From manski at greens.org Mon Nov 6 19:35:17 2006 From: manski at greens.org (Ben Manski) Date: Mon, 06 Nov 2006 19:35:17 -0600 Subject: [Corporations] For DC area folks - Election Night! In-Reply-To: References: <4635907.762631162667197383.JavaMail.root@vms076.mailsrvcs.net> Message-ID: <454FE2D5.1060601@greens.org> NOW CAN WE TALK ABOUT IMPEACHMENT? HEAR JOHN NICHOLS AT POLITICS and PROSE in WASHINGTON FOR AN ELECTION NIGHT DISCUSSION ABOUT THE NEXT AMERICAN REVOLUTION Politicians and the media talked a lot about presidential accountability during the fall campaign, but very little about the tool the founders created to accomplish the task: Impeachment. With the campaign done, it is time to get serious about the real work of restoring the Republic. On election night, after the polls begin to close but before the votes are counted, take a break from the political platitudes and join a real American values discussion with Nation political writer John Nichols. NICHOLS is the author of THE GENIUS OF IMPEACHMENT: The Founders' Cure for Royalism, just out from The New Press. THE GENIUS OF IMPEACHMENT is being hailed as an powerful and eloquent political masterwork. Author STUDS TERKEL says: "Never within my nonagenarian memory has the case for impeachment of Bush and his equally crooked confederates been so clearly and fervently offered as John Nichols has done in this book. They are after all our public 'servants' who have rifled our savings, bled our young, and challenged our sanity. As Tom Paine said 200 years ago to another George, a royal tramp: 'Bugger off!' So should we say today. John Nichols has given us the history, the language and the arguments we will need to do so." Activist MEDEA BENJAMIN, co-founder of Global Exchange and Code Pink, says: "John Nichols has found the cure for the current crisis. It's in the powers given us by the founders to challenge the King George of the moment." Historian HOWARD ZINN says: "It's time we recognize that impeachment is not a radical, outlandish measure, but a constitutional procedure, historically grounded, and absolutely necessary when a president has committed 'high crimes and misdemeanors.' John Nichols makes the argument with clarity, power, and eloquence." GORE VIDAL says: "Of all the giant slayers now afoot in the great American desert, John Nichols' sword is the sharpest." JOIN JOHN NICHOLS TUESDAY NOVEMBER 7 7 p.m. Politics & Prose Bookstore and Coffeehouse 5015 Connecticut Avenue NW Washington, DC 20008 1-800-722-0790 202-364-1919 -- Ben Manski Co-Secretary, Four Lakes Green Party of Dane County http://www.FourLakesGreenParty.org "We, the generation that faces the next century, can add the solemn injunction 'If we don't do the impossible, we shall be faced with the unthinkable'." ~ Petra Kelly See also: Wisconsin Green Party http://www.WisconsinGreenParty.org Green Party of the United States http://www.GP.org Liberty Tree http://www.LibertyTreeFDR.org From mspears at missvalley.com Tue Nov 21 00:59:02 2006 From: mspears at missvalley.com (MikeSpears) Date: Tue, 21 Nov 2006 00:59:02 -0600 Subject: [Corporations] Is Corporate Do-Goodery for Real? Message-ID: <000601c70d3a$8977c2e0$e6246ad8@Michael> MotherJones.com | Newshttp://www.motherjones.com/cgi-bin/print_article.pl?url=http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2006/11/hype_vs_hope.html MotherJones.com / News / Feature Hype vs. Hope Is Corporate Do-Goodery for Real? Bill McKibben November/December 2006 Issue Ten percent of a two-year-old?s nouns are brand names; by the time an American child heads to school, he or she can recognize hundreds of logos. Disney is now putting its cartoon characters on fresh fruit, arguing (perhaps correctly) that it?s the only way to get kids to eat it. If that?s the world we?re born into, is it any wonder we want corporations to solve our biggest problems as well? Isn?t it a parent?s job to protect us? And besides, who else has the capital and the power to do what needs to be done in the face of a crisis like global warming? Any sign that corporations might be willing to take on the job is greeted with an enthusiasm that borders on delusion. When John Browne, the head of British Petroleum, gave a speech in 1997 admitting that global warming exists, and announcing that business must respond ?to the reality and the concerns of the world in which you operate,? people began calling him the ?Sun King.? The head of California?s Environmental Protection Agency ventured that ?this bold move will set the world stage for other companies to emulate.? BP commissioned green roofs for its filling stations, along with a whole slew of ads touting its vision for a world ?beyond petroleum.? And there is every reason to think Lord Browne was sincere?he?d studied the problem, knew it was big, and was willing to buck the rest of the industry in saying so. Browne was not the only executive thinking aloud about how corporations relate to the rest of the world. His comments came as the debate over ?corporate social responsibility,? long a preoccupation for people in fuzzy sweaters, was about to explode into mainstream business culture. The movement has now spawned a booming industry in consultants and conferences; just this summer the World Business Council on Sustainable Development issued a manifesto titled ?From Challenge to Opportunity,? filled with pictures of baking deserts and disease-stricken peasants, but also with promises to ?seek greater synergy between our goals and those of the society we serve.? BP signed on, and so did everyone from Adidas to Procter & Gamble. Which is nice. The question is, what does it amount to? Take BP. In 2004, its revenues from solar power were almost $400 million; its total revenues, almost entirely from hydrocarbons, were $285 billion. In other words, the company has gone beyond petroleum to the tune of about one-sixth of 1 percent of sales (see ?It?s Not Easy Being Green,? opposite page). And the news gets worse from there. The leak disaster that led to this summer?s sudden shutdown of BP?s Alaska pipeline turns out not to have been sudden at all. Back in 1992, when a whistleblower raised concerns about