Free Republic

Many leaders of big business support Hillary Clinton. Last week she announced a list of 56 corporate backers. No wonder Bernie Sanders is still running against her. Hillary Clinton always has attracted well-connected business supporters. Even before she ran for office. Remember the lucrative cattle trades when she was Arkansas first lady? That came from a local businessman who knew how important it was to have friends in the governor’s mansion. Bill Clinton had plenty of business support when he ran for president. As New York senator she was quite friendly with Wall Street—a relationship that continued afterwards, with her...

LOS ANGELES (AP) -- Saying they felt a "deep sense of ethical responsibility for a past tragedy," executives from a major Japanese corporation gave an unprecedented apology Sunday to a 94-year-old U.S. prisoner of war for using American POWs for forced labor during World War II.At the solemn ceremony hosted by the Museum of Tolerance at the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, James Murphy of Santa Maria, California, accepted the apology he had sought for 70 years on behalf of U.S. POWs from executives of Mitsubishi Materials Corp.

When an important social issue intersected with business in Arizona, Corporate America decided it was time to take a stand. Voicing concern for their employees, customers and bottom lines, prominent companies from American Airlines to Verizon used threats of reduced business to help convince Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer to veto legislation that would have allowed businesses to refuse service to gays based on the owner's religious beliefs. Companies have long spoken out about certain issues they felt threatened their bottom lines, such as taxation and the minimum wage. The strong opposition to the Arizona bill signals an acknowledgement by businesses...

<p>The Supreme Court unanimously ruled on Monday that farmers may not use Monsanto’s patented genetically altered soybeans to create new seeds without paying the company a fee.</p> <p>The ruling has implications for many aspects of modern agriculture and for businesses based on vaccines, cell lines and software. But Justice Elena Kagan, writing for the court, emphasized that the justices meant for the decision to be narrow.</p>

Patriots the darkness is falling and shadows no more, the darkness of betrayal descends evermore like a suffocating cloak. I really think all Patriots and America need to wake up to the fact of these things I’m about to share which are 100% truth. The separation of the wheat from the chaff is soon to come. I put together a timeline of facts that most will deny but in the end will realize their foolish rebuttals. It all started back in good ole’ 1871 when the post civil war emergency caused the Government to create a corporation called these United...

U.S.-based nonfinancial companies are parking record amounts of cash abroad, thanks largely to a tax code that encourages them to indefinitely keep profits from their foreign subsidiaries outside of the country. Some of the largest companies in the U.S. greatly boosted their tax-avoiding cash stockpiles abroad last year, according to recent surveys of company filings from the Securities and Exchange Commission. For example, the Jedi master of avoiding U.S. taxation, General Electric Company (NYSE:GE), increased its tax-free cash accumulation to $108 billion, up from an estimated $94 billion in 2010. Microsoft Corporation (Nasdaq:MSFT) increased its stockpile to $61 billion, up...

Merck's charitable foundation has stopped giving money to the Boy Scouts of America. The Merck Foundation says the Boy Scouts' exclusion of gays from its ranks and leadership positions conflicts with giving guidelines and the company's nondiscrimination policy. The foundation says it will reconsider giving money to the Boy Scouts if they change their policy on sexual orientation. Merck CEO Kenneth C. Frazier was a scout in his youth. He received the "Good Scout" Award from the Philadelphia Cradle of Liberty Boy Scout Council in June. ...

The labor union of Hyundai Motor has threatened to suspend all engine output in the company's biggest production base from Tuesday, saying an employee set himself on fire to protest the company's alleged "suppression" of unionized workers. The incident indicates labor issues remain a potential vulnerability for the strongly performing South Korean carmaker, although it avoided strikes for a third year in a row last year. The worker and union member with the surname Shin was found in flames at a Hyundai engine plant in the southeastern city of Ulsan at around noon on Sunday, and is currently in critical...

There are no two institutions in American society that are more associated with the struggle between right and left than corporations and labor unions. Outside of foreign policy, there is nothing that liberals are more hostile towards than corporations, nor anything that conservatives are more hostile towards than labor unions. For most Americans, corporations and labor unions lie at opposite ends of the socio-economic spectrum. Corporations are “conservative and capitalist,” while labor unions are “liberal and socialist.” This is an illusion. In all but the most superficial respects, corporations and labor unions are virtually identical to each other. They are...

ATLANTA (AP) -- Half the meat and poultry sold in the supermarket may be tainted with the staph germ, a new report suggests. The new estimate is based on just 136 samples of beef, chicken, pork and turkey purchased from grocery stores in Chicago, Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., Flagstaff, Ariz. and Fort Lauderdale, Fla. Proper cooking kills the germs, and federal health officials estimate staph accounts for less than 3 percent of foodborne illnesses, far less than more common bugs like salmonella and E. coli.

