Category Archives: Corporate Welfare

Corporate Welfare

How Cronyism Is About To Kill Florida Micro-Breweries

Ben Swann : May 8, 2014

The Florida Wholesale Beer Association has helped to craft a law that will restrict how micro-brewries sell beer. The Florida State Senate just passed SB 1714, a bill which was crafted and supported by Florida Wholesale Beer Association.

The bill restricts how much craft breweries can sell directly to consumers

The way the bill is constructed micro breweries can sell up to 2,000 kegs a year of their own brew in any size container. But if they sell more than 2,000 kegs a year, the bill prohibits them from selling their beer in sealed cans or bottles for home consumption directly from the microbrewery.

[…]

The bottom line here once they hit the 2,000 keg mark, the micro breweries would end up having to buy back their own beer from the distributors at a marked up price. Why would lawmakers do this? They are doing it in the name of consumer protection claiming they are protecting a three-tier system between breweries, distributors and retailers.

(read the full article at Ben Swann)

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Corporate Welfare

Majority of Temporary Foreign Workers Confirmed to be Menial Jobs In Major Canadian Cities

Website maps businesses using temporary foreign workers in B.C. and Alberta

By Dene Moore
The Canadian Press: May 7, 2014

The vast majority of temporary foreign workers approved in the two westernmost provinces were located the three major urban centres, according to a new website mapping government authorizations.

That’s contrary to claims that the program is bolstering the workforce in rural or remote areas where resource companies struggle to recruit.

And the largest portion of the businesses that received authorizations, by far, were in the food service sector.

Of 511 Metro Vancouver businesses that received government authorization to recruit temporary foreign workers over a one-year period, 107 were restaurants, pubs or fast-food outlets — almost 21 per cent of the total. Everything from Megabite Pizza and Waves Coffee to Dead Frog Brewery and Doolin’s Irish Pub received approvals.

In Calgary, 299 of the 718 business that received authorizations in the same period were restaurants, pubs and fast-food outlets — 41 per cent. Those included a slew of Subway, Dairy Queen and many other franchises, as well as several mom-and-pop eateries.

“The majority of the people in those programs are not skilled workers working on construction projects where there’s a labour shortage,” Jim Sinclair, president of the B.C. Federation of Labour, said Wednesday.

“They’re simply being used as cheap labour in large urban areas where there’s already tens of thousands of people unemployed.”

The website, NTFW.ca (http://ntfw.ca/map-companies-hiring-temporary-foreign-workers/), shows businesses in British Columbia and Alberta that successfully applied to the program up until the end of 2012.

(Read the full article at Vancouver Sun)

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Corporate Welfare

GOP’s electrifying vote on corporate welfare

Norm Singleton
Campaign For Liberty: May 7, 2014

Today, the House of Representatives will consider the Electrify Africa Act (HR 2548). This bill creates “…a comprehensive United States Government policy to assist countries in sub-Saharan Africa to develop an appropriate mix of power solutions for more broadly distributed electricity access…” In other words, it forces the American people to pay (either directly through income taxes or indirectly via the inflation tax) for electricity projects in Africa.

In addition to being unconstitutional, programs created by this bill are little more than a form of corporate welfare. Many of the “development” projects financed by these programs are run by politically-connected US businesses who profit from these taxpayer-financed “investments” in “developing” countries.

HR 2548 ensures that US businesses will profit from “electrifying” Africa by giving a large role to the Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC). OPIC is a US agency that provides insurance and other support to businesses investing in “developing” countries. OPIC thus distorts the marketplace by using taxpayer dollars to underwrite projects that could not get financing in the free-market. In addition, since OPIC provides “political risk insurance” to business, OPIC may remove incentives for some foreign governments to adopt beneficial political and free-market reforms in order to attract foreign capital.

Among the vital “development” projects financed by OPIC are the Istanbul Ritz-Carlton, and Citibank branches in Egypt, Jordan, and Pakistan. OPIC is thus the type of program that the “Tea Party” Congress should be looking to eliminate not expand. But the Congressional leadership is not only not eliminating, or even reducing OPIC, they are using this bill as a vehicle to prevent a full Congressional debate on OPIC reauthorization.

Snuck into the end of this bill is 14 words reauthorizing OPIC until 2017. In order to make sure there is no real debate on OPIC or any other issue concerning this bill, it is coming up under “suspension of the rules,” a procedure usually used for non-controversial bills. Under suspension of rules there are only forty minutes of debate, and no amendments are allowed. However, bills brought up under suspension require a two-third majority to pass.