corrosion in the pipeline, BP responded with a corporate crackdown that a federal judge said was ?reminiscent of Nazi Germany.? Elsewhere, the Wall Street Journal reports that federal regulators are investigating whether BP tried to influence crude-oil prices using information about its Oklahoma pipelines and storage tanks; in a separate probe, investigators are trying to figure out if BP gamed gasoline prices on the New York Mercantile Exchange. Meanwhile, the company?s top American executive was cochairman of the Bush reelection campaign in Alaska. Not very far beyond petroleum, that. There is no question that entrepreneurs with a social bent can do enormous good?especially until they decide to go public or sell out to a larger corporation. And they can do well at the same time, connecting with a reasonably large block of motivated consumers. If I need paper towels, they?re damn well going to come from Seventh Generation. I would probably wear Patagonia jackets even if they weren?t so incredibly warm. But these tend to be one-off deals. Ben and Jerry didn?t seem to change the way H?agen and Dazs viewed the world. Somehow, Bounty has been willing to leave the thoughtful paper towel market to Seventh Generation. For several decades now, environmentalists have been citing the work of Ray Anderson and Interface (see ?The Carpet Cleaner,? Page 56), and it?s a great example?but why is there still only one Ray Anderson? Often the difficulty is built right into a company?s business model. It makes scant difference whether Wal-Mart starts stocking organic food or not, because the real problem is the imperative to ship products all over the world, sell them in vast, downtown-destroying complexes, and push prices so low that neither workers nor responsible suppliers can prosper. (In fact, Wal-Mart?s decision to sell organic food will almost certainly mean the final consolidation of the industry into the hands of a few huge growers that ship their produce across thousands of miles?not to mention that the people ringing up the organic groceries will still make below-poverty wages and taxpayers will still be footing the bill for their health care. There?s something gross about buying a healthy carrot from a sick company.) By the same token, though, business models can propel companies forward even if the ceos couldn?t care less about the planet: Dow and DuPont have cut their carbon emissions by upward of 50 percent this decade, simply because their managers started to pay attention to energy costs and figured out that efficiency went straight to the bottom line. ?Will business save the world?? turns out to be the wrong question. The right question is ?How can we structure the world so that businesses play their part in saving it?? And the answer to that, inevitably, is politics. Some of it is the politics of public awareness. It?s no accident that Vermont and Oregon are hotbeds of do-good capitalism; in these places attitudes have shifted so that conscience pays. Many of us have worked like crazy to get people excited about, say, hybrid cars?and, aided by rising oil prices, the propaganda has begun to succeed. But mostly we need politics of a more straightforward, and entirely unglamorous, variety. If you want energy companies to rearrange their portfolios so that way more money goes to renewables and way less to hydrocarbons, the best way forward is not to appeal to the ceo?s conscience?it?s to pass laws to push him in the right direction. This is what has happened in Europe, where regulators told car manufacturers last August to cut vehicles? greenhouse emissions by 25 percent?or else (see also ?The Muscles From Brussels,? Page 62). ?The car industry should be aware that we are watching the situation very closely,? one official told reporters, adding that the EU ?will not hesitate to replace the carrot with the stick.? There?s nothing particularly European about that logic?witness the efforts in the United States of a few bold state attorneys general, who in the face of federal inaction have begun to sue major carbon emitters on their own. They may not win?but the threat of liability has already gotten big polluters to talk about offering voluntary carbon cuts in exchange for legal immunity. In an August report, the investor activist group Ceres quoted a Goldman Sachs analysis that put possible global warming liability on the same scale as the fallout from asbestos. That kind of information will grab a ceo?s attention in a hurry. Helping corporations do the right thing through regulation?which, it should be noted, also levels the playing field so that a greenish BP doesn?t have to worry about a dirty Exxon?Mobil?is not exactly a new idea. It?s more or less what we used to do, in the long period from Teddy Roosevelt and the trustbusters on to about the 1980s. One reason for the shift is the enormous political power of corporations, which they use almost exclusively to boost their own profits. But in a way, you can?t blame them for that. The strange part is how little opposition the corporate agenda meets anymore?how many of us have accepted the ideological argument that as long as we leave commerce alone, it will somehow, magically, solve all our problems. We could compel Big Oil to take its windfall profits and build windmills; instead we stand quietly by, as if unfettered plunder were the obvious and necessary course. Explaining this mystery may bring us back to where we started. In the childlike enchantment we?ve lived under since the Reagan era, we?ve wanted very much to believe that someone else, some wavy-haired ceo, would do the hard, adult work of problem-solving. In fact, corporations are the infants of our society?they know very little except how to grow (though they?re very good at that), and they howl when you set limits. Socializing them is the work of politics. It?s about time we took it up again. E-mail article . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . This article has been made possible by the Foundation for National Progress, the Investigative Fund of Mother Jones, and gifts from generous readers like you. ? 