After getting frustrated out of the lemons his problems gave him, David Miller made his own corporate lemonade. Due to the frustration of always having to call technical support to solve his own frequent hardware problems, he started taking the initiative to educate himself.

Were it not enough that a representative body slid a major entitlement program thru budget reconciliation rules, and on a partisan vote, Congressional thuggery tactics have soared to a new high. Powerline has copies of a letter from Henry Waxman, chair of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, demanding that AT&T, and other companies who have publicly disclosed the fiscal repercussions of O'health care, appear before the committee and bring their analyses of the fiscal impact, and any documents including emails and messages reviewed by their senior officials that support their claim of increased operating costs. Translation? CEOs, as...

Reporting from San Francisco - A prominent Silicon Valley executive with ties to the Obama administration has admitted to an extramarital affair after his former mistress plastered romantic pictures of the two of them on giant billboards in three major cities. "I had an 8½-year serious relationship with YaVaughnie Wilkins," said Charles E. Phillips, co-president of Oracle Corp. and a member of President Obama's Economic Recovery Advisory Board. "The relationship with Ms. Wilkins has since ended, and we both wish each other well." Wilkins, a writer and actress, this week had a three-story-tall sign put up near Times Square in...

We'll start off by saying that this spoof on General Motors' Re:invention commercial is not exactly fair and not exactly accurate... but it is funny. It comes from an Onion-esque type website with a decidedly sharp take on GM's situation, with story headlines like "GM Kicks Dog, Takes Candy from Baby" and "GM Kills Electric Car, Five Others in Shooting Spree." You can watch the original commercial and the spoof after the jump. Make sure you have your sense of humor switched on.

In his Faculty Research Lecture on March 10, Gregory Schopen hopes to illuminate a little-known aspect of Buddhism: the fact that it was one of the earliest social organizations in India to develop what might be called a corporation.AS ONE OF the world's leading authorities on Buddhism, Gregory Schopen has shattered many myths, notably the notion that Buddhist monks in ancient India renounced money and property. While his painstaking research certainly helped Schopen demystify monasticism in the land of Buddhism's birth, he owes his remarkable academic success not so much to scholarship as to his grandfather, a cowboy in South...

In 2005, federal authorities concluded that a Monsanto consultant had visited the home of an Indonesian official and, with the approval of a senior company executive, handed over an envelope stuffed with hundred-dollar bills. The money was meant as a bribe to win looser environmental regulations for Monsanto’s cotton crops, according to a court document. Monsanto was also caught concealing the bribe with fake invoices. A few years earlier, in the age of Enron, these kinds of charges would probably have resulted in a criminal indictment. Instead, Monsanto was allowed to pay $1 million and avoid criminal prosecution by entering...

In another apparent effort to prepare Marylanders for looming tax increases, Gov. Martin O'Malley released a recorded statement to radio stations suggesting corporations and higher-income earners will be among those asked to pay more. "When given a choice between decline and progress, the people of Maryland always choose to make progress," O'Malley (D) says in the message, which runs more than two minutes and was sent to more than 50 radio stations, an aide said. "Together we can overcome the deficit in our path, and we can get our fiscal house in order in a way that improves our state...

In a recent study by Gallup, almost ninety percent of Americans said they believe gay people should have equal rights in the workplace. Interestingly, only forty-seven percent of these same people believe that being gay is "morally acceptable." So what has convinced nearly nine out of ten people across the country that gays and lesbians deserve equality at work even when they don't believe gay is OK? Charting a course unplanned but nevertheless successful, Corporate America is shaping up to be the most persuasive gay activists of the decade. How are they doing it? With a simple three-step formula: credibility...

Caesar Calls in the Chips By Dr. Greg Dixon Pastor Mark Holick and Evangelist Bill Keller are bold as lions, more than most Baptist preachers we know, even though their actions may fall into the “zeal without knowledge” category. Both find themselves in a running battle with the Internal Revenue Service over the content of their sermons and the direction that they believe God is leading them to conduct their ministries. Holick (31) is the Senior Pastor of the Spirit One Christian Center of Wichita, Kansas and Keller (40) conducts a non-profit TV and internet ministry in Tampa, Florida. As...

Top of page PAID TIME OFF WITH 10 YEARS' TENURE Country/Region Minimum Paid Vacation Days Paid public holidays Total Australia 20 11 (avg.) 31** Austria 25 13 38 Belgium 20 10 30 Bulgaria 20 12 32 Canada 10 10 (avg.) 20 Cyprus 21 15 36 Czech Rep. 20 11 31 Denmark 25 10 35 Egypt 21 16 37 Estonia 28 10 38 Finland 30 14 44 France 30 10 40 Germany 24 10 34 Greece 25 12 37 Hong Kong 14 12 26 Hungary 23 (if over thirty-one yrs old) 10 33 India 12 19 31 Indonesia 12 13 25...