Hostile Takeover... Legal Rights

Chapter 10 of Hostile Takeover by David Sirota is about the legal rights and the claims that "frivolous" lawsuits by greedy trial lawyers are ruining our society when this is really just a stunt to limit legal rights of people.

In just the five years that Cheney served as Halliburton's CEO, the corporation was involved in 151 court claims it filled in fifteen states. That's an average of 30 lawsuits per year under Cheney's leadership. Though Halliburton makes each year, no lawsuit seem too small or "frivolous" to the company under Cheney, as it sued debtors for as little as $1,500.

Read more from Hostile Takeover...
Introduction
Jobs
Wages
Debt
Pensions
Health Care
Prescription Drugs
Energy
Unions

Hostile Takeover...Unions

Chapter 9 of Hostile Takeover is about Unions.

During the 2000 presidential campaign, Senator John McCain (R) flew around on a corporate jets owned by companies wiht business before the Senate committee he chaired. It was a gross display of how Corporate America owns our elections. Yet while McCain did acknowledge the generally corrosive influence of money on politics, he went out of his way to single out "the labor bosses [who] go down with the big checks" as the prime culprits ruining our democracy - not the corporate cronies who were flying him al over the country.

Read more from Hostile Takeover...
Introduction
Jobs
Wages
Debt
Pensions
Health Care
Prescription Drugs
Energy

Hostile Takeover...Energy

After a little break, I am back to reading Hostile Takeover by David Sirota and just have a few chapter left (which means I should finish it over the weekend).

Chapter 8 is about the influence the energy industry has on our government.

Between 2000 and 2004, America's oil stuck consumers with abotu $250 billion in price increases and increased oil industry profits by up to $80 billion. In 2004 alone, oil executives used massinve price increases to double their annual compensation packages to an average of roughly $16 million a year - by far the highest median for any industry in America. And remember this the next time you fill up and get gouged at the gas pump: a nice chunk of what you just paid is being used to buy complicity from the political leaders who are supposed to be protection you from beind fleeced. Between 2000 and 2004, for instance, the oil and gas industry gave the Republican Party $67 million - that's $1,900 an hour, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week for four straight years - all to make sure that government looks the other way when you get ripped off.

Read more from Hostile Takeover...
Introduction
Jobs
Wages
Debt
Pensions
Health Care
Prescription Drugs

Hostile Takeover...Prescription Drugs

Chapter 7 of Sirota's Hostile Takeover is about Prescription Drugs.

No one wants to put the pharmaceutical industry out of business. Drug companies play an important role in the world's health care system. But in recent years, their quest for profits has led these companies to player a more destructive role in preventing medicenes from getting to the people who need them. That is why our government must step in and make sure the drug industry's profit motive stops drowning out every other societal need. Drug companies should be able to make healthy profits, but there is a difference between healthy profits and unhealthy profiteering. And the latter is particularly unacceptable when it means that people are denied the medicines they need.

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Introduction
Jobs
Wages
Debt
Pensions
Health Care

Hostile Takeover...Health Care

From chapter 6 of David Sirota's Hostile Takeover on Health Care...

According to a study by top experts in 2005, "the United States wastes more on [private] health-care bureacracy than it would cost to provide health care to all its uninsured." That's right - wastes. As the World Health Organization noted in a separate report, 15 cents of every dollar Americans spend on private health insurance goes to administrative expenses. The term "administrative expenses" is a euphenism for the costs incurred by Corporate America's quest for profits: that's everything from filling out and processing insurance paperwork to padding HMO executives' salaries. By contrast, when the government spends money on public health care programs like Medicare, those administrative expenses consume only about 4 cents of every dollar.

And after discussing different propoals of universal health care later in the chapter...

Remember, none of these proposals even take into account the amount that many businesses would save with a universal health care system. Consider General Motors. "In 2003 it costs of building a midsize car in Canada were $1,400 less than building the identical car in the United States, " wrote former Washington Post reporter Morton Mintz, now head of the Investigative Journalism Fun.

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Introduction
Jobs
Wages
Debt
Pensions

Hostile Takeover...Pensions and Nussle is a Hack

From Chapter 5 of Hostile Takeover on Pensions...

Consider this fact: corporations are not required to set aside adequate money to actually pay the pensions they've promised to their workers. Let's repeat this because, really, it is so appallingly hard to believe, it needs to be said twice: though your employer mayb be promising you a nice pension, federal laws actually permit companies to pocket the retirement money that they should be putting aside to follow on those promises. And boy are they abusing these loopholes to the extreme.

At the end of 2004, the nations 1,108 weakest private pension plans were underfunded by a total of more than $350 billion. In other words, companies had set aside $350 billion less in pension money than they had promised their workers. In just the five years between 1999 and 2004, the number of companies whose pensions were underfunded by $50 million or more grew by 600 percent.

And now on to Nussle. In each chapter, Sirota names a couples hacks, who have been rather awful on the issue being discussed (He sometimes also names heros, who have fought against the hostile takeover by big money.). In the chapter on pensions, Jim Nussle is named as a hack for his work trying to privative social security.

Hack: Jim Nussle, Iowa Congressman
Using Chairmanship to spread fearmongering lies about Social Security.

