CORPORATE RESPONSIBILITY

I saw a very interesting program tonight on CBS called Undercover Boss. The premise is that each week a business owner goes and works unannounced for a time with his labor force to examine how his or her employees are doing and to learn about and hopefully improve the operations of the company. This week's employer was the White Castle 400 plus store hamburger chain's CEO, David Rife (shown above, at left, while undercover).

Those of you not familiar with the White Castle chain probably live in the western or upper northeastern parts of the country. For, with the exception of a store near Sacramento, CA, and two near Los Angeles, White Castle restaurants are found almost exclusively in the midwest, middle south, and east. They do sell their hamburgers frozen in numerous supermarkets all across the country. The White Castle hamburger, nicknamed "slyder", is unique in its category. First, it is very small, measuring about 3 to 3 1/2 inches square when fully cooked, and very, very thin. It is steam-grilled rather than fried, comes with tiny onion bits and a pickle on top, and kind of melts into its bun casing, giving it an unusual texture and surprisingly good flavor. A single burger as of this writing and location, is priced at 64 cents. The chain also features french fries, onion rings or battered onion chips, a tiny cod fish sandwich, and various other unique items like battered chicken rings, battered whiefish "nibblers", mozzarella sticks, and battered clam strips (in season). Their batter is uncommonly good. White Castle also features the usual array of soft drinks, milk, and coffee, plus breakfast items, too.

Like most fast food operations, the pay for workers tends to be very low, and it is not unusual to find the work staff at each location made up of a mix of young, old, and minorities. But unlike most fast food corporations, White Castle is a privately, rather than publicly, held corporation that is family-owned, as it has been since its founding in Wichita, KS, back in 1921.

Maybe because of this, fourth-generation CEO David Rife decided to think outside the bun and go undercover to get an honest feel of how his employees do their jobs and what they go through in the process. In collusion with CBS, he portrayed himself as a laid-off equipment worker who came to White Castle for a change and to do something new. His undercover study took him to several of his stores, working both day and night shifts, in all capacities from grilling to prepping to drive-up window, and also to his company-owned bakery as well as their packing plant where they package product for supermarket sales across the country. In the process, he got a firsthand experience as to the difficulties and frustrations of each job, as well as a deep glimpse into the personal issues facing his coworker/employees.


This is in no sense an endorsement of White Castle, its products, or its business structure or practices. But I credit Mr. Rife for getting out and actually experiencing what the people who work for him and make his fortune possible truly go through in their service to him. He now knows the importance of their labor. Now, in reality, Mr. Rife may be a real son of a bitch to work for, and we already know from the wages he pays that he must throw quarters around like they were manhole covers. Someone may very well comment what deplorable working conditions the company had for them, or that Rife is a total phony and pulled this off as a PR gimmick to boost sales. I don't know. But he, unlike the overwhelming majority of corporate CEOs, actually went out, got into the nitty gritty, and got his hands dirty along with his workers. He now knows and understands them far better than he did previously. I am not naive enough to believe he will now turn around and hike all of their wages. But I do believe he will now appreciate the true value of those employees, and will understand more fully how the decisions he makes, miles and layers away from them in his boardroom, impact them. Instead of being a typical dead-ass corporate CEO, counting his profits and never giving a thought to the well-being or feelings of his employees, taking them for granted each and every day, he made a sincere attempt at exercising CORPORATE RESPONSIBILITY. And that will be good for all.


This working among the workers activity Mr. Rife undertook should be a required undertaking for every single corporate CEO in the world! Perhaps then we would see more productive CEOs, (truly earning their outrageously high paychecks) able to make informed and intelligent decisions regarding their labor force and business policies!

18,857

"For years, we've talked about shutting down overseas tax havens that let companies set up operations to avoid paying taxes in America. That's what our budget will finally do...we're closing one of our largest tax loopholes that lets subsidiaries of some of our biggest companies tell the IRS that they're paying taxes abroad; tell foreign governments that they're paying taxes elsewhere; and avoid paying taxes anywhere."
- President Barack Obama -

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I stand solidly behind the President in his effort to close these shamefully ridiculous tax loopholes huge corporations have been expoliting unethically for many years. I wrote about U.S. corporations setting up phony tax havens offshore in my March 27, 2009 blog titled "WANTED FOR TREASON: I.S. CORPORATIONS." At the time, I had no idea of the extent of this problem. Thanks to a very illuminating Rachel Maddow Show segment on MSNBC last week, I now know, and I am outraged now even more than before.

