Consistency fail…
Tag: corporations
Big Banks, Corporations Getting 90 Percent Of Biden’s Green Energy Credits: Congressional Study
Most of the green energy tax benefits provided by President Joe Biden’s $750 billion Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) of 2022 are going into the coffers of big banks and billion-dollar corporations, according to House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Jason Smith (R-Mo.).
“While President Biden’s supercharged IRS is warming up to target working Americans, his administration is getting ready to spend those tax dollars to subsidize special interest green energy projects of billion-dollar companies,” Smith said in a statement based on a new congressional analysis issued by the Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT).
Smith was referring to the Biden administration’s controversial plan to double the size of the IRS workforce by adding 87,000 new tax investigators and auditors. House Republicans want to defund the IRS expansion plan.
“Many of the same companies getting a green corporate welfare check have shed their American identity to do business with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), and, as a result, our tax dollars are being funneled to Chinese entities that manipulate our key supply chains,” Smith continued.
“While House Republicans are fighting for working families struggling to pay their gasoline and utility bills, House Democrats are prioritizing foreign nations and sending as many taxpayer-funded handouts to corporations as possible. With big banks pocketing three times more of these special interest tax breaks than any other industry, it’s clear Democrats are rewarding their friends on Wall Street that push their partisan ESG agenda,” the Missouri Republican said.
The JCT includes members from both the Senate and House of Representatives, and the chairmanship and vice chairmanship positions are rotated between the two chambers from one Congress to the next. Smith is the chairman this year, while Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), the most senior senator on the panel, is the vice chairman.
BACKGROUND CHECK INDUSTRY PROFITS OFF ‘DIGITAL PUNISHMENT,’ DESPITE FLAWED DATA
Tony Taylor was not anticipating becoming the center of a class action lawsuit when he attempted to rent an apartment through Airbnb in 2020. But when a standard background check by a third-party provider turned up a violent felony on Taylor’s record, the short-term rental company informed him that it had permanently banned him from using their services.
Taylor was perplexed. He’d been through countless background and credit checks before. And he thought the crime in question was well behind him: In 2014, Taylor—who spent years working in the security and personal protection field—carried his Glock handgun into Minneapolis City Hall. Unbeknownst to Taylor, he was bringing a firearm into a building with a courthouse in it. And, as such, he was accidentally committing a felony under Minnesota law, even though he says he never removed his licensed weapon from its locked holster.
Minneapolis police arrested Taylor and charged him with “dangerous weapon possession in a courthouse.” His wife, Sarah, was also arrested during the incident.
Rather than take on the costs associated with a criminal trial, Taylor decided to plead guilty. He was sentenced to 30 days in jail. As part of the plea, his crime would be reduced to a misdemeanor if he completed three years of probation.
Six years later, Taylor assumed the consequences of his run-in with the criminal legal system had been laid to rest. He had completed his probation and maintained good legal standing since the arrest.
However, Inflection Risk Solutions, a private company that provides background checks for employers and services like Airbnb, had erroneously reported that Taylor was a violent criminal. After seeing errors on his background check, Taylor requested a report for his wife, who was convicted of the same charge, to ensure any mistakes could be corrected. Her records contained the same error, and Inflection Risk had even duplicated her charges, listing her as having two violent felonies.
“At this point, I’m pissed,” Taylor said in an interview with The Appeal. “How dare you call me a violent felon. The reason why I was in security was to keep people safe, not to hurt people.”
Neither Inflection Risk nor Airbnb responded to a request for comment.
As the Taylors fought to correct the record, they would soon discover that they were far from the only ones whom private background check companies like Inflection Risk had harmed.
Clearview Facial Recognition: A Perpetual Police Lineup
Clearview AI CEO Hoan Ton-That admitted that the company scraped 30 billion photos from Facebook and other social media platforms and used them in its massive facial recognition database accessible by law enforcement agencies across the U.S. Critics call the company’s database a “perpetual police lineup.”
This is an example of the growing cooperation between private companies and government agencies in the ever-growing U.S. surveillance state.
The photos were collected from social media platforms without users’ permission or knowledge.
Clearview AI markets its facial recognition database as a tool allowing law enforcement to rapidly generate leads “to help identify suspects, witnesses and victims to close cases faster and keep communities safe.” According to Ton-That, law enforcement agencies across the U.S. have accessed the company’s database over 1 million times since 2017.
