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Tag: Wall Street

AT&T-Time Warner Merger: Another Media Consolidation That Puts Profits Over Consumers

Posted in Journalism, and MintPress News

Media analysts warn that a proposed merger between AT&T and Time Warner is more likely to enhance corporate bottom lines and pad the pockets of Wall Street investors than benefit consumers.

“Big mergers like this inevitably mean higher prices for real people, to pay down the money borrowed to finance these deals and compensate top executives,” said Matt Wood, policy director at Free Press, an NGO that protects net neutrality and online press freedom, in an Oct. 22 press release.

The media first reported that AT&T was in “informal” talks to merge with Time Warner on Oct. 20. By Oct. 24, AT&T announced that Time Warner had agreed to be bought out by the telecommunications giant for $85.4 billion.

Jill Stein Blasts The Daily Beast’s Ties To Clinton After Attack Against Her Investments

Posted in Archive, Journalism, and MintPress News

Green Party presidential candidate Dr. Jill Stein accused The Daily Beast, a popular news and opinion website, of hiding its ties to the Clintons after publishing an attack on Stein’s investment portfolio on Wednesday.

“Jill Stein’s Ideology Says One Thing—Her Investment Portfolio Says Another” declared the headline for an analysis of Stein’s investments and finances by Yashar Ali. The article suggests that Stein has millions of dollars invested in mutual funds which support industries she opposes on the campaign trail, including fossil fuels and the military-industrial complex.

“If Mr. Ali is truly interested in conflicts of interest of political candidates and their families, where is his disclosure on the conflict of interest posed by Chelsea Clinton’s position as a director of the corporate owner of the Daily Beast, IAC?”Stein fired back in a detailed response sent to the Daily Beast prior to publication and published to her campaign website in full on Wednesday.

House Passes Koch-Backed Bill Aimed At Opening Doors To Foreign Donors, Dark Money

Posted in Journalism, and MintPress News

Rather than following the lead of prominent advocates for campaign finance reform, the House of Representatives recently voted to make American politics less transparent than ever.

The issue of the influence of so-called “dark money” on politics — hidden, high-dollar donations made possible by reforms to campaign finance law like the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision — is receiving renewed attention this election cycle thanks to successful awareness-raising campaigns by presidential candidates like Bernie Sanders and Jill Stein, and legislators like Sen. Elizabeth Warren.

A September poll by Bloomberg Politics found that 78 percent of Americans would like to see Citizens United overturned. And that opposition isn’t coming from just one corner; it’s consistent across the party spectrum, from Democrats to Republicans to independents.

WikiLeaks: Brazil’s Acting President Michel Temer Is US Diplomatic Informant

Posted in Journalism, and MintPress News

Brazil’s new acting president is a known U.S. informant who has provided Washington with insider information about the Brazilian government on multiple occasions.

Michel Temer’s ties to the U.S. government, as revealed by WikiLeaks’ Public Library of U.S. Diplomacy, add to the growing body of evidence that the parliamentary impeachment of Brazil’s democratically-elected president, Dilma Rousseff, was supported by allies in Washington.

Temer, who has served as Brazil’s vice president since 2011, took power Thursday after Brazil’s parliament suspended Rousseff pending the results of impeachment proceedings.

Via Twitter, WikiLeaks highlighted two diplomatic cables from the U.S. Embassy in São Paulo that document Temer’s history of sharing insider information with Washington from his position as the leader of the Brazilian Democratic Movement Party, or PMDB, Brazil’s largest political party.

Hillary Clinton’s Corporate Cronyism

Posted in Archive, Journalism, and MintPress News

Abby Martin, a leading alternative journalist, accuses Hillary Clinton of being a political shapeshifter who is “morphing her positions to try to capture support” from supporters of Sen. Bernie Sanders.

In an April 17 episode of “The Empire Files,” the investigative news program Martin hosts on TeleSUR English, she promised to expose “what Hillary Clinton really represents,” devoting the entire half-hour program to exploring the presidential hopeful’s history and corporate-driven agenda.

Under pressure from Sanders’ unexpected success in his campaign, Clinton has attempted to position herself as an anti-establishment, anti-Wall Street candidate, as well as the best choice to oppose Donald Trump’s open racism and Islamophobia.

However, Martin warned: “Far from being a candidate of the people, she’s the top pick of corporations to do the job of every president: to be the CEO of the empire.”

Forget Panama: Why Corporations And The Rich Love US Tax Havens

Posted in Journalism, and MintPress News

The Panama Papers, a massive leak of secret financial data relating to the use of overseas tax havens, cast an uncomfortable spotlight on many political figures and world governments.

However, the 11.5 million documents contain few American names or corporations, leading some to speculate that the documents had been censored before release.

While Mossack Fonseca, the secretive “boutique” law firm that created the hundreds of offshore shell corporations revealed in the leak, may have simply served a primarily European clientele, there’s another reason that few American corporations have been found in the files: When a U.S. company wants to hide its earnings, it’s easier to create a tax shelter at home than to take its business abroad.

Several states, including Nevada, Delaware, and Wyoming, have corporate tax laws so lenient, they are effectively domestic tax havens. In these states, “it’s possible to create these shell corporations with virtually no questions asked,” said Matthew Gardner, executive director of the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, a Washington-based nonprofit, in a recent interview with The New York Times’ Patricia Cohen.

While shell corporations may have legal uses, they are most often used for “cloaking wrongdoing” from public and governmental scrutiny. Gardner described to Cohen that, “Aside from avoiding taxes, shell companies are routinely used by terrorist organizations to hide assets, by political donors to sidestep campaign finance laws and by criminals to launder money.”