Posts Tagged ‘Corporation Watch’
Mommy Bloggers or Corporate Shills?
P.J. Huffstutter and Jerry Hirsch writes in the LA Times:
On most days, Andrea Deckard can be found in her home office, digging through stacks of coupons and grocery receipts for money saving tips and recipes that she can share with readers of her Mommy Snacks blog.
That is, when the stay-at-home mom isn’t being wined and dined by giant food companies. Earlier this year, Frito-Lay flew her to Los Angeles to meet celebrities such as model Brooke Burke and the Spice Girls’ Mel B, while pitching her on its latest snack ad campaign.
More recently, Nestle paid to put her and 16 other so-called “mommy bloggers” — and one daddy blogger — up at the posh Langham Huntington hotel in Pasadena, treated them to a private show at the Magic Castle in Hollywood and sent packages of frozen Omaha Steaks to their families to tide them over while the women were away learning all about the company’s latest product lines.
In return, Deckard and her virtual sisterhood filed Twitter posts raving about Nestle’s canned pumpkin, Wonka candy and Juicy Juice drinks.
“People have accused us of being corporate shills,” said Deckard, a Monroe, Ohio, mother of three whose junkets have also included a free trip to Frito-Lay’s Texas headquarters. Deckard, noting that she is up front with her readers about such trips, said they are educational for her and her fans, and “just fun.”
Besides, she added, “it’s not like I sold my soul for a chocolate bar.”
Meet the New Boss
From Nick P. at Black Sun Gazette:
We’re almost a full year into the Obama regime, and over a year past his election. There is significant disconnect between the rhetoric and the reality. I was widely pilloried for not joining in the choruses of “hope and change.” While I acknowledge that most Americans voting for a black man for President represents something, I disagree with most people about what it represents.
If nothing else, having a black president highlights what black people living in urban areas run by black Democrats already know — black Democrats are dangerous hustlers, charlatans of the highest order who prey on their own people. Illusions in Obama quickly shatter in light of the reality. Despite repeated attempts by craven apologists of Obama to represent him as some…
Ford Workers Lead The Way Forward
From Nick P. at Black Sun Gazette
Ford workers, under economic blackmail from the federal government and the UAW “union” rejected a concession contract two weeks ago. The vote represented the first rejection of a national contract since 1982. For anyone seeking evidence that the American working class is still a highly militant force- and that their “unions” are little more than a management organization of the bosses- the struggle at Ford provides an excellent case study.
Pfizer Broke the Law by Promoting Drugs for Unapproved Uses
David Evans writes on Bloomberg:
Prosecutor Michael Loucks remembers clearly when lawyers for Pfizer Inc., the world’s largest drug company, looked across the table and promised it wouldn’t break the law again.
It was January 2004, and the attorneys were negotiating in a conference room on the ninth floor of the federal courthouse in Boston, where Loucks was head of the health-care fraud unit of the U.S. Attorney’s Office. One of Pfizer’s units had been pushing doctors to prescribe an epilepsy drug called Neurontin for uses the Food and Drug Administration had never approved.
In the agreement the lawyers eventually hammered out, the Pfizer unit, Warner-Lambert, pleaded guilty to two felony counts of marketing a drug for unapproved uses.
New York-based Pfizer agreed to pay $430 million in criminal fines and civil penalties, and…
Wall Street Bonuses to Rise 40 Percent
Douglas A. McIntyre writes in MSN Money:
There has been plenty of evidence that firms like Goldman Sachs have had such huge profits that their bonus payouts may be at all-time highs.
The federal government has systematically begun to control bank pay packages. The Treasury “pay czar” is effectively controlling compensation at companies which still owe TARP money. The Fed is pressuring other large financial firms to tie pay to risk.
None of those efforts seems to be working well, because bankers are ignoring the signals from Washington.
A new compensation survey described in the Wall Street Journal predicts that Wall Street incentive pay will rise 40% this year. For those in the fixed-income part of the industry, the increase could be closer to 60%.
Data about pay packages will be available, in some cases, as…
Goldman Sachs and Citigroup Received Swine Flu Vaccine First
KAREN MATTHEWS writes on the AP via Google News:
Some of New York’s biggest companies, including Wall Street giants Goldman Sachs and Citigroup, received doses of swine flu vaccine for at-risk employees, drawing criticism that the hard-to-find vaccine is going first to the privileged.
Hospitals, universities and the Federal Reserve Bank also got doses of the vaccine for employees who need it the most, such as pregnant women or chronically ill workers, according to the city’s health department.
In order to receive the vaccine, companies had to have their own medical staff. Distributing large doses of the vaccine to such businesses is “a great avenue for vaccinating people at risk,” said Jessica Scaperotti, spokeswoman for the city Department of Health and Mental Hygiene.
But critics said Wall Street firms should not have access to…
Your Medical Records Are Stored Online and Sold in the Open Market
Kim Zetter writes on WIRED’s Threat Level:
When patients visit a physician or hospital, they know that anyone involved in providing their health care can lawfully see their medical records. But unknown to patients, an increasing number of outside vendors that manage electronic health records also have access to that data, and are reselling the information as a commodity.
