Tag: corporations

Biden To Give $850 Million to a Chinese-Owned Battery Company

Last summer, the Biden administration announced an $850 million conditional loan to a company called KORE Power to build a battery production plant in Arizona. The purpose was to decrease the United States’ reliance on China’s batteries, but KORE Power has enlisted its co-owner, a Chinese battery maker, to help build the taxpayer-funded facility, according to court filings.

The Biden administration touted the project as a way to “strengthen the domestic battery supply chain” and combat China’s grip on the global market. KORE, with its Idaho headquarters and small staff of around 150 employees, seemed to have the perfect all-American background for the job.

But that backstory conflicts with court documents and corporate disclosure filings, obtained by the Washington Free Beacon, which outline the company’s extensive roots in China.

The records reveal that KORE is 14 percent co-owned by Do-Fluoride New Materials (DFD), a Chinese battery manufacturer led by Chinese Communist Party official Li Shijiang. One of KORE’s directors is Li Shijiang’s daughter, Li Lingyun, who also serves as vice chair of DFD and as vice president of China’s state-supervised Patent Protection Association.

The KORE loan is the latest example of how the Biden administration’s green energy funding is benefiting China due to the country’s dominance in the global market. Last year, the Department of Energy was forced to cancel a $200 million grant to the battery maker Microvast, after the Free Beacon reported that the company operated primarily from China.

In a court filing in November, KORE disclosed that DFD New Energy, a China-based subsidiary of Do-Fluoride New Materials, will help it build the Arizona battery plant.

“The facility is under construction at present and DFD New Energy will assist in the buildout,” said KORE’s CEO Lindsay Gorrill.

The Department of Energy confirmed to the Free Beacon that DFD will help KORE build the Arizona facility by providing intellectual property, research and development, and engineering capabilities. The department said it conducted “extensive due diligence” of the arrangement, adding that KORE has been working to reduce its Chinese ownership, with the goal of eventually becoming completely independent of Chinese technology.

“The partnership with DFD provides KORE with access to proven IP and an experienced team—experience that does not currently exist at [that] scale [in] the United States, but through this partnership will be transferred to American workers and to an American company,” said the Department of Energy.

Some links between KORE and DFD have previously been reported. In June, the Department of Energy’s loan director, Jigar Shah, said the Idaho company would rely on “technology from a Chinese company, DFD, to manufacture battery cells in Arizona.” Shah’s comments were reported by the Daily Caller, which also noted DFD’s connections to the Chinese Communist Party.

In October, the inspector general for the Department of Energy told Congress that KORE’s use of technology from DFD “clearly does not support the legislation’s goals of U.S. technology development since this project deploys Chinese intellectual property.”

But the extent of the relationship between the two companies—including DFD’s ownership stake in KORE and its involvement in building the Arizona plant—has not previously been reported.

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Fascism: Liberal Policies Transferring Taxpayer Money to Corporations

Liberal policies meet the definition of Fascism: Money for migrants, vaccine requirements, and diversity, equity, and inclusion are government policies that enrich a small number of favored and obedient private companies at taxpayers’ expense.

Liberals call everyone they hate a fascist. However, fascism is a form of state capitalism and is much closer to liberal policies than conservative ones. Conservatives advocate for more individual choice and fewer government regulations in commerce and private life. On the other hand, liberals seek more government intervention, increased spending, free money, and greater compliance.

Conservatives effectively say, “Eat what you want, but you pay for it.” Liberals say, “The government will pay for it, but you have to eat what we tell you.” The government gets to pick which restaurants receive the tax dollars paying for the meal and who gets to eat the meal, but all working people have to pay for the meal through taxes, whether they eat or not.

Some states and municipalities are mandating that students have COVID shots as a requirement for attendance. The parents pay school taxes (property tax), but the children can be barred if they do not comply with COVID and vaccine requirements. The vaccines are distributed by for-profit, private companies selected by the government. And the program is ultimately paid for by taxpayers. Ironically, a parent can pay both the school tax and the income tax funding the vaccine requirements and still have their children excluded from school because they refused to comply.

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Study Finds 80 Percent Americans Exposed to Fertility-Lowering Chemicals in Cheerios, Quaker Oats

According to a recent study, four in five Americans tested positive for an agricultural chemical found in several wheat and oat products, including brands like Cheerios and Quaker Oats.