(Read the full article at Campaign For Liberty)

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Banksters, Corporate Welfare

Too Big To Audit? Large Partnerships Escape IRS Scrutiny, GAO Reports

By Barbara Hollingsworth
CNS News: May 2, 2014

In 2011, while the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) was busy scrutinizing the tax-exempt status of 100 percent of Tea Party groups and other conservative non-profits, the tax agency did not audit a single high-value electing large partnership (ELP) with more than $100 million in assets.

That’s according to a preliminary report released to Congress by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) April 17th. (See GAO.pdf)

An ELP is a business entity with more than 100 partners and more than $100 million in assets that is required to file a 1065-B tax return every year. They include large private equity firms, hedge funds and oil and gas partnerships.

“No partnerships that filed a Form 1065-B from tax years 2002 to 2011 had their tax return audited and closed by IRS from fiscal years 2007 to 2013,” a footnote on page 14 of the GAO report stated.

Jim White, a spokesman for GAO, confirmed that no ELPs were audited by the IRS between 2007 and 2013, the last year statistics are available. However, he pointed out that there were only 15 ELPs out of 105 filing 1065-B returns nationwide in 2011 that met the $100 million asset threshold.

Another 2,211 partnerships filed under IRS Form 1065 in 2011, “but only 20 audits (or less than one percent) were closed that year,” White told CNSNews.com, acknowledging that “this is a very low audit rate.”

White noted that GAO is doing a follow-up and “will be asking the IRS a number of questions to try to better understand” the tax agency’s audit decisions.

“These are the big guys,” said Amy Elliott, legal editor at the non-profit Tax Analysts, who pointed out that some ELPs have up to $20 billion in assets. “The IRS should be looking at them more.”

(Read the full article at CNS News)

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Banksters, Corporate Welfare, Drugs

Wall Street and the Global Laundering of Drug Money

Big Banks Started Laundering Massive Sums of Drug Money In the 1980s … And Are Still Doing It Today

Washington’s Blog: May 2, 2014

For More Than 30 Years, the Big Banks Have Been Key Players In the Drug Trade

Official statistics show that huge sums of drug money are laundered every year:

The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) conducted a study to determine the magnitude of illicit funds generated by drug trafficking and organised crimes and to investigate to what extent these funds are laundered.  The report estimates that in 2009, criminal proceeds amounted to 3.6% of global GDP, with 2.7%  (or USD 1.6 trillion) being laundered.

This falls within the widely quoted estimate by the International Monetary Fund, who stated in 1998 that the aggregate size of money laundering in the world could be somewhere between two and five percent of the world’s gross domestic product.  Using 1998 statistics, these percentages would indicate that money laundering ranged between USD 590 billion and USD 1.5 trillion. At the time, the lower figure was roughly equivalent to the value of the total output of an economy the size of Spain.

Indeed, the head of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime says that drug dealers kept the banking system afloat during the depths of the 2008 financial crisis.

This started a long time ago. For example, Citibank was caught laundering drug money for Mexican cartels in 2001.

In the 1990s, earlier, Citibank apparently set up special client accounts for a big drug dealer:

One of the more infamous cases involving taxpayer bailed-out Citigroup’s ties to money laundering drug cartels emerged in the late 1990s when Raúl Salinas de Gortari, the brother of former Mexican President Carlos Salinas, was arrested after his wife, Paulina Castañón, attempted to withdraw $84 million from a Swiss account controlled by Raúl under an alias.

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According to a 1995 Los Angeles Times report, Salinas “amassed at least $100 million in suspected drug money.”

Switzerland’s top prosecutor at the time, Carla del Ponte, “launched the investigation after the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration supplied information that led Swiss agents to the accounts in Geneva, where they arrested Raúl Salinas’ wife and her brother on Nov. 15 as the pair attempted to withdraw more than $83 million.”

Del Ponte told the Los Angeles Times that after observing Salinas’ interrogation by Mexican federal prosecutors the sums found in those accounts were “suspected to be from the laundering of money related to narcotics trafficking.”

In 1998, when Swiss prosecutors completed their Salinas investigation, The New York Times disclosed that “Swiss police investigators have concluded that a brother of former President Carlos Salinas de Gortari played a central role in Mexico’s cocaine trade, raking in huge bribes to protect the flow of drugs into the United States.”

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A 1998 report by the General Accounting Office (GAO) pointed a finger directly at Citibank. Investigators revealed that “Mr. Salinas was able to transfer $90 million to $100 million between 1992 and 1994 by using a private banking relationship formed by Citibank New York in 1992. The funds were transferred through Citibank Mexico and Citibank New York to private banking investment accounts in Citibank London and Citibank Switzerland.”

