Category: Corporate Statism

Hobby Lobby wants Jesus to rule the world

~ susie ~ 4 Comments

Hobby Lobby Huber Heights

No, really:

Outside of the Supreme Court case, little has been reported about Hobby Lobby’s political ties. The company is owned privately by the Green family and generates more than $3 billion per year in revenue from its 602 stores. The family proudly promotes its philanthropy to churches, ministries and Christian community centers, dedicating half of the company’s pretax earnings to Christian ministries. In 2007, Hobby Lobby’s founder and CEO, billionaire David Green, pledged $70 million to Oral Roberts University, bailing out the debt-ridden evangelical university. In 2012, Forbes reported, “Hobby Lobby’s cash spigot currently makes [Green] the largest individual donor to evangelical causes in America.”

But until now, its political connections have been obscure.

Hobby Lobby-related entities are some of the biggest sources of funding to the National Christian Charitable Foundation, which backed groups that collaborated in promoting the anti-gay legislation in Arizona – recently vetoed by Gov. Jan Brewer – that critics say would have legalized discrimination against gays and lesbians by businesses.

The path of SB 1062 to the Arizona statehouse was built by two groups, the Center for Arizona Policy and the Alliance Defending Freedom. Center for Arizona Policy employees regularly spoke in favor of the legislation, appearing as the grass-roots face of a bill that the center’s president, Cathi Herrod, characterized as “[making] certain that governmental laws cannot force people to violate their faith unless it has a compelling governmental interest–a balancing of interests that has been in federal law since 1993,” according to a statement on the group’s website. (One hundred and twenty-three Center for Arizona Policy-supported measures have been signed into law; its legislative agenda ranges from requiring intrusive ultrasounds for women seeking abortions to HB 2281, a bill that, if passed by the Arizona Senate, would exempt religious institutions from paying property taxes on leased or rented property.)
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How dare they

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

Citigroup Centre (1978)
Please, won’t you think about the poor shareholders?

The U.S. Federal Reserve on Wednesday rejected Citigroup’s planned payout to shareholders because of shortcomings found in its annual check-up of the financial health of the country’s biggest banks, the second time Citi was dealt a blow in the so-called stress tests.

Citi was among five banks that the Federal Reserve blocked from going through with planned payouts because of results from the stress tests.

The Fed also blocked plans for higher dividends or share buybacks submitted by the U.S. units of HSBC, RBS and Santander due to weaknesses in their capital planning processes. Zions Bancorp’s was the fifth bank whose plan were barred, though this was expected because Zions last week was the only bank to miss minimum hurdles for regulatory capital in a first tranche of the stress tests, which simulate a future crisis as severe as the 2007-09 credit meltdown.

… The five banks will not be allowed to move forward with proposed raises in dividends and share buybacks, though they can continue with shareholder payouts at the same pace as they did last year.

Take me out to the ball game

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

Pittsburgh Pirates vs Philadelphia Phillies

Baseball is slowly dying. Fewer kids play it or even watch it, and now it will be even fewer. And Comcast is making a nice Kevorkian cocktail to speed things along.

Comcast SportsNet Philadelphia, already one of the nation’s priciest regional sports networks, is seeking a subscriber surcharge on behalf of the wallet-busting, 25-year, $2.5 billion TV rights deal it negotiated with the Phillies in January.

As part of the deal, at least 33 Phillies games will relocate from the over-the-air – and free – TV station WPHL17 to the cable sports network.

Comcast SportsNet Philadelphia is asking pay-TV operators, including Comcast itself, to pay for those additional games on cable, according to multiple pay-TV operators who declined to be identified.

The sports network has warned that it would black out 33 Phillies games on the TV systems that decline to pay.

Comcast Cable has agreed to the extra charges. Pay-TV operators will either pass the surcharge along to customers with cable-TV rate hikes, or absorb the new costs. Comcast said it has no changes to announce to its cable rates.

Taxpayers are already subsidizing baseball, through their new stadiums and tax subsidies. Now they won’t even be able to watch games without paying for them.

Just plain greed. People should boycott them, but they won’t.

The brutal ageism of tech

~ susie

Three VCs
It’s not just tech. Many organizations think middle-aged people are too boring to have in their “cutting edge” shops:

Twenty years ago, when Matarasso first opened shop in San Francisco, he found that he was mostly helping patients in late middle age: former homecoming queens, spouses who’d been cheated on, spouses looking to cheat. Today, his practice is far larger and more lucrative than he could have ever imagined. He sees clients across a range of ages. He says he’s the world’s second-biggest dispenser of Botox. But this growth has nothing to do with his endearingly nebbishy mien. It is, rather, the result of a cultural revolution that has taken place all around him in the Bay Area.

