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Why Are American Communities Dying?

April 8, 2019

Why Are American Communities Dying?

Most Americans who have been around for a while know life is nothing like it used to be. When someone wanted a job one was found with a little bit of searching. Today jobs are difficult to find, especially in small communities. 

When I was growing up in the 70’s, there were several car dealers in my community. There were three tractor dealers and too many mom and pop stores to count. Today there are two used car dealers and the nearest tractor dealer is twenty miles away. So how is it that we now have more people, but fewer businesses to employ them?

A nations wealth is derived from having a product to sell. That wealth needs to circulate in towns and cities to compound the wealth effect and create jobs and businesses. When wealth is not created or it is siphoned off to other places, the wealth effect can not happen, and in many cases goes into reverse. A community needs a certain amount of service related jobs to function but it also needs some type of production jobs to bring in money from the outside. This can be mining , agriculture or manufacturing type jobs, but they must exist to insure a healthy economy.

America has two major problems today. A large amount of our production is done outside the country eliminating production jobs in local communities and many of the small local businesses that kept wealth within communities have been supplanted by large corporations that siphon wealth out of communities and send it to wall street. 

 …click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

TPP: Unconstitutional tribunal for .01% oligarchs to dictate what is ‘fair trade’

June 15, 2015

TPP: Unconstitutional tribunal for .01% oligarchs to dictate what is ‘fair trade’

“The corporations have bribed the political leaders in every country to sign away their sovereignty and the general welfare of their people to private corporations. Corporations have paid US senators large sums for transferring Congress’ law-making powers to corporations.” – Dr. Paul Craig Roberts, former Assistant Secretary to US Treasury, former editor of the Wall Street Journal

Trans-Pacific-Partnership (TPP) is “secret national security legislation” that President Obama and both parties’ “leaderships” refuse to disclose to the American public, and only visible from WikiLeaks. President Obama attempted “fast track” dictatorial power for Congress to vote for TPP without access to full text or public consideration. “Fast track” violates the US Constitution’s requirement for the Senate to ratify all treaties with 2/3 vote by claiming that 50% is somehow the same (a tie is broken by the VP, so 50% is enough). President Clinton’s justification of “fast track” is here.

TPP is Emperor’s New Clothes’ unconstitutional because it allows a foreign three-person tribunal chosen by the same .01% oligarch powers that created TPP to have power to tax Americans billions of our dollars for claimed “damages” of corporations. These three persons appointed by TPP interests would have dictatorial power to protect corporate claimed “future profits.” From Ellen Brown:

“To date, the highest ISDS award has been for $2.3 billion to Occidental Oil Company against the government of Ecuador over its termination of an oil-concession contract, this although the termination was apparently legal. Still in arbitration is a demand by Vattenfall, a Swedish utility that operates two nuclear plants in Germany, for compensation of €3.7 billion ($4.7 billion) under the ISDS clause of a treaty on energy investments, after the German government decided to shut down its nuclear power industry following the Fukushima disaster in Japan in 2011.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

 

How Obama’s “Trade” Deals Are Designed To End Democracy

June 15, 2015

How Obama’s “Trade” Deals Are Designed To End Democracy

U.S. President Barack Obama has for years been negotiating with European and Asian nations — but excluding Russia and China, since he is aiming to defeat them in his war to extend the American empire (i.e, to extend the global control by America’s aristocracy) — three international ‘trade’ deals (TTP, TTIP, & TISA), each one of which contains a section (called ISDS) that would end important aspects of the sovereignty of each signatory nation, by setting up an international panel composed solely of corporate lawyers to serve as ‘arbitrators’ deciding cases brought before this panel to hear lawsuits by international corporations accusing a given signatory nation of violating that corporation’s ‘rights’ by its trying to legislate regulations that are prohibited under the ’trade’ agreement, such as by increasing the given nation’s penalties for fraud, or by lowering the amount of a given toxic substance that the nation allows in its foods, or by increasing the percentage of the nation’s energy that comes from renewable sources, or by penalizing corporations for hiring people to kill labor union organizers — i.e., by any regulatory change that benefits the public at the expense of the given corporations’ profits. (No similar and countervailing power for nations to sue international corporations is included in this: the ‘rights’ of ‘investors’ — but really of only the top stockholders in international corporations — are placed higher than the rights of any signatory nation.)