2006 The Foundation for National Progress -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: /pipermail/corporations_corporations.org/attachments/20061121/a293159f/attachment.html -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: image/gif Size: 83 bytes Desc: not available Url : /pipermail/corporations_corporations.org/attachments/20061121/a293159f/attachment.gif From mspears at missvalley.com Wed Nov 22 19:46:33 2006 From: mspears at missvalley.com (MikeSpears) Date: Wed, 22 Nov 2006 19:46:33 -0600 Subject: [Corporations] HOW MULTINATIONAL CORPORATIONS AVOID PAYING THEIR TAXES Message-ID: <000501c70ea1$36813770$d5256ad8@Michael> HOW MULTINATIONAL CORPORATIONS AVOID PAYING THEIR TAXES NEWS YOU WON'T FIND ON CNN How Multinational Corporations Avoid Paying Their Taxes Drug companies and other multinational companies based in the U.S. systematically avoid paying tax in the U.S. on their profits. The companies elect to realize profits in low-tax countries and because of this the rest of us have to pay billions of unnecessary taxes to make up for the shortfall, writes Peter Rost, an ex-pharmaceutical executive. By Peter Rost 11/22/06 "Information Clearing House" -- -- The biggest tax scam on earth has a very innocent sounding name. It is called "transfer prices." That almost sounds boring. It is, however, anything but boring. Abuse of transfer prices is a key tool multinational corporations use to fool the U.S. and other jurisdictions to think that they have virtually no profit; hence, they shouldn't pay any taxes. Corporations involved in this scam are "model corporate citizens," or so they would like us to believe. The truth is that they rob us all blind. The money we lose can be estimated in the tens of billions, or possibly hundreds of billions of dollars every year. We all end up paying higher taxes because rich corporations make sure they don't. But don't take my word for this. A few weeks ago U.K.-based GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), one of the largest pharmaceutical companies in the world, together with the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) announced that GSK will pay $3.4 billion to the IRS to settle a transfer pricing dispute dating back 17 years. The IRS alleges that GSK improperly shifted profits from their U.S. to the U.K. entity. And U.K. pharmaceutical companies are not alone with these kinds of problems. Merck, one of the largest U.S. drug companies, also this month disclosed that they face four separate tax disputes in the U.S. and Canada with potential liabilities of $5.6 billion. Out of that amount, Merck disclosed that the Canada Revenue Agency issued the company a notice for $1.8 billion in back taxes and interest "related to certain inter-company pricing matters." And according to the IRS, one of the schemes Merck used to cheat American tax payers was by setting up a subsidiary in tax-friendly Bermuda. Merck then quietly transferred patents for several blockbuster drugs to the new subsidiary and then paid the subsidiary for use of the patents. The arrangement in effect allowed some of the profits to disappear into Merck's own "Bermuda triangle." I have described many more ways the global drug industry cheats and defrauds our government in my recent book, "The Whistleblower, Confessions of a Healthcare Hitman." In this article, however, I'm going to focus on how they, and other rich multinationals, use the tax system to defraud us. So what's going on here, how have multinational drug companies been able to gouge us for years selling expensive drugs and then avoid paying tax on their astronomical profits? The answer is simple. For companies in certain businesses, such as pharmaceuticals, it is very easy to simply "invent" the price a company charges their U.S. business for buying the company's product which they manufacture in another country. And if they charge enough, poof; all the profit vanishes from the US, or Canada, or any other regular jurisdiction and end up in a corporate tax-haven. And that means American and Canadian tax payers don't get their fair share. Many multinational corporations essentially have two sets of bookkeeping. One set, with artificially inflated transfer prices is what they use to prepare local tax returns, and show auditors in high-tax jurisdictions, and another set of books, in which management can see the true profit and lost statement, based on real cost of goods, are used for the executives to determine the actual performance of their various operations. Of course, not every multinational industry can do this as easily as the drug industry. It would be difficult to motivate $6,000 toilet seats. But the drug industry, where real cost of goods to manufacture drugs is usually around 5% of selling price, has a lot of room to artificially increase that cost of goods to 50% or 75% of selling price. This money is then accumulated in corporate tax-havens where the drugs are manufactured, such as Puerto Rico and Ireland. Puerto Rico has for many years attracted lots of pharmaceutical plants and Ireland is the new destination for such facilities, not because of the skilled labor or the beautiful scenery or the great beer-but because of the low taxes. Ireland has, in fact, one of the world's lowest corporate tax rates with a maximum rate of 12.5 percent. In Puerto Rico, over a quarter of the country's gross domestic product already comes from pharmaceutical manufacturing. That shouldn't be surprising. According to the U.S. Federal Tax Reform Act of 1976, manufacturers are permitted to repatriate profits from Puerto Rico to the U.S. free of U.S. federal taxes. And by the way, the Puerto Rico withholding tax is only 10%. Of course, no company should have to pay more tax than they are legally obligated to, and they are entitled to locate to any low-tax jurisdiction. The problem starts when they use fraudulent transfer pricing and other tricks to artificially shift their income from the U.S. to a tax-haven. According to current OECD guidelines transfer prices should be based upon the arm's length principle - that means the transfer price should be the same as if the two companies involved were indeed two independents, not