The peer-reviewed study, published in the JESEE journal on Feb. 15, looked at urine samples from American citizens to determine their exposure to chlormequat chloride—a plant growth chemical. Exposure to the chemical can result in lower fertility and harm developing fetuses even at doses below acceptable levels set by regulators. Researchers detected chlormequat in 80 percent of urine samples collected between 2017 and 2023, with “a significant increase in concentrations for samples from 2023.”

The chemical was detected in “92 percent of oat-based foods purchased in May 2023, including Quaker Oats and Cheerios,” said the Environmental Working Group (EWG), which conducted the study.

Out of 25 conventional oat products tested, 23 had “detectable levels” of chlormequat. One in eight organic oat products had the chemical, while two in nine wheat products had low concentrations of chlormequat.

Researchers collected 96 urine samples, out of which 77 showed the presence of chlormequat. The numbers suggest that the subjects likely underwent “continuous exposure” to the chemical since chlormequat leaves the body about 24 hours after ingestion.

The frequency of the chemical in samples was observed to rise with time. In 2017, 69 percent of samples had chlormequat, which jumped to 74 percent in 2018-2022 and then to 90 percent in 2023.

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Wall Street Is Finding New Ways to Milk the Prison System

As part of a growing effort to stop prison telecom monopolies from charging exorbitant fees for calls between prisoners and their families, last year Minnesota became one of the first states to make all phone calls free for prisoners. And to eliminate the kickback system perpetuating the scheme, the state barred its agencies from collecting commissions on prison phone services, as well as on video calling and e-messaging.

But records obtained by us show Minnesota’s Department of Corrections still collected hundreds of thousands of dollars in kickbacks last year from commissions on other prison services private telecom companies controlled — including money transfers, music access, and other entertainment behind bars. All in all, the records suggest the telecom firms brought in nearly $3 million in revenue from an ever-increasing array of nonphone prison services in the state.

Minnesota, which was the fourth state in the country to make the government, not prisoners, pay for phone calls, is a case study in how prison communication companies and their private equity owners have managed to preserve their symbiotic relationship with state corrections agencies despite reforms — at the major expense of incarcerated people and their families.

According to a Minnesota state watchdog agency, under a current prison contract, people in state prisons must pay between $1.06 and $1.99 to listen to a single song on state-issued devices. Under a new contract with another telecom vendor, the cost will increase to up to $2.36 per song — and the state will pocket a bigger cut of the revenue.

“For-profit telecom companies are making hundreds of millions of dollars from incarcerated people and their families, while Minnesota families are going into debt to stay connected with their loved ones through phone calls and video calls,” said Margaret Zadra, Minnesota’s ombudsperson of corrections. “For-profit companies should not be allowed to erode that connection to line their own pockets.”

As digital tablets become increasingly ubiquitous behind bars, criminal justice reform advocates say Wall Street is poised to control and monetize an ever larger share of the daily lives of this captive audience.

“The ideal world for the private equity owners of these companies is every prisoner has one of their tablets, and every one of those tablets is hooked up to the bank account of someone outside of prison that they can just drain,” said Paul Wright, the executive director of the advocacy group Human Rights Defense Center, which for years has led a campaign to lower prison telecom costs.

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Prisoners in the US are part of a hidden workforce linked to hundreds of popular food brands

A hidden path to America’s dinner tables begins here, at an unlikely source – a former Southern slave plantation that is now the country’s largest maximum-security prison.

Unmarked trucks packed with prison-raised cattle roll out of the Louisiana State Penitentiary, where men are sentenced to hard labor and forced to work, for pennies an hour or sometimes nothing at all. After rumbling down a country road to an auction house, the cows are bought by a local rancher and then followed by The Associated Press another 600 miles to a Texas slaughterhouse that feeds into the supply chains of giants like McDonald’s, Walmart and Cargill.

Intricate, invisible webs, just like this one, link some of the world’s largest food companies and most popular brands to jobs performed by U.S. prisoners nationwide, according to a sweeping two-year AP investigation into prison labor that tied hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of agricultural products to goods sold on the open market.

They are among America’s most vulnerable laborers. If they refuse to work, some can jeopardize their chances of parole or face punishment like being sent to solitary confinement. They also are often excluded from protections guaranteed to almost all other full-time workers, even when they are seriously injured or killed on the job.

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New York Stock Exchange Abandons Plan To Control America’s Natural Resources

The New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) on Jan. 17 withdrew its proposal to establish and list Natural Asset Companies (NAC), which would pool investors’ money from around the world to buy controlling rights to public and private land throughout the United States.