A total of 18,857 phony companies supposedly reside in that 5 story building pictured above. It is called "Ugland House" and it, as well as those 18,857 phony companies, all share its same address on S. Church St., George Town, Cayman Islands. Of the 18,857 phony companies with supposed mailing adresses and company headquarters based right there, half had billing addresses right here in the U.S.A., according to a 2008 Government Accounting Office (GAO) study! In 2007, 83 of the top 100 U.S. companies used offshore tax havens, including an astounding 25% of our government's largest contractors! The names of corporations using these handy tax dodges reads like a Who's Who of American business: Coca Cola, Intel, General Electric, Tyco, Seagate, Bank of America, Morgan Stanley, Citigroup, and many, many others. The last three I listed here by name even received government bailouts totaling BILLIONS as part of the controversial TARP program. So much for corporate morality and patriotic loyalty. Kids, if you want to be rich when you grow up, don't bother robbing banks. Just set up a corporation with phony offshore subsidiaries, and then never pay your taxes. To hell with your country.

Here's how the little scam works: American corporations, headquartered and realistically based here, file the name of a dummy shell company subsidiary with the Security and Exchange Commission, giving its address as being Ugland House in the Caymans, or elsewhere outside the country. They take tax deductions for phony overseas expenses and then don't report any of the overseas income. Citigroup listed an astonishing 427 foreign subsidiaries , including 91 in small Luxembourg, 90 in the Cayman Islands, and even 12 in the tiny Channel Islands! Bank of America showed 115 foreign subsidiaries in the Caymans, Bermuda, the Bahamas, Luxembourg, and even on the miniscule rock of Gibraltar! And good ol' Morgan Stanley listed 273 foreign subsidiaries supposedly operating in the Caymans, the Marshall Islands, and even the Island of Jersey. The list goes on and on and on, and has increased steadily since 2004.

This shows how immoral, wholly self-serving, greedy, and obsessed with profit our corporations and business community have become. Our corporate tax rate stands at 35% today, much, much lower than it was 60 years ago. Huge corporations have successfully shifted the burden of tax paying away from themselves onto wage earners, mainly in the middle and working classes. Yet American corporations still scream for tax relief and resort to phony scams to avoid paying taxes like I outline here today. Though most middle income Americans are taxed at an effective rate of 25% and actually pay right around that amount, by using dummy foreign subsidiaries, huge corporations can effecrtively pay only 3%, 1%, or even ZERO income tax on real earnings totaling BILLIONS. This wouldn't even be so bad except for the fact that many of these corporations have exported good paying American jobs overseas to cheap foreign labor markets while freezing or lowering American wage and benefit scales on the jobs still performed here. When placed in the context of ever-rising food, fuel, and pharmaceutical costs as well as skyrocketing corporate board member pay and benefit paxkages, this greedy corporate behavior is inexcusable and indefensible. Everyone is belt-tightening and suffering, especially those on fixed incomes, except the piggish, cheating corporations and their insulated and heartless executives. They, too, MUST pay their fair share and tighten THEIR belts too! ESPECIALLY, since we the taxpayers who actually PAY taxes, recently bailed out a number of these freeloading corporations who DON'T pay taxes, or who pay very, very little!

Naturally, conservative Republican crybabies like Grover Norquist, the Club for (Corporate) Growth, and Senator Mitch McConnell are all screaming foul at Obama's loophole-closing effort. McConnell even had the unmitigated gall to suggest that the President's action amounted to some kind of unfair tax increase on business. That, of course, was a typically distorted statement coming from a lamebrain conservative who obviously places the wants of big business far above the needs of ordinary citizens. For this action is not at all a tax increase, but rather a way of enforcing the existing tax laws. The anti-tax crowd also claim that the move will cripple business and curb economic growth. That, too, is an absolute lie and rubbish. In their zeal to stop Obama, they don't even bother to consider that a good chunk of the revenue which the government will now recover will go directly into a Research and Development Tax Credit for business to develop new products, services, and industries here within our borders.

