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Several months ago, film critic Nell Minow – aka The Movie Mom-- presented a segment on “Roger Ebert Presents” about corporate villians where she noted that "the most frequent villian in movies is the American corporation." She added that many films, which are often made and distributed by corporations themselves, use corporations as their “villain of choice”. That’s definitely the case in the new thriller, “In Time,” which pits a lowly working class man against a group of rich fat cats. In the film’s alternate universe, time is the new form of currency. People pay for their morning coffee with...

Today, there are protests all over America that are targeting "the one percent" and all of the wealth and power that they have accumulated. Unfortunately, many of the solutions that these protesters are advocating simply will not work and will not lead to less wealth inequality. To understand this, you have to understand how we got to this point. Over the past several decades, our federal government has exploded in size and our large corporations have exploded in size. In fact, we have seen this pattern happen pretty much all over the world. Governments and corporations all over the...

Do Obama's big donors break his no-lobbyist pledge? CBS News President Obama's re-election campaign is pushing back against a New York Times report that suggests Mr. Obama may not be meeting his own standards when it comes to keeping corporate lobbyists out of his campaign.

The revolution will be corporate-sponsored! That’s according to Harrison Schultz, an Occupy Wall Street organizer who also happens to be an “business intelligence analyst” at a publicly traded company. On a limited-access email list shared by Occupy protesters, Schultz wrote of a ”Corporate Funded Revolution,” calling it “a revolutionary plan.” Despite protesters’ occupation of a New York City park and their stated goal of ending corporate influence — particularly of Wall Street — in government, e-mails emerged Monday showing Schultz and other anti-corporate organizers were a little more corporate than they like to let on.

For those who hate corporations.

Are the anti-Wall Street protestors demonstrating against themselves? The richest and most prominent Wall Street executives almost overwhelmingly supported and bankrolled Barack Obama's presidential campaign in 2008. And on Wall Street, little distinction is made between liberal Democrats and avowedly socialist activist groups. The big banks financed ACORN. Although ACORN has disbanded in the wake of scandal, the JPMorgan Chase Foundation, formerly headed by White House Chief of Staff William Daley, continues to fund similar groups committed to undermining capitalism and debasing democracy. Goldman Sachs and other big financial institutions lobbied for Dodd-Frank, which institutionalizes the "too big to...

Okay, I lied. WILLIAM RIVERS PITT never made any pledge to divest his Trust Fund of any income derived from corporate sources. However, like a lot of other leftwing Trust Fund Kids, Pitt continues to slam the EVIL corporations from the comfort of his computer chair. The big difference between Pitt and the protesting Trust Fund Kids is that Pitt TALKS a good tale but as to actually attending these protests...Eh! He can't be bothered. Here is the latest momentous event recorded by Pitt on his Facebook Page: Humongous red-tailed hawk is roosting in a tree right outside my...

President Obama has not been particularly successful in fostering the creation of jobs. But he thinks he has found a way to pry open doors in the workplace for many of the unemployed, especially those who have been out of work for a long time. Mr. Obama’s jobs bill would prohibit employers from discriminating against job applicants because they are unemployed. Under the proposal, it would be “an unlawful employment practice” if a business with 15 or more employees refused to hire a person “because of the individual’s status as unemployed.” Unsuccessful job applicants could sue and recover damages for...

In a shocking representation of just how bad things are in Europe, the FT reports that major European industrial concern Siemens, pulled €500 million form a large French bank, which is not BNP and leaves just [SocGen|Credit Agricole] and deposited the money straight to the ECB. The implications of this are quite stunning, as it means that even European companies now refuse to work directly with their own banks, and somehow the ECB has become a direct lender/cash holder of only resort to private non-financial institutions!

Sarah Palin proposed eliminating all corporate taxes in her speech to the Iowa Tea Party today. This is HUGE. The ripple effect of putting this in place would affect a vast swath of corporate America, in addition to eliminating crony-capitalism. Consider for a moment all those that would be affected by such a policy. Corporate tax attorneys, CPA firms and countless tax department employees would lurch to a halt in their jobs. The focus of countless corporate controllers would shift from tax avoidance to net income maximization. Countless corporate lobbyists would be out of a job overnight. Their corporate benefactors...