With the connivance of bank officials, in 1992 Salinas was able to “effectively disguise” the source of those funds and their destination.

Indeed, with hefty fees secured from assisting their well-connected client Salinas, Citibank “set up an offshore private investment company named Trocca, to hold Mr. Salinas’s assets, through Cititrust (Cayman) and investment accounts in Citibank London and Citibank Switzerland.”

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A 1999 Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations report on “Private Banking and Money Laundering” revealed that “a culture of secrecy pervades the private banking industry.”

“For example,” Senate investigators disclosed, “in the case of Raul Salinas . . . the private bank hid Mr. Salinas’ ownership of Trocca by omitting his name from the Trocca incorporation papers and naming still other shell companies as the shareholders, directors, and officers. Citibank consistently referred to Mr. Salinas in internal bank communications by the code name ‘Confidential Client Number 2′ or ‘CC-2.’ The private bank’s Swiss office opened a special name account for him under the name of ‘Bonaparte’.”

In the 1980s, the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI) – apparently backed by top CIA officials – laundered drug money.  Time Magazine reported in 1991:

Because the US wanted to supply the Mujahideen rebels in Afghanistan with stinger missiles and other military hardware it needed the full cooperation of Pakistan. By the mid-1980s, the CIA operation in Islamabad was one of the largest US intelligence stations in the World. `If BCCI is such an embarrassment to the US that forthright investigations are not being pursued it has a lot to do with the blind eye the US turned to the heroin trafficking in Pakistan’, said a US intelligence officer.

As Wikipedia notes, Alfred McCoy (Professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and one of the world’s top experts on drug trafficking)

[McCoy] uncovered money laundering activities by banks controlled by the CIA, first the Castle Bank which was then replaced by the Nugan Hand Bank, which had as legal counsel William Colby, retired head of the CIA.  He also alludes to the BCCI, which seems to have played the same role as the Nugan Hand Bank after its collapse in the early 1980s, claiming that “the boom in the Pakistan drug trade was financed by BCCI.

Citibank was still laundering Mexican drug money in 2001.

And nothing has changed since then.

The big banks are still laundering staggering sums of drug money.  See this, this, this, this, this, this and and this.

An HSBC employee who blew the whistle on that banks’ money laundering for terrorists and drug cartels says: “America is losing the drug war because our banks are [still] financing the cartels“, and “Banks financing drug cartels … affects every single American“.

(And see this.)

(read the full article at Global Research)

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Corporate Welfare, Drugs, Privacy

High schools to drug test using company of school president’s brother

RT: May 1, 2014

Three Catholic schools in the Cleveland, Ohio area will begin mandatory drug testing using students’ hair in the next school year. The CEO of the company performing the testing is the brother of one of the school’s presidents.

Gilmour Academy, St. Edward High School, and St. Ignatius High School announced the new policy to students and their parents on Monday. The schools will use Psychemedics Corporation for the drug tests on hair follicles. Psychemedics president and CEO Raymond Kubacki is the brother of St. Edward president James Kubacki.

K.C. McKenna, vice president of admissions and marketing at St. Edward High School, told the Cleveland Scene that the decision to work with Psychemedics came after several years of research led by an internal committee made up of members of the board of trustees, a faculty member, and members of the administration.

“Certainly, Jim knew a little more about the process because of his brother being involved, but his brother being CEO of that company in no way led to us making the decision to use Psychemedics,” he said.

“From Day One, I told them this was my brother’s company,” the St. Edward’s president told the Plain Dealer. But in their announcements, the schools made no mention of a connection between anyone at the schools and Psychemedics.

“The short answer is Gilmour was very much aware of that connection from the beginning and it was never an issue,” Gilmour spokesman Devin Schlickmann told the Plain Dealer.

“How we picked the company isn’t of interest to high school boys,” St. Ignatius spokeswoman Lisa Metro said. “They’re more interested in how it’s going to play out to them.” Metro also revealed why the committee decided to go with Psychemedics: “They were the only lab with full FDA clearance to do the testing we were looking for,” she added.

The schools said the drug testing is preventative, and not evidence of substance abuse among students, according to a statement on the St. Edward website. “The schools decided to initiate drug testing out of a deep concern for the health and well-being of students,” the statement says. “The primary purpose for this initiative is to give students another reason to say “no” to the pressures of using illegal drugs and to help them remain substance-free. This initiative is simply one more component in our student wellness efforts.”

However, school leaders told The Plain Dealer that the heroin epidemic in Northeast Ohio was the catalyst for implementing the program.