part of the same corporate structure. Reality is that standard operating procedure for multinationals is to consistently violate this rule. And why shouldn't they? After all, it takes 17 years for them to pay up, per the GSK example above, even when they get caught. Another industry which successfully exploits overseas tax strategies to cheat us all is the hi-tech industry. In fact, Microsoft Corp. recently shaved at least $500 million from its annual tax bill using a similar strategy to the one the drug industry has used for so many years. Microsoft has set up a subsidiary in Ireland, called Round Island One Ltd. This company pays more than $300 million in taxes to this small island country with only 4 million inhabitants, and most of this comes from licensing fees for copyrighted software, originally developed in the U.S. Interesting thing is, at the same time, Round Island paid a total of just under $17 million in taxes to about 20 other countries, with more than 300 million people. The result of this was that Microsoft's world-wide tax rate plunged to 26 percent in 2004, from 33 percent the year before. Almost half of the drop was due to "foreign earnings taxed at lower rates," according to a Microsoft financial filing. And this is how Microsoft has radically reduced its corporate taxes in much of Europe and been able to shield billions of dollars from U.S. taxation. But remember, this is only one example. Most of the other tech companies are doing the same thing. Google recently also set up an Irish operation that the firm credited in a SEC filing with reducing its tax rate. Here's how this is done in the software industry and any other industry with valuable intellectual property. A company takes a great, patented, American product and then develops a new generation. Then, of course, the old product disappears. Some, or all, of the cost and development work for the new product takes place in Ireland, or at least, so the company claims. The ownership of the new generation product and all income from licensing can then legally be shared between the U.S. parent company and the offshore corporation or transferred outright to the tax-haven. The deal, to pass IRS scrutiny, has to be made using the "arms-length principle." Reality is that the IRS has no way of controlling all these transactions. Unfortunately those of us working and paying tax in the U.S. can't relocate our jobs and our income to Ireland or another tax haven. So we have to make up the income shortfall. In the U.S. we have a highly educated society with a very qualified workforce, partly supported by our tax payers. This helps us generate breakthrough products. But once a company has a successful product, they have every incentive to move the second generation of a successful product overseas, to Ireland and a few other corporate tax havens. There is only one problem for U.S. companies with this strategy, and that is that if they repatriate this money to the U.S. they have to pay full corporate taxes. In fact, according to BusinessWeek, U.S. multinational corporations have built up profits of as much as $750 billion overseas, much of it in tax havens such as the Ireland, Bahamas, and Singapore to avoid the stiff 35% levy they'd face if they repatriated the funds back into the U.S. But of course, Congress, which is basically paid for by our multinational corporations, generously provided for a one-time provision in the corporate tax code, so that they could repatriate profits earned before 2003, and held in foreign subsidiaries, at an effective 5.25% tax rate. And so the game goes on. In the end, multinational corporations live in a global world which allows them to pretty much send their money to corporate tax havens at will, and then repatriate this money almost tax free, with the help of the U.S. Congress. The people left holding the bag are you and me. If you want to know learn more about the corruption in the drug industry, read my new book, "The Whistleblower, Confessions of a Healthcare Hitman." Peter Rost, M.D., is a former Vice President of Pfizer. He became well known in 2004 when he emerged as the first drug company executive to speak out in favor of reimportation of drugs. He is the author of "The Whistleblower, Confessions of a Healthcare Hitman" See: http://the-whistleblower-by-peter-rost.blogspot.com/ Click on "comments" below to read or post comments Comment Guidelines Be succinct, constructive and relevant to the story. We encourage engaging, diverse and meaningful commentary. Do not include personal information such as names, addresses, phone numbers and emails. Comments falling outside our guidelines - those including personal attacks and profanity - are not permitted. See our complete Comment Policy and use this link to notify us if you have concerns about a comment. 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Name: not available Type: application/octet-stream Size: 16481 bytes Desc: not available Url : /pipermail/corporations_corporations.org/attachments/20061122/c5c9a722/attachment-0001.obj From outreach at countercorp.org Thu Nov 23 14:39:10 2006 From: outreach at countercorp.org (CounterCorp) Date: Thu, 23 Nov 2006 12:39:10 -0800 Subject: [Corporations] 2006 Anti-Corporate Film Festival: Dec 1-3 in SF Message-ID: The 1st Annual Anti-Corporate Film Festival: Dec. 1?3 in San Francisco 2006 Festival features ?eco-terrorists?, ?pirates?, sociopaths (both human and corporate), and the office retreat from hell (San Francisco, Nov. 22) ? Who said an anti-corporate film festival has to be serious, preachy, and (dare we say it) boring? Not the folks organizing the CounterCorp Festival, which launches its inaugural year with a series of movies chock full of crime, violence ? and, yes, even humor. The festival kicks off on Friday, Dec. 1, with two documentaries ? about so-called ?eco-terrorists? and ?pirates?, respectively ? and then follows that up on Saturday, Dec. 2, with more lawbreaking by those pesky pirates, leading up to a comedy that brings new meaning to the term ?cut-throat competition?. The festival ends on Sunday, Dec. 3, with a love story set in India, a documentary that