This provision, whose full name is “Investor State Dispute Resolution” grants a one-sided benefit to the controlling stockholders in international corporations, by enabling them to bring these lawsuits to this panel of lawyers, whose careers will consist of their serving international corporations, sometimes as ‘arbitrators’ in these panels, and sometimes as lawyers who more-overtly represent one or more of those corporations, but also serving these corporations in other capacities, such as via being appointed by them to head a tax-exempt foundation to which international corporations ‘donate’ and so to turn what would otherwise be PR expenses into corporate tax-deductions. In other words: to be an ‘arbitrator’ on these panels can produce an extremely lucrative career.

 

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Sustainable Companies Are Using Trade Associations That Undermine EU Climate Policy

April 3, 2015

Sustainable Companies Are Using Trade Associations That Undermine EU Climate Policy

Many major multinational companies with strong sustainability policies, such as Facebook andMicrosoft, are also members of trade associations that are actively lobbying against European climate policy, a new study released this week finds.

According to the report by the Policy Studies Institute (PSI) at the University of Westminster, businesses use trade associations to lobby on climate policy more than any other approach, including direct contact with policymakers.

But as the report argues, member companies must assess if the position of these trade associations is undermining their own stance on climate change.

Ben Fagan-Watson, lead researcher and research fellow at PSI, said: “Companies which are making strong commitments to deal with climate change need to ensure that their trade associations are singing from the same hymn sheet.”

Climate Policy

“In the run-up to COP21 in Paris, [EU] leadership should not be undermined by trade associations lobbying to protect narrow, short-term industrial interests at the expense of theEU economy and the global climate in the long term,” he continued.

Data from the Carbon Disclosure Project cited in the report shows that 61 percent of all companies surveyed and 77 percent of the largest 500 companies in the world use trade associations to lobby on climate policy.

Other companies highlighted in the report for contradicting their stance on sustainability through membership to one of these trade associations include American consumer goods company Johnson & Johnson, British drinks brand Diageo, and major car companies such asBMW, Daimler and Volkswagen.

 

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Sustainability for Whom?

March 7, 2015

Sustainability for Whom?

The mission of UPSTREAM (formerly Product Policy Institute) is “sustainable production and consumption and good governance.” Sometimes I feel like we’re swimming against the tide in advocating a role for government action in ensuring sustainable production and consumption.

Big brands like Wal-Mart, Nestle, Procter and Gamble can effect rapid, systemic change in their global supply chains when it suits them. The Cradle to Cradle Products Innovation Institute and Ellen MacArthur Foundation’s Circular Economy Initiative are doing great work by partnering with industry to redesign products.

Governments, on the other hand, are mired in political stalemate and often produce weak regulations when they act at all, especially in the international arena inhabited by the multinational corporations that produce the products we buy. Why even bother with public policy? Some government actors settle for “co-regulation” with corporate actors, or defer to voluntary corporate initiatives. For their part, foundations often support NGOs to conduct “market” campaigns targeting companies, or to partner with companies; in both cases the strategy is to access the power of corporations to effect swift, large-scale change.

What is the appropriate role for organizations that look out for the public interest – governments and nonprofits – in advancing sustainability in an environment in which the power balance has shifted dramatically to the private sector?

 

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

A “Magical Fairyland” – How Global Multi-National Corporations Avoid Taxes in Luxembourg | Liberty Blitzkrieg

November 9, 2014

A “Magical Fairyland” – How Global Multi-National Corporations Avoid Taxes in Luxembourg | Liberty Blitzkrieg.

The following expose by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), at times reads like a movie script. Leaked documents, one of the world’s largest accounting firms, and a retired tax official named Marius Kohl, nicknamed “Monsieur Ruling,” who was described by a Belgian newspaper as “the guardian of the only door through which companies can enter the fiscal paradise of Luxembourg.”  This piece has it all.

Here are some choice excerpts:

Pepsi, IKEA, FedEx and 340 other international companies have secured secret deals from Luxembourg, allowing many of them to slash their global tax bills while maintaining little presence in the tiny European duchy, leaked documents show.

These companies appear to have channeled hundreds of billions of dollars through Luxembourg and saved billions of dollars in taxes, according to a review of nearly 28,000 pages of confidential documents conducted by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists and a team of more than 80 journalists from 26 countries.

Big companies can book big tax savings by creating complicated accounting and legal structures that move profits to low-tax Luxembourg from higher-tax countries where they’re headquartered or do lots of business. In some instances, the leaked records indicate, companies have enjoyed effective tax rates of less than 1 percent on the profits they’ve shuffled into Luxembourg.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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