The NACs would, according to filing documents, manage the lands solely for the purpose of “sustainability.” Critics of the plan charged that wealthy investors and foreign entities would be able to use these vehicles to make decisions to allow or block the public from accessing the publicly owned land that is designated for uses such as hunting, fishing, drilling, mining, hiking, and logging. 

While some conservation groups and global warming activists had supported the initiative as a way to protect natural resources, many land-rights activists applauded its demise and questioned whether wealthy investors would be better stewards of America’s land. 

“Today’s withdrawal is a major victory for Americans,” Margaret Byfield, executive director of American Stewards of Liberty, a land-rights organization, told The Epoch Times.

“Very few people understand how close we were to losing control of our property and natural resources through this diabolical NAC scam.” 

The creation of NACs was the initiative of an organization called the Intrinsic Exchange Group (IEG), which was created with funding from the Rockefeller Foundation and other unnamed investors. IEG entered into a partnership with the NYSE, where the NYSE bought a stake in IEG.

The two organizations collaborated to set up NACs, which would have been financed and traded on the exchange, while licensing IEG’s proprietary software for valuation and reporting according to guidelines based in the U.N. environmental accounting standards. Because this was a nonstandard type of company, which wouldn’t earn profits for investors in the way that other companies do, nor would it use GAAP accounting to value its assets, the NYSE applied to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to grant an exception to its existing rules of operation. 

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Racist Delta Airlines Sends Memo to Employees Asking Them to Capitalize “Black” & “Brown” but Write “White” in Lowercase – Format Follows Far-Left Associated Press Guidelines

A source from Delta Airlines has revealed that the airline is now asking its employees to capitalize the words “Black” and “Brown” but not “White” when describing one’s race.

Delta’s new “Inclusivity Language Guide” states,

RACE AND ETHNICITY STYLE NOTE •

Capitalize “Black” and “Brown” in Delta communications. Unlike Black or Brown, “white” should be lowercase.

When referencing race, ethnicity, or nationality, be as specific as possible.

This follows the far-left Associated Press style guidelines for capitalizing all race-identifying words except for “White.”

According to the Associated Press,

AP’s style is now to capitalize Black in a racial, ethnic or cultural sense, conveying an essential and shared sense of history, identity and community among people who identify as Black, including those in the African diaspora and within Africa. The lowercase black is a color, not a person. AP style will continue to lowercase the term white in racial, ethnic and cultural senses.

These decisions align with long-standing capitalization of distinct racial and ethnic identifiers such as Latino, Asian American and Native American. Our discussions on style and language consider many points, including the need to be inclusive and respectful in our storytelling and the evolution of language.

We agree that white people’s skin color plays into systemic inequalities and injustices, and we want our journalism to robustly explore those problems. But capitalizing the term white, as is done by white supremacists, risks subtly conveying legitimacy to such beliefs.

Some have expressed a view that if we do not capitalize white, we are being inconsistent and discriminating against white people, or, conversely, that we are implying that white is the default. We also took note of the argument that capitalizing the term could pull white people more fully into issues and discussions of race and equality.

Apparently, black and brown are proper adjectives to describe a person, but white is not, and Delta agrees. What happened to treating everybody as equals?

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State AGs Blast Biden, Wall Street Plan To Sell Rights To America’s Public Lands

The current plan by the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) to create Natural Asset Companies (NACs), which would buy up land rights throughout America, faced heavy criticism from 25 state attorneys general, who in a Jan. 9 letter urged the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to reject the concept.

“What is happening here is clear,” the AGs wrote. “The Commission and the NYSE are seeking to implement a radical environmental agenda through the rulemaking process (and outside the legislative process).”

“This type of decision, particularly given its vast economic consequences, must be left to Congress and not the Commission or the NYSE,” they stated.

The idea for NACs was developed by an activist eco-organization called the Intrinsic Exchange Group (IEG), funded in part by the Rockefeller Foundation, in partnership with the NYSE. NACs would pool investors’ money from around the world to buy the rights to public and private land in the United States and limit its use to “sustainable” endeavors.

Currently, much of the land under federal control is intended for public use, which includes farming, ranching, hunting, fishing, drilling, mining, hiking, and camping, according to its designation by Congress. In many western states, including Idaho, Alaska, and Utah, more than 60 percent of the land is government owned. About 85 percent of the land in Nevada is government owned.

“On the spectrum of serious ESG threats, this is one of the most concerning, and least understood,” Utah Attorney General Sean Reyes, who co-authored the letter, told The Epoch Times. “I don’t think most people in America even know about it; it was done very quietly.