could be called "Sociopaths, Inc.", and a look at the present state (and two possible futures) of the food we eat every day. Opening Night ? Friday, Dec. 1 ? (7:30) THE FOREST FOR THE TREES ? A made-in-San Francisco documentary about the still-unsolved car bombing of environmental activist Judi Bari, and her crusading attorney, Dennis Cunningham, who won the largest civil penalty against the FBI in U.S. history for its politically motivated effort to blame the victim. Directed by Bernadine Mellis (60 minutes, 2006). There will be a Q & A with director Bernadine Mellis, Dennis Cunningham, and Bari protege Alicia Littletree following the film. ? (9:30) PIRATE RADIO USA ? San Francisco premiere! Broadcasting live with a 4-watt transmitter from an ?undisclosed location?, DJs Him and Her take us through the underground world of rogue radio, where people all over the U.S. are defying federal law to say and play what they want on the air. Along the way, we see the rise of Big Media ? and of ?citizen media? in response to it ? and the showdown between the two as they report on the "Battle of Seattle" at the 1999 WTO ministerial meetings. It?s not Left versus Right, it?s Corporate versus Public. Directed by Jeff Pearson (84 minutes, 2006) Day Two ? Saturday, Dec. 2 ? (4:00) MAKING WAVES ? Not everyone who opposes corporate power is a left-leaning socialist. Big Media also squelches the anti- government views of a group of crusty libertarian radio pirates in Tucson, Arizona. See if you still support "free speech radio" when you disagree with what the speakers are saying. Directed by Michael Lahey (64 minutes, 2004). There will be a Q & A with the director after the screening. ? (7:30) ALTERNATIVE FREEDOM ? San Francisco premiere! The development of the Internet and resulting explosion in access to information are challenging traditional definitions of collective culture and individual property. A growing number of academics, activists, and artists are questioning whether copyrights ? which artists are often forced to sign over to corporations under economic inequality duress (in a form of modern indentured servitude) ? were originally designed or should be used primarily as a means of maximizing profits, instead of encouraging creativity, innovation, and the exchange of ideas. The film examines the rise of the ?free culture? movement in response to efforts by corporations to maintain their control over information ? and high profits. Featuring interviews with Grey Album mash-up dj Danger Mouse, Xbox hacker Andrew "Bunnie" Huang, Electronic Frontier Foundation attorney Jason Schultz, free-software guru Richard Stallman, underground rapper Adam "DoseOne" Drucker, and Stanford Law professor Lawrence Lessig. Directed by Shawn Cronin and Twila Raftu (68 minutes, 2006). There will be a Q & A following the film. ? (9:30) Centerpiece Film: SEVERANCE ? San Francisco premiere! What do you get when you cross "The Office" with "Friday the 13th"? A British horror-comedy in the style of "Shaun of the Dead", but in a far more terrifying setting: a 'team-building' weekend at an isolated corporate retreat. The hotel turns out to be more rustic than expected, and there's reason to think it was the site of a gruesome massacre by renegade soldiers during the Bosnian War. Computer tech Steve decides to stave off boredom by dropping acid, and is soon convinced that the local deer are insulting him. But the meeting agenda quickly changes as he and his co-workers find themselves being stalked and killed in unexpected and horrifying ways that bring new meaning to the phrase, "cutting staff at the office ". Directed by Christopher Smith (UK, 96 minutes, 2006). Not available on DVD. U.S. theatrical release scheduled for April 2007. Closing Night ? Sunday, Dec. 3 ? (4:00) THE CORPORATION ? What anti-corporate film festival could be complete without the grand-daddy of them all? Rather than simply presenting a litany of corporate crime and abuse, the film examines the very nature and ?personality? of corporations themselves, and takes the idea of corporate personhood to its logical conclusion, arguing that anyone who behaved like a corporation would be diagnosed ? and treated ? as a sociopath. Co-directed by Mark Achbar and Jennifer Abbot (Canada, 150 minutes, 2004) ? (7:00) BHOPAL EXPRESS ? A heart-breaking, narrative drama about a newly married Indian couple whose lives are forever changed by the American chemical factory that dominates the local economy. Tara (Nehra Raghuraman) insists on returning to her village for several days for a post-wedding visit, so husband Verma (Kay Kay Menon) receives permission to leave his job at the plant a few hours early to spend more time with her before she leaves. Verma's former co-worker and carousing single friend Basheer (Naseeruddin Shah) takes them to the station and witnesses the couple's forlorn parting. He drags the dejected Verma to a bar to try to lift his spirits with some whiskey ? and a sultry singer called Zohrabai. As the two men drink and laugh, neither can imagine what awaits them or Bhopal. Directed by Mahesh Mathai (100 minutes, 1999). Co-sponsored by the 3rd Eye San Francisco South Asian Film Festival. ? (9:00) THE FUTURE OF FOOD ? There is a revolution happening on the farms and dinner tables around the world that is transforming the very nature of the food we eat. From the prairies of Saskatchewan, Canada, to the fields of Oaxaca, Mexico, the Future of Food reveals the complex web of economic and political forces at work as huge multi-national corporations seek to control the world's food system. An in-depth investigation of the disturbing truth behind the unlabeled genetically-engineered food that has quietly filled U.S. grocery store shelves for the past decade. The film examines the impact of patented "techno-crops" on the lives and livelihoods of the farmers who grow them, the health of the public who consume them, and the government policies that are supposed to regulate them ? and looks at the viability of organic and sustainable agriculture as alternatives to large-scale, laboratory-driven industrial agriculture. If you eat food, you'll want