I wish Obama and congressional Democrats would put some real teeth into enforcing the closure of these phony tax havens and prosecute those who have defrauded the government by using them. For the greedy and traitorous act of deliberate and fraudulent tax evasion, in a time of war for the country, when nearly 1 in 7 of us cannot afford health insurance and have none, when the middle class and poor are facing unparalleled modern economic hardship, when elderly and poor on fixed incomes sometimes have to choose between food or medication, here are filthy rich CEOs, CFOs, and huge corporations cheating on taxes and pocketing the cash. Were it up to me, I would like to see long jail terms at hard labor coupled with heavy fines for these offenders. Unfortunately, I will probably have to settle for a mere closing of their disgusting loopholes instead. Either way, you corporate executives had better start toeing the line, because the overwhelming majority of this country is fed up with your immoral and unethical business practices coming at our expense. We're tired of you using our taxpayer-funded roads to transport your imported goods for sale to us but not paying for it. We're tired of you using our taxpayer-funded police and fire departments to protect your property but not paying for it. We're tired of your using our taxpayer-funded schools to educate children but not paying for it. If you don't want to follow Sheriff Obama's rules, I'm sure a number of us average folk would be more than happy to form economic posses to run you down and string you up. The days of your unchallenged arrogance and shenanigans are over, boys. This is NOT an economic wild, wild west where you can do whatever, whenever, and however you damn well please and to hell with the rest of us! You had better adopt a new, permanent mindset---NOW!

Oh, by the way, the REAL occupant of Ugland House, ALL of it, is the dubious law firm of Maples and Calder, whose specialty is apparently setting up American corporations with phony shell companies using their Ugland House address for tax evasion purposes.

NEXT UP: "Time for REAL Representation! (Part IV)"

WANTED FOR TREASON: U.S. CORPORATIONS!

"I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial by strength and bid defiance to the laws of our country."
- Thomas Jefferson -

"A corporation is an ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility."
- Ambrose Bierce -

"A criminal is a person with predatory instincts who has not yet sufficient capital to form a corporation."
- Howard Scott -

"Fascism should be more properly called corporatism, for it is the merger of state and corporate power."
- Benito Mussolini -

"I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country. Corporations have been enthroned, an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money-power of the country will endeavor to prolong it's reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until the wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed."
- ABRAHAM LINCOLN, in a Nov. 21, 1864 letter to Col. William F. Elkins -



I laugh every time I hear modern day conservative Republicans declaring that they belong to "the party of Lincoln." They are ignorant fools. For Abraham Lincoln was a LIBERAL who believed in a strong Federal Government. And, as the quote above proves, he correctly foresaw the dangers of concentrated capital so I believe he would have fought the influence of today's corporations tooth and nail. In fact, evidence strongly suggests that were he alive today, Lincoln would be a liberal Democrat and would undoubtedly be derisively labeled by such short-sighted and far-right Republicans as John Boehner, Mitch McConnell, Jim DeMint, Eric Cantor, and John Cornyn, as a "far left liberal extremist." This is because today's Republican Party has shifted so far right, and is so -ro-big business that its beliefs about the role of business versus that of government would put it into direct opposition to the beliefs of Thomas Jefferson AND Abraham Lincoln, two of our greatest and most visionary Presidents. Surely both are spinning in their graves at the speed of light, as is Republican Teddy Roosevelt, to see the unprecedented influence corporations now have over our government and society as well. They have effectively bought control of the government and are using it for their own ends.

This unfortunate rise in corporate power got a tremendoust boost in 1886, when the government bowed to pressure from the then-huge railroad industry in the infamous Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company Supreme Court decision. A clearly out-to-lunch (and bought out by the railroad) then-Chief Justice Morrison Rennick White prefaced the proceedings with a shocking statement that "the court does not wish to hear argument on the question whether the provision in the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution which forbids a State to deny any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the law, applies to these corporations. We are all of the opinion that it does." In one fell swoop, this very poor decision by the Supreme Court effectively gave the corporation the same rights as living persons. But this ill-fated and errant decision failed to define its responsibilities and so we have been plagued with corporate excesses to this day.