A new survey of 368 midsize to large companies found that 29% of them are considering terminating their active employee health care plans when Obamacare is full implemented in 2014. Only 71% of employers surveyed said they did not expect to drop their health coverage, while 20% said they did not know and 9% said they were planning to exit.The latest survey, conducted by Towers Watson, echoes an ealier survey by McKinsey & Co. finding that 30% of private-sector employers were planning to drop their employee health insurance coverage by 2014. When the Congressional Budget Office crunched Obamacare's spending numbers,...

INDIANAPOLIS (AP) - Nearly one of every 10 midsized or big employers expects to stop offering health coverage to workers once federal insurance exchanges start in 2014, according to a new survey from a large benefits consultant. Towers Watson also found in a survey completed last month that an additional 20 percent of the companies are unsure about what they will do. Another big benefits consultant, Mercer, found in a June survey of large and smaller employers that 8 percent are either "likely" or "very likely" to end health benefits once the exchanges start. Employer-sponsored health insurance has long been...

Media cross-ownership ban restoredJuly 08, 2011 By Associated Press WASHINGTON - A federal Appeals Court has restored a long-standing ban that prevents media companies from owning both a newspaper and a television station in the same market. The 3d US Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia said yesterday that the Federal Communications Commission didn’t give the public adequate opportunity to comment on new rules that lifted the ban in the 20 largest media markets. The Appeals Court sent the rules back to the FCC to be rewritten. The so-called cross-ownership ban dates back to 1975 - a time when newspapers...

In doing further research on my constitutional inquiry into whether or not unions & corporations should have the same inalienable rights that I do as an individual, I have found a resolution introduced by a state senator in Washington that calls for a constitutional amendment clarifying that corporations – and in turn unions – are not persons according to U.S. law. A statewide grassroots group in Washington wants to know what you think. I think that a constitutional amendment of any kind should be considered carefully. I hold the U.S. Constitution in a place of great esteem… and in my...

Several people have become interested in a quite controversial topic called "AGENDA 21." They have requested being on a ping list for this topic. While I do not have time to do a thorough treatment of this subject, nor am I in any way an expert, I am willing at least for a time,to ping people as I run across articles which might pertain to this concern. It might be good to start with an examination of just what it is or might be. To kick this discussion and exploration off,I did a Google search (just for fun) on "Agenda...

The reach of Citizens United v FEC just got longer, if only temporarily. Relying on the controversial ruling, a federal judge in Virginia threw out part of an indictment against two men accused of secretly reimbursing donors to Hillary Clinton with corporate cash. Judge James Cacheris ruled that Citizens United established that corporations have a right to donate to political campaigns, as well as to spend their own money: A judge has ruled that the campaign finance law banning corporations from making contributions to federal candidates is unconstitutional. …Cacheris says that under last year’s Citizens United Supreme Court case, corporations...

Although the below image has been circulating the internet as a satirical warning for some time now, Dutch telco KPN recently announced that it's actually going to implement something like this due to declining revenue. The company stated that starting this summer it will be blocking chat-messaging applications such as WhatsApp (competes with SMS), VoIP services (competes with calls) and heavy streaming services. All these services will get their own price tag, just like is currently the case with calling and text messaging. The problem with that logic of course is that calling and SMS are actually different services that...

Many of America’s most powerful companies do not report how much they spend to influence elections and legislation. These companies contribute millions of dollars to powerful trade associations and to other politically active groups that are not required to report the sources of their funding. Those groups, in turn, spend the money on lobbying and other political activity. The Los Angeles Times reviewed how the 75 largest publicly traded companies in the energy, healthcare and financial services sectors disclose their political giving on their corporate websites.

Reporting from Washington— Despite mounting calls for greater transparency, only a few of the country's 75 leading energy, healthcare and financial services corporations fully disclose political spending, according to a review of company records and state and federal campaign finance reports. While complying with legal requirements to report direct donations to candidates, the vast majority of these companies — many of which are seeking legislative favors from the new Congress — do not reveal information even to their shareholders about support for politically active trade associations like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Groups such as the chamber, some of which...

Jon Stewart is right. While demonizing unions Conservatives all too often over look the total destruction that Corporations have waged on the American economy and the American Middle Class (see 4:49min video) I am not newcomer to the argument that Corporations are ungrateful, unpatriotic out of control entities that have abused America and the American people to maximize their profits. (see previous posts below) Everything that is wrong in America today can be blamed on an out-of-control corporate environment that will do anything and everything for the sake of the bottom line. Profit!—Alaphiah (source) *** America is bleeding. For decades,...