The statement did outline the decision to use hair testing over body fluids like urine or saliva. “Many drugs are undetectable in urine as early as 72 hours after use, whereas they can be detected in hair samples for several months after ingestion,” the statement says. “In addition, it is much more difficult to adulterate or substitute hair samples and collection is much less intrusive, as well as more cost-effective.”

Hair-testing kits cost $39 to $50 each, schools that currently work with Psychemedics told the Scene. All high school students – about 980 at St. Ed’s, 340 at Gilmour, and 1,500 at St. Ignatius – will be subject to testing at the beginning of the 2014-2015 school year, and then random testing will occur throughout the year. The three contracts combined will pay Psychemedics nearly $120,000 for the initial testing alone, the Plain Dealer reported.

According to the St. Ed’s statement, hair testing can detect drug use for up to three months. The timing of the announcement gives students a four-month warning before testing begins. “The only good thing about this is that they announced it this early,” one Ignatius student wrote on the Scene site. “They practically winked at us while saying that the test can detect drugs used up to 3 months prior to it, and the first tests won’t begin for 4 months.”

The student also noted, “We were also told that shaved heads would not work as the test can be done with even arm hair…And as a side note, the students will likely just be drinking a lot more.”

(read the full article at RT)

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Banksters, Corporate Welfare

The Canadian Housing Bubble Puts Even The US To Shame

Zero Hedge: April 27, 2014

Since the bursting of the first US housing bubble in 2007, one of the primary explicit goals of the Fed has been to reflate the very same housing bubble (whose pop, together with the credit bubble, nearly wiped out the western financial system) as housing, far more than stocks, is instrumental to the “wealth effect” of the broader population (as opposed to just the 1%).

Sadly for the Fed, instead of recovering previous highs, median housing prices (not to be confused with the ultraluxury high end where prices have never been higher) have stagnated and are now in the downward phase of the fourth consecutive dead cat bounce, curiously matching a like amount of Fed monetary injection episodes.

But while the Fed has clearly had a problem with reflating the broader housing bubble, one which would impact the middle class instead of just those who are already wealthier than ever before thanks to the Russel 200,000, one place which not only never suffered a housing bubble pop in the 2006-2008 years, but never looked back as it continued its diagonal ‘bottom left to top right’ trajectory is Canada. As the chart below shows, the Canadian housing bubble has put all attempts at listening to Krugman and reflating yet another bubble to shame.

Here is the Globe and Mail’s take:

The gap between the average price of a home in Canada and the United States widened to a record level in the first quarter of this year, contrary to what economists would have expected, according to Bank of Montreal’s chief economist Doug Porter.

 

Average Canadian home prices were 66 per cent above average U.S. prices during the first three months of this year, he says. (Note: these are prices for existing houses and condos, not those that are newly constructed).

 

“The main takeaway is that, contrary to all expectations, the Canadian housing market has just kept on rolling in 2014 even as the U.S. housing market has  paused for breath (after a steep climb out of the dungeon),” he writes in a research note. “Put it this way, how many pundits a year ago were calling for Canadian home prices to rise faster than their U.S. counterparts in any single measure?”

 

It’s worth noting that there are many problems with comparing average Canadian home prices to average U.S. home prices, not the least of which is that average prices themselves can be highly misleading. Mr. Porter is aware that it’s not an apples-to-apples comparison.

 

“Some may quibble that this doesn’t take the exchange rate into account, but even adjusting for the Canadian dollar leaves a 50 per cent price gap,” he writes.

(read the full article at Zero Hedge)

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Banksters, Corporate Welfare, Tyranny

World Leaders Pave the Way for a Corporate Coup d’Etat: How to Stop the Trans-Pacific Partnership

Abby Martin and Anya Parampil
Media Roots: April 25, 2014

Negotiations for the world’s biggest trade deal have been conducted in total secrecy over the last four years. What’s worse, the deliberations are being held between multinational corporations and world leaders that are paving the way for a global corporate coup.

The Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) consists of twelve Pacific Rim countries: Australia, Brunei, Chile, Canada, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, Vietnam and the US.

Over 600 corporate advisors are consulting on the TPP to establish an international court tribunal made up of corporate representatives, which could supercede the sovereignty of countries involved and override existing laws. But despite the drastic implications this deal could have concerning everything from food safety to pharmaceutical costs, a stunning new report by Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) reveals that neither ABC, CBS, nor NBC have even so much as mentioned the TPP since Obama’s State of the Union address in February of 2013.

Given the magnitude of this so called “free trade” agreement and the corporate media’s blacking out of the issue, it’s important to look back at some of Breaking the Set’s coverage of the TPP.