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How John Deere Hijacked Copyright Law To Keep You From Tinkering With Your Tractor

Discussions about the repairability of high-tech devices tend to focus on mass-market products: smartphones, laptops, video game consoles, and other commonplace devices. Less apparent is the repairability of tractors, cultivators, combines, and other heavy agricultural equipment that are equally reliant on computers and software. As with smartphone or laptop repairs, farmers and right-to-repair advocates have long complained that agricultural equipment manufacturers have used software to lock owners out of their products. To combat such restrictions, farmers and white-hat hackers have joined in an unlikely alliance to “liberate the tractors.”

As with other types of hardware, such as smart cars, the “techiness” of heavy agricultural machinery has become an impediment to meaningful ownership. Now, companies such as John Deere have vertically integrated the entire ecosystem for equipment, requiring customers to purchase repair services exclusively from dealers and using software to prevent independent repairs. 

Whenever software has been used to prevent the owners of products from altering or repairing their property, groups of ideologically driven individuals have used their skills to circumvent such constraints. Agricultural equipment is no different, and hackers have taken it upon themselves to “jailbreak” or open up the closed software systems that prevent independent repairs. In the words of one such hacker, “We want farmers to be able to repair their stuff for when things go wrong, and now that means being able to repair or make decisions about the software in their tractors.”

Hackers have now developed tools that would give power back to the owners of farm equipment, allowing farmers unversed in handling software to circumvent manufacturers’ software locks and independently make repairs and service their equipment. There’s only one problem with this movement to liberate the tractors: It’s a violation of federal copyright law.

Under Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), any individual who produces or uses a tool designed to circumvent software intended to keep them out of a system faces five years in federal prison and a fine of up to $500,000. Those penalties double for each subsequent infraction. This means software developers who build tools to get around John Deere’s software blocks could receive a 10-year prison sentence and a $1 million fine for each time they distribute their tool. Although the Copyright Office has implemented a narrow exception to the law for certain circumstances, a farmer who purchases such a tool could also end up in federal prison. 

The Copyright Office technically has the ability to implement broad, permanent exclusions to Section 1201 but has so far refused to act absent expressed congressional authorization. Fortunately, there are some in Congress that recognize this issue and have proposed solutions.

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State Governments Promised Private Companies More than $10 Billion in Subsidies Last Year

Governments often make deals with private companies, offering generous subsidies to encourage development in their respective states. The year 2023 was unfortunately no exception.

According to a new report from Good Jobs First, a watchdog group that tracks economic development deals, 16 states promised more than $10 billion to private companies last year. The group counted 23 “megadeals,” which it defines as any agreement involving at least $50 million in subsidies to a private company.

The most spendthrift state was Michigan, which agreed to shell out $2.73 billion for three projects, including $1.7 billion to Ford Motor Company, the single largest economic development deal in the nation last year. The Center for Economic Accountability, a Michigan-based think tank that opposes corporate welfare, previously named the Ford subsidy 2023’s Worst Economic Development Deal of the Year.

Economic development subsidies are often sold with the promise that the state will recoup its initial investment in the form of greater tax revenues, as the development projects spur economic growth. Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer pledged that the Ford project “has an employment multiplier of 4.38, which means that an additional 4.38 jobs in Michigan’s economy are anticipated to be created for every new direct job.” A multiplier of 4.38 would be extraordinarily high, and a much more realistic number would be closer to 1.5 or 2.

When broken down by the number of jobs the subsidies are supposed to directly create, the math is still unfavorable. Michigan’s $1.7 billion investment, intended to “create 2,500 good-paying jobs,” works out to a staggering $680,000 per job, for which state taxpayers would be on the hook. (Ford has since announced it would be “re-timing and resizing some investments,” which included paring back its project in Michigan and lowering its job creation goal to 1,700).

Good Jobs First noted in its report that 18 of the deals announced last year included “job creation targets,” for a total of 34,928 jobs promised. When compared against the amount of state funding promised in return, though, that works out to an average subsidy of $262,800 per job.

Among the other most egregious examples on the list, Amazon received property tax exemptions worth $1 billion over 15 years for its Oregon data centers. At the time, Good Jobs First noted that Amazon—which recorded $4.3 billion in profits and $524.9 billion in revenue last year—”hasn’t said how many jobs it will create, but the program under [which] the tax breaks were approved requires just 10 jobs per project.”

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