The revelation comes in a recent New York Times article about how so-called “scrubbed” patient data isn’t as anonymous as people think. The piece focuses primarily on how anonymized data can be cross-bred with other publicly available databases, such as voting records, which subverts the anonymity. Buried near the end of the article is the news that medical data is collected, anonymized and sold, not by insurance agencies and health care providers, but by…
Judge OKs Challenge to Human-Gene Patents
From Wired:
A federal judge ruled Monday that a lawsuit can move forward against the Patent and Trademark Office and the research company that was awarded exclusive rights to human genes known to detect early signs of breast and ovarian cancer.The first-of-its-kind lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties Union and the Public Patent Foundation at the Benjamin Cardozo School of Law claims that the patents violate free speech by restricting research.
U.S. District Judge Robert W. Sweet of New York, in ruling that the case may proceed to trial, noted that the litigation might open the door to challenges of a host of other patented genes. About one-fifth of the human genome is covered under patent applications and claims.
[Read more at Wired]
Long Hair, Costumes and Kids: Things Disney Parks Have Banned
Alvin Ward writes in mental_floss:
Disneyland may be the Happiest Place on Earth, but don’t think that means you can just waltz in and do whatever you want. In fact, Mickey Mouse’s theme parks have banned quite a few things over the years. Here are just a few of the things on which the Mouse has dropped his hammer.
1. Long Hair: Until the late 1960s, men could either have flowing locks or enjoy Adventureland, but they definitely couldn’t do both. According to Snopes, if a long-haired fellow tried to buy a ticket, a cast member would discreetly and politely inform the man that his hairdo didn’t jive with the park’s unwritten dress code before escorting him from the park.
2. Facial Hair: It’s tough to find a picture of Walt Disney without a mustache, but for decades it was even tougher to find a Disney employee who had a ‘stache of his own. Starting in 1957, workers at Disney parks were not allowed to have long hair, grow beards, or wear mustaches. (The underlying logic was that park patrons wouldn’t want to buy a $9 soda from some filthy bearded hippie or mustachioed Snidely Whiplash type.)
In 2000, Disney was having trouble drumming up enough manpower to staff its parks, so it relaxed the facial hair ban. Employees were finally allowed to grow mustaches, provided they kept them trimmed and groomed. Beards didn’t fare so well, though; they stayed on the forbidden list.
Read more in mental_floss
Senators Who Could And/Or Will Screw Up Health Care Reform
From The Huffington Post:
The public option: it (sort of) lives (maybe)! Or so says Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), who boldly announced in yesterday’s anxiously-anticipated press conference that the bill would contain something public option-esque. Since then, it has quickly become the fast-moving subject du jour.
Naturally, it’s worth pointing out that Reid didn’t manage to get behind the so-called “robust,” chipotle-flavored public option that progressives favor. Nor is it the Chuck Schumer, “cool-ranch” version of the public option.
Instead, we get the “opt-out” public option, in which various states could choose to bail on the program after a year, if their public servants so desired. Political mavens are fascinated by the “opt-out” possibilities, because it flips the “Waterloo” script and dares Republicans at the state level to risk their political…
The Robber Barons Are Back — Hide Your Money!
From Alternet:
On Oct. 14, the Dow Jones Industrial Average barely passed the 10,000 mark for the first time in over a year.
That gave the “green shoots” crowd spasms of joy at the possibility of a recovery from the worst recession to hit America in seven decades. Of course, the last one eventually morphed into the Great Depression lasted at least a full decade, rewired our currency, led to world war, ruined countless lives and set a universal standard for societal implosions.
The fire this time? It’s almost out, say a series of decorated financial experts within and without the mainstream.
But most of them blew the call on the implosion, and are still blowing it today. We are not in Paul Krugman’s Great Recession, or the “deep and long recession” coined by…
T-Mobile Sued For ‘Catastrophic’ Losses Of Data
By Wendy Davis of online media daily:
T-Mobile’s Sidekick data loss isn’t just a messy public relations problem. The debacle also could leave the company with some big legal bills.
This week, T-Mobile was hit with two separate class-action lawsuits alleging that the company misled consumers into believing that their data was more secure than was the case. “One of the major selling points of Sidekicks was that users always had access to their personal data, and that such data would and could be properly entrusted to defendants to maintain and retain, safely, securely and always available,” Sidekick user Maureen Thompson alleges in a lawsuit filed in federal district court in San Jose, Calif.
T-Mobile said Saturday that photos, contacts and other data that wasn’t currently on Sidekick devices had most likely been…
Telephone Company Is Arm of Government, Feds Admit in Spy Suit
Ryan Singel writes on Wired’s Threat Level:
The Department of Justice has finally admitted it in court papers: The nation’s telecom companies are an arm of the government — at least when it comes to secret spying.
Fortunately, a judge says that relationship isn’t enough to quash a rights group’s open records request for communications between the nation’s telecoms and the feds.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation wanted to see what role telecom lobbying of the Justice Department played when the government began its year-long, and ultimately successful, push to win retroactive immunity for AT&T and others being sued for unlawfully spying on American citizens.
The feds argued that the documents showing consultation over the controversial telecom immunity proposal weren’t subject to the Freedom of Information Act since they were protected as “intra-agency” records:
“The communications…