In the magnificently informative and entertaining 2003 Canadian documentary "The Corporation", this premise of the corporation being a living being is taken literally and examined closely on a number of levels. A comprehensive history of the corporation, legal decisions regarding it, and its behavioral aspects are all presented in a very revealing and thought-provoking manner. The conclusion: The corporation is a dangerous psycopath. It is anti-social, completely self-centered, callously disregards others' feelings, has no guilt, has a reckless penchant for ignoring the safety of others, and chronically lies to obtain profit. I would strongly recommend this film to everyone. A DVD of it can be bought relatively inexpensively on Amazon.com, and you also may be able to rent it, or find it at your public library. So please give it a view and even tell your friends about it. It is truly too good and too relevant to pass up.

Just Thursday night, David Shuster broke an infuriating story about corporations on his show "1600 Pennsylvania Avenue" on MSNBC. It turns out President Obama has asked former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker to head a new "Tax Code Review Panel" in an effort to close some dubious corporate tax loopholes. Why? It turns out that the corporations recently bailed out by us taxpayers, plus numerous others, have all been avoiding paying federal taxes for years by fraudulently listing their subsidiaries as being based out of the country in phony tax havens like the Cayman Islands, Andorra, Luxembourg, Switzerland, and even Singapore. It is estimated corporations have as much as $12 TRILLION squirreled away in these havens which keeps those funds safe from taxation. This has deprived our government, now deep in deficit, engaged in two costly wars, with a crumbling infrastructure, even bailing out these irresponsible banks and other corporations, and unable to provide health care for 47+ million (roughly 1 out of every 7) of its citizens, with an estimated $100 BILLION shortfall in revenue it could dearly use! These same corporations have employed well-paid and well-funded lobbyists to influence the abovementioned foreign governments to keep details of the tax havens secret and inaccessible. Consider this: Morgan Stanley lists an astounding 158 foreign subsidiaries; Citigroup an incredible 90 (in the Cayman Islands alone!), and Bank of America boasts a whopping 59. Unfortunately, that is just the tip of the iceberg as far as American corporations' foreign subsidiaries go. There are many, many, many others. Some are in fact legitimate, but the overwhelming majority are set up solely to keep from paying taxes to the American government. Yet they all rely on the American government to fund roads their products are transported on, a postal system to bring their mail, schools to educate their children and labor force, and defense to protect their investments overseas. These greedy corporations ask for very much, and offer to return very little. In fact, they are stealing from the very hand that feeds them!

In business practice, corporations are set up to shield their owners from individual loss or responsibility arising from unforseen market developments. If, for example, the corporation expends a large amount of capital to procure sproducts or materials and then something goes wrong resulting in the corporation's inability to pay for those materials, the corporation's owners are not held personally liable for the procured, but unpaid for, materials. In other words, the corporation and its officers can make money and have rights, but cannot be held responsible or incur personal cost. This avoidance of responsibility is wrong and can be (and is) abused. Not only that, but corporations often employ a one-sided, beneficial-mainly-to-them methodology in doing business. In the case of large insurance corporations, they cherry-pick who and who they will not cover. In health insurance, they basically dictate how treatment and medications are delivered, overruling physicians and dictating terms. They boot people out of hospitals after major surgery in many cases the very next day, and they dictate medication dosage. This is done for the profit of the corporation, not for the benefit of the patient. Pharmaceutical corporations routinely sell the exact same medications to Canada at prices far lower than those offered to the United States, even though our tax dollars underwrite up to 30% of their research and development costs! This too is done for their profit and not for the benefit of citizens living in the very same communities in which the corporation is based! In my logic, if you are classified as a living human being and are afforded the rights of a living human being, so too should you bear the responsibilities of a living human being. The Supreme Court was grievously wrong to grant living rights to corporations but to make them immune to responsibility. For all living beings have a responsibility to one another and must pay a price or be punished when injuriously deviating from said responsibility. Should a person engage in acts which damage others' property, deprive them of their rights, or cause injury or death to others, that person is justifiably and individually fined and/or punished. And so too must it be with the officers of corporations. As laws and legal decisions have many loopholes, so too must one be found to reverse that foolish, highly unjust, unfairly preferential, and dangerous 1886 Supreme Court decision.

Merriam Webster defines "treason" in one sense as "the betrayal of a trust: TREACHERY." I would suggest U.S. corporations' deliberate and deceitful actions in setting up fictitious foreign subsidiaries to deprive our government of needed funds fits that definition. In a time of war, with millions of people's basic needs in jeopardy or going unmet, with even our military underfunded and underequipped, I would say this corporate hoarding and tax evasion constitutes a direct threat to our government and its people and endangers our very security. For this reason, I propose that the officers and directors of these offending corporations be held personally liable and receive harsh punishment for tax evasion and treason, just as an individual would for tax evasion, or for stealing from the military in time of war. These people have been getting by scot-free with far too much for far too long, and their day of reckoning must come. NOW!