to see this film. Directed by Deborah Koons Garcia (88 minutes, 2004). * * * Tickets are $10 ($5 for students with ID) and are available online through the CounterCorp website (www.countercorp.org) and at the door an hour before the first show. Single-day and full-festival passes are also available online. For more information, visit the CounterCorp website or e-mail or call us at filmfest at countercorp.org or (415) 282-2486. For more information on the films ? including photos and trailers ? visit the "Festival" page on the CounterCorp website, www.countercorp.org. Feel free to forward this e-mail and information about the festival to your family, friends, neighbors and co-workers, and to bring them with you to the festival. This is our first year and we want to start things off right! We also want to how the local and national media ? including last Sunday's New York Times: www.nytimes.com/2006/11/19/movies/19pete.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all ? that people are concerned about the power and influence of corporations in our society, and want to know what they can do about it. CounterCorp may start out being considered a "niche" festival, but the issues the festival explores are hardly limited to a small part of our lives, communities, or culture. They are integral to almost every aspect of how we live and and everything we do everyday. Thanks for your support, and look forward to seeing you at the Festival! CounterCorp Film Festival Dec. 1-3, Victoria Theater 16th & Mission Street, SF www.countercorp.org filmfest at countercorp.org :-=-:-=-:-=-:-=-:-=-:-=-:-=-: To see every show at the 2006 festival for $7.50 each, get a "Full-Fest" pass at www.brownpapertickets.com/event/5620 To add the festival schedule to your computer or iPod calendar, click on webcal://icalx.com/public/CounterCorp/CounterCorp.ics To donate to the festival, select CounterCorp from the drop-down menu at https://secure.groundspring.org/dn/index.php?id=695 To subscribe to CounterCorp's News and Events e-mail list, visit http://list.countercorp.org/mailman/listinfo/countercorp-news From mspears at missvalley.com Tue Nov 28 20:15:11 2006 From: mspears at missvalley.com (MikeSpears) Date: Tue, 28 Nov 2006 20:15:11 -0600 Subject: [Corporations] Nixing Corporate Personhood Message-ID: <000401c7135c$346769e0$d1246ad8@Michael> MotherJones.com | NewsWhen Is a Corporation Like a Freed Slave? In rural Pennsylvania, township supervisors battling sewage sludge and hog manure stumble up against one of the biggest mysteries in constitutional law. Barry Yeoman November/December 2006 Issue LICKING TOWNSHIP, PENNSYLVANIA, is a rolling swath of soybean fields and pastures in Clarion County, two hours northeast of Pittsburgh, with 500 residents and quite a few more cattle. Drive past the township hall, a converted one-room schoolhouse, and you might see a horse-drawn buggy parked in front, with an Amish family clustered around the pay phone outside. Farther down the road, you'll notice a rusty coal dragline tucked into the woods, stranded like the hull of an old freighter, a souvenir of the township's 20th-century mining boom. Among Clarion County's biggest events are the annual Horsethief Days, featuring bed and lawn mower races. In these parts, Republicans outpoll Democrats 2-to-1. "If you could picture the heart of Bush country north of the Mason-Dixon Line, this is it," says Mik Robertson, a produce farmer and one of the township's three elected supervisors. Four years ago, Robertson and the other supervisors were debating an ordinance to restrict the spreading of toxics-laden sewage sludge on local fields?a major issue in an area that has become a destination for waste from Pittsburgh. The supervisors knew that messing with big business could come at a price: Three years earlier, another Pennsylvania township had passed an anti-sludge ordinance, only to be sued by a sludge hauler called Synagro, which argued that the township had infringed on its rights under the 14th Amendment, passed after the Civil War to guarantee "equal protection" to all. Synagro could make that argument because since the late 19th century, the Supreme Court has defined corporations as legal "persons," conferring on them many of the same rights that belong to flesh-and-blood citizens. And so, Licking's supervisors did something that has been variously described as creative, futile, or out-and-out revolutionary: They passed an ordinance declaring that henceforth, in their township, "Corporations shall not be considered to be 'persons' protected by the Constitution of the United States." The measure was the brainchild of a brash 37-year-old attorney named Thomas Linzey, who has made a name for himself around the country taking on the principle of corporate personhood?an idea and legal precedent that undergirds much of the past century's rise in corporate power. The director of the Pennsylvania-based Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund, Linzey sees Licking Township's action as one of the opening shots of a movement that will redefine American democracy. "It's about going on the offensive," he says. "The dream is that 30 years out?and my heart sinks, because I don't know if we even have 30 years from an environmental perspective?other places will join hands as well, and lead to a rewrite of the U.S. Constitution." LINZEY WAS FRESH out of law school in 1995 when he set up the Defense Fund, a group that worked mainly with African American communities battling incinerators and waste dumps. The activists would scour a company's permit application for technical errors, often persuading authorities to reject the facility. "We'd have a victory party," Linzey says. "Everybody would pat themselves on the back. Well, what would happen three months later? The corporate boys would be back, and they'd say to us, 'Thank you very much.' We were actually identifying the gaps in their applications." Clean-cut, stocky, and blue-eyed, Linzey comes across as temperate, perhaps a little standoffish. But in front of a crowd, his voice takes on a preacher's timbre. His favorite verb is "drive" in its most aggressive sense?as