Iowa representative Jim Nussle (R) is chairman of the US House Budget committee, and in that role he is supposed to speak credibly about fiscal issues. Yet in 2005 he said that "by the year 2042, the entire (Social Security) system, in fact, by most people's definiton of the word bankrupt, would be bankrupt." It was a lie designed to scare people into supporting a Social Security privatization scheme that would give away billions of taxpayer dollars to Wall Street. But the lie was surprising, considering Nussle had taken more than $180,000 from the financial services industry during his political career. The truth is that the system will be very far from bankrupt in 2042. According to Social Security's own actuaries, if Congress does absolutely nothing, Social Security will still be able to pay 74 percent of its full benefits after 2041 - far from "bankrupt". Robert Ball, Social Security commissioner under both Democratic and Republican presidents, told the New York Times in 2005 what's really going on: "What they're saigint is not true. The program is not going bankrupt."

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Introduction
Jobs
Wages
Debt

Hostile Takeover...Debt

After taking last week off, I hope to finish Hostile Takeover this week. Chapter 4 of Hostile Takeover is about Debt and most of it is written about the Bankruptcy Bill that was passed in 2005. It isn't just one party that supports the hostile takeover by the Credit Card companies, Democrats, such Evan Bayh and Joe Biden and former Democrat Joe Lieberman get mentioned a lot in this chapter. On to the quote...

As journalist Mark Reutter noted in the Washington Post, the new bankruptcy law cracks down on ordinary citizens but "keeps intact the legal system by which corporations can shed certain employee obligations" - a euphenism for companies reneging on their pension, wage, and health care promise to workers. Thanks to the disparity, "federal bankruptcy court has become the venue of choice for sophisticated financiers and corporate managers seeking to pull apart labor contracts and roll back health and welfare programs at troubled companies."

Read more from Hostile Takeover...
Introduction
Jobs
Wages

Hostile Takeover...Wages

From Chapter 2 of Hostile Takeover on wages...

The facts are very stark: trade deals that allow companies to freely search the world for the cheapest labor have driven down Americans' wages. In 2001, economists estimated that three-quarters of American workers had lost about 12 percent of their current wages because of these trade deals. For a worker earning $25,000 a year, that's more than $3,000, thanks to trade deals that corporate America and politicians of both parties promised would mean better wages. In the period from World War II to 1972, when our government was not aggressively using trade policy to sell out American workers, wages grew by 85 percent. By contrast, in the next three decades of "free" trade dominance, real wages grew only 7 percent, even as corporate profits skyrocketed.

Read more from Hostile Takeover...
Introduction
Jobs

Hostile Takeover...Taxes

Yesterday I posted that each day this week, I will be posting quotes from each chapter of David Sirota's book, Hostile Takeover. The first chapter is on taxes.

A 2004 GAO report found that more than 27,000 Pentagon contractors owe federal government $3 billion in undpaid taxes. A follow-up study the next year found an additional 33,000 contractors for civilian agencies owe $3 billion more. The government could cut off these cheats by terminating their federal contracts. Or at the very least, officials could follow a 1997 law that requires federal agencies to withhold15 percent from payments to individuals or businesses with unpaid tax bills. Yet that hasn't happened, likely because many of those tax evaders are big donors to politicians of both parties. Meanwhile, companies that abuse offshore tax havens continue to recieve almost $1billion in US government contracts each year, despite the fact they are brazenly stealing money from American taxpayers. In all, corporate delinquency, refusal to pay, and tax evasion rob America up to $40 billion a year - more than the annual budget of the Department of the Homeland Security.

When it comes to wasting taxpayer's money, CIETC can't hold a candle to the amount of money that corporations fail to pay in taxes.

Reading Hostile Takeover by David Sirota

I have been reading the book by David Sirota called Hostile Takeover: How Big Money and Corruption Conquered Our Government - and How We Take It Back. Each chapter is about a different industry or issue and is full of statistics that shows how Big Money has expanded their influence in the Government.

Like many Americans, I had felt that corporations and big money somehow kept coming out on top on many political issues. However, it wasn't until I heard Ed Fallon talking about Big Money that I learned how much influence Big Money actually has.

For the next two weeks, I will be posting some quotes from each chapter of Hostile Takeover to highlight how our Government has been sold off to Big Money and we, the Common Iowans, are being left out.

I will leave you with this quote from the Introduction of Hostile Takeover...

On almost every major issue affecting your wallet, you are told a different version of the same basic story. There is deified "free market" that we all must bow down to and never question, under punishment of getting tarred and feathered as a pink commie bastard by whatever Attila the Hun radio host happens to be on the air. This free market, we are told, means we must have fewer regulations that protect citizens' rights, less taxation of the rich, and no mandates on business to fulfill any social responsibilities other than increasing corporations' bottom line. At the same time, this "free market" is to be ignored when it might actually benefit ordinary citizens.

Thus, in one breath, politicians tell us price controls for medicine are bad, but restrictive patent laws that keep drug prices high are good; regulations against energy price gouging are bad, but government handouts to energy companies are good; protecting American jobs is bad, but government help in outsourcing our jobs is good. In short, they tell us government is Big Business's personal sidearm, instead of the middle-class's flak jacket against corporate abuse.