According to a CNN report last year, more than 3,100 U.S. agencies use Clearview AI, including the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security.
In a statement, Ton-That said, “Clearview AI’s database of publicly available images is lawfully collected, just like any other search engine like Google.”
While photo scraping might be legal, Facebook sent Clearview AI a cease and desist order in 2020 for violation of the platform’s terms of service. In an email to Insider, a Meta spokesperson said, “Clearview AI’s actions invade people’s privacy, which is why we banned their founder from our services and sent them a legal demand to stop accessing any data, photos, or videos from our services.”
Fight for the Future director of campaigns Caitlin Seeley George called Clearview “a total affront to peoples’ rights, full stop,” and said, “Police should not be able to use this tool.”
Annals of the Covert World: the Secret Life of Shampoo
Veterans of the CIA’s Phoenix Program always seem to make soft landings with a golden parachute: a lifetime guarantee of gainful employment. CounterPunch reported on the ascent into the Congress of Robert Simmons, a Phoenix veteran and adept at torture. Then there’s the case of former senator Bob Kerrey, who commanded a Phoenix operation in the Mekong delta that featured throat-slitting and the assassination of elderly men and women and children. Now comes word that Phoenix veterans are also highly sought after by the upper echelons of the corporate world.
In early September, Procter and Gamble, the Cincinnati-based conglomerate, fessed up to hiring Phoenix operatives to infiltrate its chief rival Unilever, the Anglo-Dutch cosmetics giants. It was all about the secrets of shampoo, specifically the top-selling Salon Selectives and Finesse. It seems both of those Unilever brands had taken a big bite out of the market share once dominated by a shelf of P&G products, including Wash & Go, Head & Shoulders, Pantene and Vidal Sassoon. Also at stake was the planned sale of Clairol, which was on the auction block with both companies in an intense bidding struggle. One former P&G executive said that the companies were engaged in a decades-long dirty war, which had become “a death struggle to incrementally gain share”.
The operation was launched in June of 2000, when P&G contracted with the Phoenix Consulting Group of Huntsville, Alabama, a corporate espionage firm set up by Phoenix veteran John Nolan and fellow CIA officers. P&G also set up a secret wing inside its own security department. The operations were run out of a secret office known as The Ranch, and featured safe houses, off-shore bank accounts, dumpster diving and informants.
Nolan and his operatives were apparently able to secure more than 80 internal Unilever documents that detailed the company’s shampoo marketing strategy for the next two years. The documents were returned to the company after word of the operation leaked out to a reporter at Fortune magazine. P&G apologized for the operation, saying it had “violated our strict business guidelines regarding our business policies.” The company also fired two executives in the firm’s security sector.
But few take these actions as anything more than the defensive maneuvers of a company caught doing something shady and in full damage control mode. Indeed, P&G is well-known for its paranoia and obsessive concerns about corporate secrecy. Its security officers are known inside the company as “Proctoids”. In the past, P&G has shadowed employees on their business trips to see if they chatted to fellow travelers (and Unilever agents?) about company business, snooped in on company phone lines and tracked computer traffic. A few years ago P&G executives became enraged by a series of critical articles about the company by Wall Street Journal reporter Alecia Swasy and retaliated by hitting her with grand jury subpoenas and putting her under 24-hour surveillance.
Grants Reveal Federal Government’s Horrific Plans To Censor All Americans’ Speech
Our government is preparing to monitor every word Americans say on the internet—the speech of journalists, politicians, religious organizations, advocacy groups, and even private citizens. Should those conversations conflict with the government’s viewpoint about what is in the best interests of our country and her citizens, that speech will be silenced.
While the “Twitter Files” offer a glimpse into the government’s efforts to censor disfavored viewpoints, what we have seen is nothing compared to what is planned, as the details of hundreds of federal awards lay bare. Research by The Federalist reveals our tax dollars are funding the development of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine-learning (ML) technology that will allow the government to easily discover “problematic” speech and track Americans reading or partaking in such conversations.
Then, in partnership with Big Tech, Big Business, and media outlets, the government will ensure the speech is censored, under the guise of combatting “misinformation” and “disinformation.”
YouTube CEO: Our monetization policies are oriented towards making advertisers feel “safe,” “comfortable”
New YouTube CEO Neal Mohan discussed how advertisers are the focus of its monetization policies during an interview with tech and travel creator iJustine and said the intention of monetization policy changes is to make advertisers feel “safe” and “more comfortable.”