in, "True people's movements seek to drive rights into the Constitution." As Linzey kept racking up defeats through the '90s, he concluded that the regulatory system was a distraction, or worse. "We were working off a script that we hadn't written. After billions of hours spent by community groups around the nation"?and here his face reddens and his hand slams the table?"nothing was better. Nothing." Activists, he believed, were being channeled into an unwinnable process "like cattle through a chute": As long as the law placed the same value on corporate rights as it did on those of individuals, corporations would always triumph. Though corporate personhood is now thoroughly ingrained in U.S. constitutional law, it would have been a foreign notion to the founders. For much of the nation's first century, corporations were seen as a means to an end, not unlike associations. They were "chartered," or called into existence, by the states, and their charters could be revoked at any time (a legal possibility now back in vogue among activists in several states); they were not considered "persons" until after the Civil War, when business magnates began to avail themselves of the 14th Amendment's antidiscrimination protections. In the landmark 1886 Supreme Court case Santa Clara v. Southern Pacific, a railroad company refused to pay a special county tax in California, arguing (much as sludge hauler Synagro would do in Pennsylvania more than a century later) that to treat it differently from everyone else violated its constitutional rights. Speaking from the bench, Chief Justice Morrison Waite announced, "The court does not wish to hear argument on the question whether the provision in the 14th Amendment...applies to these corporations. We are all of the opinion that it does." After Santa Clara, federal judges began granting more and more rights to nonliving "persons." In 1922, the Supreme Court ruled that the Pennsylvania Coal Co. was entitled to "just compensation" under the Fifth Amendment because a state law, designed to keep houses from collapsing as mining companies tunneled under them, limited how much coal it could extract. In 1967 and 1978, businesses prevailed in Supreme Court cases citing the search-and-seizure provisions of the Fourth Amendment as protection against fire and workplace safety inspections. Corporate lawyers have also taken a shine to the First Amendment. In 1978, the Supreme Court agreed with corporations claiming that the state could not limit their political spending in an antitax campaign. Almost two decades later, a federal appellate court struck down a Vermont law requiring that milk from cows treated with bovine growth hormone be so labeled. Dairy producers had a First Amendment right "not to speak," the court said. In California, Nike invoked the First Amendment to fight a lawsuit arguing that the company's public relations materials misrepresented sweatshop labor conditions. Most recently, the Retail Industry Leaders Association has relied on the 14th Amendment's equal protection clause to fight Maryland's Wal-Mart law, designed to force the company to expand its spending on employee health care. The retail group has also sued Suffolk County, New York, which last fall passed a similar ordinance aimed at nonunionized supermarkets. Defenders of corporate rights argue that while the concept may be counterintuitive, the alternative is worse: "If for-profits didn't have First Amendment rights, then Congress could pass a law requiring every retailer to fly an American flag out front," notes Kent Greenfield, a law professor at Boston College who has written extensively on corporate accountability. Ditto for the Fourth Amendment: "Would we really think it's a good thing for the FBI to go into any establishment without a search warrant?" Yet given corporations' enormous resources, "equal rights" for industry can mean huge advantages?especially in the political arena. Last year, for example, Wal-Mart poured almost $400,000 into a ballot initiative to overturn a ban on certain big-box stores in Flagstaff, Arizona. Included in the media campaign was a newspaper ad comparing Wal-Mart's opponents to Nazi book burners. The retailer apologized but prevailed nonetheless, by 365 votes out of more than 17,000 cast. "What you've seen is the subsuming of the political process to the corporate agenda," says Thom Hartmann, author of Unequal Protections, a book about corporate personhood. BY THE LATE 1990S, fear and anger over sludge application in rural Pennsylvania?fueled by the deaths of an 11-year-old who got sick after riding his dirt bike through a sludge-treated field, and a 17-year-old who fell ill after exposure to sludge at a farm?was running high. Thomas Linzey found himself fielding calls from local officials desperate for ways to battle the "biosolids" applicators, as well as the corporate hog farms whose stench sickened people for miles around. Municipalities had been used to keeping those nuisances at bay with their own waste ordinances; but in 1997, in response to agribusiness lobbying, the state began enforcing a law that invalidated the local rules. Residents packed schools and fire stations to air their grievances. "These are the people with the shitkickers and the John Deere hats," Linzey says. "These are the people who salt the roads in the wintertime and fix the roads in the summertime. We had rural farmers coming to community meetings with the Declaration of Independence in their back pockets." To help the townships, Linzey wrote model ordinance after model ordinance. One banned corporations from owning farmland, an idea found on the books in nine states; 12 local governments in Pennsylvania passed it. Another banned companies with previous environmental violations from doing business in a township; 5 municipalities adopted that one. An ordinance requiring companies to do extra testing of sludge for health dangers has passed in more than 70 townships. Business took note. The Pennsylvania Chamber of Business and Industry's newsletter editorialized against a "stronger force than evil space invaders: the radical agenda of militant environmentalists