CORPORATE GREED KILLS!

According to a briefing given reporters by Michael Rogers, Director of Regional Investigations at the Food and Drug Administration, a peanut butter processing plant in Blakely, GA has been identified as the source of a salmonella outbreak that has sickened more than 500 people and was responsible for 8 deaths across 43 states and Canada. The plant, owned by Peanut Corp. of America out of Lynchburg, VA, had been cited numerous times throughout 2007 and 2008 for salmonella contamination, but kept shipping product anyway. The FDA found that the plant's manufacturing conditions differed significantly from good manufacturing practice and had "an adverse effect upon the quality of that product, making it adulterated." In fact, once the plant had received the FDA's lab findings, the company contracted with other, presumably hand-picked, labs, which found no evidence of bacterial contamination, so, getting the results it wanted, the company happily kept ship[ping infected product. This approach reminds me of my elderly father's folly regarding high blood pressure. His doctor told him on a visit that he had borderline high blood pressure and prescribed medication for it. My father abjors medications and resists them like the plague. Ever the skeptic, he went out and bought a home blood pressure measuring device. I watched him one day recently, rapidly taking three or four successive readings in a row, not bothering to properly recalibrate the device before each reading. I noted he had written down three differnt readings. When I asked him what he was doing, he said, "i'm looking for the best reading!" So then I said to him, "Do you want the BEST reading, or the ACCURATE one?" He looked at me like I was half nuts and exclaimed indignantly, "Why, the BEST one, of course!" My father can be excused, kind of, because his actions affected only him and he's nearly 87. Peanut Corp. of America CANNOT be excused for what they have done to the innocent public, for their actions were based on greed and negligence.

I have been a Type I diabetic, since 1957, diagnosed just after my 3rd birthday. I have injected insulins daily all these years since then, and joke with my friends that I am the only human pin cushion they know. One of the types of insulin I use is made only by the pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly & Co. I have used their products faithfully for more than 50 years. Now that I am temporarily (I hope) out of work and can no longer afford health insurance, I am finding out just how ungodly expensive my meds have become. Just the other day, I was shocked to pay $109 plus change for a bottle of this made-by-Lilly-only insulin purchased at a pharmacy known nationally for its low prices. But I was horrified to learn only yesterday that I could have purchased this VERY SAME product out of Canada for only $43.25 per bottle, less than HALF what I had just paid here in the USA! I resent the fact that Eli Lilly, who has consistently shown great profit in recent years, has a CEO paying himself more than $7 million per year (and a board of directors also exceeedingly well paid), who obviously feels it essential to charge the dealers and citizens of their own country MORE THAN DOUBLE what they charges those in Canada. This, too, CANNOT be excused, for ANY reason!

I once knew a guy in college who was an avid Socialist. With great zeal he used to cheerily urge fellow students to sign up for Young Socialist, a publication which had been put out by the Socialist Workers Party, or attend the latest Socialist rally or protest. I saw him smilingly exclaim literally hundreds of times his favorite slogan: "Human needs before profits!" Having witnessed the demoralizing aspect of the Soviet Union's forced dictatorship over the years, I gradually abandoned my youthful, like-minded idealism to favor instead welfare-state capitalism. I recognized that profit was essential to the capitalistic system and that it was a good motivator. But then came the greed of the Reagan, Bush I, and Bush II years, and I began to question again how capitalism has been practiced and abused in this country.

As I think back to Sarah Palin and John McCain last fall, and John Boner (ooops, Boehner), and others today on the far right, corporate Republican, Chamber of Commerce scope, all condemning socialism and socialists as evil, I really wonder. Their heroes in that corporate Republican world are clearly ripping off most of the population, and corporate greed is indeed killing Americans as well as causing them unnecessary financial stress. Who really is the more evil of the two: Socialists, or the corporate bandits? Those Republicans saying the former should tell that to the families and friends of those who died from tainted peanut butter, or to millions of diabetics like me who are getting screwed by Eli Lilly. But, Republicans, we won't be listening to you.