First, Kevin Zeese, co-founder of It’s Our Economy, explains why the mainstream media has ignored the story and calls the TPP a ‘privatization’ of state owned enterprises.

Kevin Zees on the TPP Corporate Coup d’Etat

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Breaking the Set explains how the media distracted citizens in order to allow Congress to sneakily introduce a measure to put the TPP on a legislative fast track, an undemocratic move that undermines public debate.

How Bridgegate Distracted America from TPP Fast Track

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Margaret Flowers, Organizer for Popular Resistance, discusses why fast tracking the TPP is so dangerous to the democratic process, and why everyone should care about this trade deal.

How You Can Stop the TPP: Say No to Fast Track!

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Then, Abby interviews legislative representative of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, Mike Dolan. Dolan breaks down the content of the TPP chapter released by Wikileaks and explains how the legislation will affect global citizens.

Mike Dolan on Dangers of TPP Fast Track

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(read the full article at Media Roots)

Learn more at:

www.stoptpp.org

www.exposethetpp.org

https://www.citizen.org/TPP

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Corporate Welfare, Tyranny

Temporary foreign workers program spurs higher unemployment

Temporary foreign workers program spurs higher unemployment, study claims

By Lee-Anne Goodman
Calgary Herald: April 24, 2014

OTTAWA — A new report by the C.D. Howe Institute is harshly critical of the federal government’s controversial temporary foreign workers program, saying it has spurred a higher unemployment rate in western Canada.

The study by C.D. Howe, a non-partisan public policy think-tank, points out that changes to the program enacted between 2002 and 2013 made it much easier for employers to hire temporary foreign workers.

“These policy changes occurred even though there was little empirical evidence of shortages in many occupations,” writes the report’s author, economist Dominique Gross.

“When controlling for differences across provinces, I find that changes to the TFWP that eased hiring conditions accelerated the rise in unemployment rates in Alberta and British Columbia.”

The Conservative government has since tightened the regulations, but there have been a spate of high-profile allegations in recent months about an array of employers, particularly restaurant operators, abusing the program.

Fast-food giant McDonald’s has announced it is freezing its participation in the program pending a third-party audit after it found itself in hot water for hiring temporary foreign workers in B.C.

Hundreds of Canadian companies and governmental departments employ temporary foreign workers, according to data compiled by Employment Minister Jason Kenney’s department. But there’s been an especially dramatic increase in the number of hotels and restaurants accessing the program under the Conservatives.

The initiative was originally designed to address shortages of skilled workers, not menial labour.

Kenney is vowing to lower the boom on any companies found to be abusing the program, and a spate of new rule changes is expected to be announced soon.

The C.D. Howe study, however, says that although the government’s 2013 crackdown on the program was a welcome move, it’s probably insufficient because of the absence of solid data about the state of Canada’s labour market.

That echoes concerns raised by Don Drummond, a respected economist who has given the Tories 69 recommendations to vastly improve the quality of the information on Canada’s labour markets. He said earlier this week that most of them have yet to implemented.

(read the full article at Calgary Herald)

Corporate Welfare, Health/Environment

Alberta regulator ignores four continuing leaks, permits oilsands company to resume steam injection

Alberta regulator permits oilsands giant to resume steam injection near Primrose leaks

By Sheila Pratt
Edmonton Journal: April 22, 2014

EDMONTON – Oilsands giant CNRL won approval to resume pumping high-pressure steam into wells on its Cold Lake lease near four sites where bitumen continues to leak to the surface uncontrolled.

The Alberta Energy Regulator has not yet determined the cause of the leaks, which totalled almost 12,000 barrels in the past year. Late last week, it approved the company’s application to resume steam injection, with lower steam pressures, to keep its Primrose wells producing.

But environmentalists say allowing steam injection to start again on the Primrose lease is premature, especially since it is not known how to stop the leaks, and the same geological formation is involved in leaks in 2013 and in 2009.

In its production, Canadian Natural Resources Ltd. sends steam into the ground for weeks, builds up pressure, melts the bitumen, then brings it back up the same well — called high-pressure cyclical steaming.

This spring steaming cycle is the first injection since the leaks were discovered last May. The steaming cycle is needed to keep the wells producing.

Early last spring, the company discovered three sites where sticky bitumen had flowed into the forest, covering vegetation, and was leaking into a small lake, which has since been drained to expose the fissures on the bottom.

One theory says high-pressure steam is cracking the caprock and allowing the bitumen to flow to the surface. The company says the underground leaks start at faulty well bores.

(read the full article ay Edmonton Journal)

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