Mohan discussed “putting yourself in the shoes of the advertisers” and said, “you have to make it so that it feels to the advertiser not just safe but relatively clear in terms of where their advertising is going to run.”
He continued: “They don’t want to inadvertently damage their brand in any particular way and so our policies are really oriented towards that when I say…one of the best ways to increase creator monetization is to make advertisers more comfortable with the content and that is the goal of our policy changes.”
Corporatism Will Kill Us All
One of the chief characteristics of an anti democratic corporatist society is the way parliament and people become the servant of business. Large construction, transport, pharmaceutical or military projects are driven not by Government implementing a democratically expressed need but often by corporations creating “needs” – and the plans, systems and budgets to implement them.
Nowhere is that more blatant than in pharmaceutical corporations and their vaccines where deadly viruses are created with the excuse that “if we don’t create them nature or an enemy will and we need to develop a vaccine.”
The vaccines for COVID 19 have proven obscenely profitable for the vaccine producers who have made tens of billions of dollars in profits for themselves, despite tens of thousands of deaths following vaccination and a cover up of deaths and abortions in vaccine trials (not disclosed until long after millions were vaccinated). See this.
The 1918-1920 flu pandemic killed millions. It was over within two years and no vaccine was developed. Now scientists in the USA and Canada have created by “reverse engineering” an even more deadly version of that flu “in order to create a vaccine for it”: see this.
But we know that COVID emanated from a laboratory in Wuhan China which was doing dangerous “gain of function” work in collaboration with America scientists – who had been forbidden by law to carry out that research in the USA. There is no reason why this new recreation of the 1918 flu should not bring the same disaster.
These dangerous projects are totally out of the control of democratic representatives and are classic corporatist collaborations between ignorant governments who have access to the public’s pocket and corporations whose main incentive is profit seeking.
Biden admin calls for digital ID investment, public-private data sharing collaboration
The White House has presented its National Security Strategy that, among other points, calls for investing in digital IDs.
The Biden administration, however, is short on detail regarding this issue and privacy implications, while mentioning the term biometrics only once.
“Strategic Objective 4.5” is a 4-paragraph section in the 35-page document that speaks about supporting development of a digital identity “ecosystem.”
We obtained a copy of the document for you here.
The administration calls for improved digital identity infrastructure that would produce “a more innovative, equitable, safe and efficient digital economy.”
Like all other justifications for the push to adopt digital IDs, this one mentions conveniences and “secure” access to government services and benefits, “trusted” communication, as well as social networks, and improved payment systems.
To get there from here, the document calls for the digital ecosystem in question to undergo “fundamental changes,” and wants to bring in the private sector – both through “close cooperation” and public-private undertakings.
Here’s The Lawmaker Who Accepts More BlackRock Money Than Any Other Member Of Congress
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) accepted more donations in the last election cycle from BlackRock and individuals affiliated with the firm than any other member of Congress.
The connection between the lawmaker and the asset management company was noted by the American Accountability Foundation, a non-profit government oversight and research organization, after Schumer rebuked efforts to scrap a Labor Department rule that would allow retirement fiduciaries to allocate funds in accordance with the environmental, social, and corporate governance movement, also known as ESG. Both the House and Senate passed a resolution opposed to the rule, which President Joe Biden is expected to veto.
BlackRock is a leading proponent of the ESG movement, which critics say mingles political and social causes such as decreasing carbon emissions and achieving racial diversity in a manner that compromises or distracts from profitability. Schumer nevertheless accepted $103,950 from individuals associated with BlackRock and $10,000 from a political action committee controlled by the company, according to data compiled by OpenSecrets.
“ESG opponents are trying to turn it into a dirty acronym, deploying attacks they’ve used for elements of a so-called woke agenda,” Schumer said on social media this week as the resolution moved through Congress. “They call ESG wokeness. They call it a cult. They call it an incursion into free markets. I say ESG is just common sense.”
Candidates from both parties benefit from BlackRock money, with Republicans getting $639,000 and Democrats getting $453,000 in the most recent midterm election cycle. Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) and Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-GA) were the second and third-largest individual recipients of funds from BlackRock and individuals associated with BlackRock.
Hellbound and Down 
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