Silicon Valley has become one of the most ageist places in America. Tech luminaries who otherwise pride themselves on their dedication to meritocracy don’t think twice about deriding the not-actually-old. “Young people are just smarter,” Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg told an audience at Stanford back in 2007. As I write, the website of ServiceNow, a large Santa Clara–based I.T. services company, features the following advisory in large letters atop its “careers” page: “We Want People Who Have Their Best Work Ahead of Them, Not Behind Them.”

And that’s just what gets said in public. An engineer in his forties recently told me about meeting a tech CEO who was trying to acquire his company. “You must be the token graybeard,” said the CEO, who was in his late twenties or early thirties. “I looked at him and said, ‘No, I’m the token grown-up.’ ”

In talking to dozens of people around Silicon Valley over the past eight months—engineers, entrepreneurs, moneymen, uncomfortably inquisitive cosmetic surgeons—I got the distinct sense that it’s better to be perceived as naïve and immature than to have voted in the 1980s.1 And so it has fallen to Matarasso to make older workers look like they still belong at the office. “It’s really morphed into, ‘Hey, I’m forty years old and I have to get in front of a board of fresh-faced kids. I can’t look like I have a wife and two-point-five kids and a mortgage,’ ” he told me.

Don’t drink the diet soda

~ susie

#diet #coke #cocacola #100th dis month... :p
Just in case you needed a reminder — oh, and don’t forget the only reason it got approved was because of Donald Rumsfeld:

“When aspartame was put before the FDA for approval, it was denied eight times. G.D. Searle, founder of aspartame, tried to get FDA approval in 1973. Clearly, he wasn’t bothered by reports from neuroscientist Dr. John Olney and researcher Ann Reynolds (hired by Searle himself) that aspartame was dangerous. Dr. Martha Freeman, a scientist from the FDA division of Metabolic and Endocrine Drug Products, declared, “The information submitted for review is inadequate to permit a scientific evaluation of clinical safety.” Freeman recommended that until the safety of aspartame was proven, marketing the product should not be permitted. Alas, her recommendations were ignored. Somehow, in 1974, Searle got approval to use aspartame in dry foods. However, it wasn’t smooth sailing from there. In 1975, the FDA put together a task force to review Searle’s testing methods. Task force team leader Phillip Brodsky said he “had never seen anything as bad as Searle’s testing” and called the test’s results “manipulated.” Before aspartame actually made it into dry foods, Olney and attorney and consumer advocate Jim Turner filed objections against the approval.

“In 1977, the FDA asked the U.S. attorney’s office to start grand jury proceedings against Searle for “knowingly misrepresenting findings and concealing material facts and making false statements in aspartame safety tests.” Shortly after, the U.S. attorney leading the investigation against Searle was offered a job by the law firm that was representing Searle. Later that same year, he resigned as U.S. attorney and withdrew from the case, delaying the grand jury’s investigation. This caused the statute of limitations on the charges to run out, and the investigation was dropped. And he accepted the job with Searle’s law firm. Stunning.
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Price-fixing cabel

~ susie

#google employees waiting for #googlebus across street from #eviction #gentrification

I’m sure we’ll have a congressional hearing on this illegal restraint any day now:

Confidential internal Google and Apple memos, buried within piles of court dockets and reviewed by PandoDaily, clearly show that what began as a secret cartel agreement between Apple’s Steve Jobs and Google’s Eric Schmidt to illegally fix the labor market for hi-tech workers, expanded within a few years to include companies ranging from Dell, IBM, eBay and Microsoft, to Comcast, Clear Channel, Dreamworks, and London-based public relations behemoth WPP. All told, the combined workforces of the companies involved totals well over a million employees.

[…] A confidential Google memo titled “Special Agreement Hiring Policy,” dating from November 2006, divides the company’s wage-fixing agreements into two categories: “Do Not Cold Call” and “Sensitive Companies.” Below that, the Google memo offers a brief chronology and list of companies.

[…] In September 2005, eBay CEO Meg Whitman called Schmidt complaining that Google’s recruiters were hurting profits and business at eBay. Schmidt emailed Google’s “Executive Management Committee”—the company’s top executives— summarizing Whitman’s, and “the valley”’s view that competing for workers by offering higher pay packages was “unfair”.

[…] Beneath that list, a rather cryptic warning suggesting that all across industries, illegal non-solicitation agreements were common everywhere: “Please be cautious when recruiting teams from any company to keep our candidates and potential employees safe from legal action. Most companies have non-solicit agreements which would limit or prohibit a candidate from asking a coworker to interview with us as well.” That passage alone is a stunning example of not just flagrantly illegal practices—it also shows how few rights companies assume their employees are entitled to, rights that Americans take for granted—such as the right to free speech, the right to assembly, the right to ask one’s own co-worker if he or she would be interested in taking a better job somewhere else.