washington, D.C.

“Two years after the Santa Barbara oil spill in 1969 we had Earth Day and the birth of the modern environmental movement. Two years after the Exxon Valdez, the Oil Pollution Act of 1990 was passed. Here we are, two years after the BP drilling disaster, and not a single law has been signed by the President to restore the Gulf or protect it from future disasters. It’s well past time for the nation to commit to the long-term health of this threatened ecosystem and the people it sustains.”

Tagged With: Aaron Viles, Chris Kromm, corporations, Derrick Evans, environment,

Welcome to the Energy Third-World: the United States

April 2, 2012

MICHAEL T. KLARE, via Leslie Brandon, leslie.brandon at hholt.com
Klare is a professor of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College and the author of the new book The Race for What’s Left: The Global Scramble for the World’s Last Resources. He just wrote the piece “A New Energy Third World in North America? How the Big Energy Companies Plan to Turn the United States into a Third-World Petro-State,” which states: “The ‘curse’ of oil wealth is a well-known phenomenon in Third World petro-states where millions of lives are wasted in poverty and the environment is ravaged, while tiny elites rake in the energy dollars and corruption rules the land. Recently, North America has been repeatedly hailed as the planet’s twenty-first-century ‘new Saudi Arabia’ for ‘tough energy’ — deep-sea oil, Canadian tar sands, and fracked oil and natural gas. But here’s a question no one considers: Will the oil curse become as familiar on this continent in the wake of a new American energy rush as it is in Africa and elsewhere? Will North America, that is, become not just the next boom continent for energy bonanzas, but a new energy Third World?

“Eager to escape ever-stronger environmental restrictions and dying oil fields at home, the energy giants were naturally drawn to the economically and environmentally wide-open producing areas of the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America — the Third World — where oil deposits were plentiful, governments compliant, and environmental regulations few or nonexistent.

“Here, then, is the energy surprise of the twenty-first century: with operating conditions growing increasingly difficult in the global South, the major firms are now flocking back to North America. To exploit previously neglected reserves on this continent, however, Big Oil will have to overcome a host of regulatory and environmental obstacles. It will, in other words, have to use its version of deep-pocket persuasion to convert the United States into the functional equivalent of a Third World petro-state.

“The formula for making Canada and the U.S. the ‘Saudi Arabia’ of the twenty-first century is grim but relatively simple: environmental protections will have to be eviscerated and those who stand in the way of intensified drilling, from landowners to local environmental protection groups, bulldozed out of the way. Put another way, North America will have to be Third-Worldified.

“How we characterize our energy predicament in the coming decades and what path we ultimately select will in large measure determine the fate of this nation.”

Filed Under: Electoral Issues, Resources: Trade, World Bank, IMF Tagged With: corporations, energy, environment, Michael T. Klare,

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