that seems to have taken possession of the township supervisors." One corporation sued, claiming that the township's restrictions violated its rights with regard to "equal protection, due process, taking without just compensation, and rights guaranteed under the commerce clause." Last year, agribusiness took the fight to the state Legislature, supporting a law under which the state attorney general could sue any local government for passing an ordinance that "prohibits or limits a normal agricultural operation." (The first four such lawsuits were filed this past June.) During debate on the measure, says Linzey, "the suits were out in full force. It was about the heaviest type of lobbying we had ever seen." Into this fray stepped Supervisor Robertson, a former Peace Corps volunteer who had moved back to Licking Township in 1999 with his wife to grow tomatoes, berries, and garlic on a 95-acre farm fertilized with llama and goat droppings. In Licking Township, the chief qualification for supervisor is the ability to drive a road grader?elected officials do the pothole-filling themselves?and 42-year-old Robertson was appointed to fill a vacancy on the board. He's run twice since then, unopposed. "You don't have people beating down the doors to do this kind of stuff," he says wryly. In 2002, Robertson learned that several farmers in Licking Township were planning to spread sludge on their fields, and he called Linzey. They discussed tightening local waste regulations, and then Linzey mentioned a model ordinance he'd written to strip corporations of personhood. "The more I looked at that ordinance, the more I liked it," says Robertson, "and the more I realized that it had implications well beyond sewage sludge. This is an issue that is really fundamental to American government." The measure passed unanimously, making Licking the second Pennsylvania township to take such a stance. Somewhat to Linzey's disappointment, no one sued. PEOPLE FIGHTING corporate personhood like to think of themselves as heirs to the American Revolution. "The colonists realized they needed to tear up the very roots of colonialism, including corporate rule," says Jeff Milchen, director of the Montana-based ReclaimDemocracy.org, a fledgling group focused on corporate power. Indeed, the Revolution was partly an insurrection against entities like the East India Co., whose monopolistic tactics triggered the Boston Tea Party in 1773. The ordinances passed by the Pennsylvania townships, Milchen and others believe, are the modern-day version of such a backlash. Linzey has his revolution all mapped out. First, local governments will keep passing anti-personhood measures until one of them triggers a lawsuit in the federal courts. This, in turn, will force the judiciary to reconsider the constitutional principles involved. Linzey doesn't expect to win such a case: "People are colonized to think we can turn to the courts for remedy," he says, "and that the judge will hit himself on the forehead and say, 'Oh my God, 200 years of corporate rights are wrong.'" Rather, Linzey expects a ruling in favor of corporations to "rip away the veil of disbelief," prompting even more grassroots organizing and local lawmaking. "You treat the courts as a means to building an army," he says?one that will eventually lead to overhauls of state constitutions, and finally the federal one. The U.S. Constitution, he says, simply focuses too much on "property and commerce," and eventually pressure will build on Congress to call a convention and start from scratch. For now, though, the campaign remains stuck at Step One. "I'm not ready to say we have a movement," confesses Milchen. "We're not quite there yet." Notes Richard Grossman, who together with Linzey has taught a series of activist seminars around the country dubbed Democracy Schools: "The Populists had 40,000 lecturers organizing people across the U.S. We have five." Both Grossman and Linzey refuse to speak to journalists who haven't undergone their three-day training session; I was the first, to their knowledge, to abide by that rule and attend the seminar, at which a dozen earnest activists underwent a combination of people's history lessons and political shock therapy. Last year, Linzey lost his biggest battle thus far: In a case involving a Pennsylvania developer, a federal judge called his personhood arguments "tortured" and "illogical" and said she had come "very close" to disciplining him for filing a frivolous lawsuit. Lawrence Mitchell, a law professor at George Washington University and author of Corporate Irresponsibility, warns that Linzey's strategy is draining energy from more important battles. "I work with a lot of activist groups, and I sit at meetings banging my head on the table," he says. "This is deeply embedded constitutional law that no one's going to reverse." Mitchell believes activists' energy would be better spent on reforming state laws to make corporations more accountable. And yet, Linzey, Grossman, and company keep drawing converts. The Democratic parties of Maine, New Hampshire, and Washington state have passed resolutions opposing corporate personhood and the constitutional rights it confers. Last March, the 4,600 residents of Barnstead, New Hampshire, approved an ordinance?designed to shield the town's water supply from commercial bottlers?that voids corporate personhood. And in California's Humboldt County, where the timber giant Maxxam and its contractors spent more than $350,000 to recall a crusading district attorney, voters this year approved a ballot measure banning campaign spending by nonlocal businesses, and specifying that "No corporation shall be entitled to claim corporate constitutional rights or protections in an effort to overturn this law." Linzey knows that his undertaking appears quixotic but?perhaps fittingly?betrays not a hint of uncertainty. "The abolitionists did not seek to create a Slavery Protection Agency, or to make conditions for slaves a little better," he says. "They understood the Constitution left them remediless, and the only thing they could do was to change it." 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