Opposition to the Bayer Monsanto Roundup Settlement

Tens of thousands of people have sued Monsanto owner Bayer AG alleging their non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma and other cancers were caused by glyphosate, the active ingredient in Monsanto’s Roundup herbicide.

Three cases brought by Lee Johnson, Edwin Hardeman, and Alva and Alberta Pilliod went to trial.

And in each case, the courts found the Roundup caused the cancers, that Monsanto hid the risks, and that compensatory and punitive damages were justified.

Bayer wants to resolve the thousands of remaining cancer claims with an $8 billion to $9 billion compensation fund. Those cases are being negotiated by Monsanto lawyers and the lawyers representing the cancer victims.

But last year, in a surprise to the Monsanto plaintiffs lawyers, a separate settlement was put forward to handle everyone else who might bring a case against Monsanto in the

— source corporatecrimereporter.com | Apr 17, 2021

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BP’s Deepwater Horizon cover-up aided by Bush State Department

That’s the official line, and I could have swallowed it — except for a message I received from a very nervous source floating in the Caspian Sea. The source told me he’d been an eye-witness to the BP/Transocean oil rig blow-out — not the one in the Gulf, but an IDENTICAL blow-out in the Caspian that happened just 17 months before its Gulf companion exploded.

The hunt for the truth took me to Baku, Azerbaijan, in Central Asia (and detention by the dictatorship’s not-so-secret police), meetings with MI-6 sources in London, and beaches on the Gulf Coast and in the Arctic. Watch this video from my investigation for Britain’s Channel 4 Dispatches. It ran world-wide…except in the USA.

If you don’t know about the earlier blow-out, it’s because BP didn’t tell you, didn’t tell anyone but its drilling partners Exxon and Chevron — and in a top secret cable, George W. Bush’s State Department. The oil company chieftains kept the devastating information tightly concealed — even though US law required they report such rig failures to the US Department of Interior.

If BP had reported the disaster to Interior, the 11 men would be alive today, because Interior’s experts had tried to stop BP from drilling in the unstable deep waters of the

— source gregpalast.com | Greg Palast | Apr 19, 2021

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Standing Forty Years Against Brutish Corporate Power

It is not often that one speech urging the creation of a national public interest law firm, driven by seasoned trial lawyers, would move from words to deeds, from oratory to action.

That is just what happened following my address in June 1980 to the Michigan Trial Lawyers Association. I spoke of a gap in trial practice which needed to be filled. There was a pressing need to bring cases against the many corporate abuses, which included non-enforcement of regulatory laws. Without the prospect of a contingent fee after a successful outcome, trial lawyers were unlikely to take on these uncertain cases or structural reform cases on behalf of tenants, farm workers, or cruel prison conditions.

I noted the assault of corporations on “the biosphere, personal injury law from trauma to toxics.” The corporate lobby was blocking legislative proposals to strengthen consumer class action rights, digging deeper for unconscionable corporate welfare payments and funding corporatist politicians. To challenge these damaging corporate power plays, I suggested a full-time core of public interest attorneys supported by a sabbatical program for trial lawyers who wanted to take a year off from their regular practice and come to Washington, D.C. to advance justice and refresh themselves.

It turned out that there were some leading trial lawyers – Scottie Baldwin, J.D. Lee, Bill Colson and Dean Robb – who were dissatisfied with the slow pace of the American Trial Lawyers Association (ATLA), then controlled by a small clique of smug members. They took this proposal to the ATLA convention and convened a meeting of like-minded attorneys.

— source nader.org | Ralph Nader | May 6, 2022

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Corrupt corporate worlds of Germany and the U.S

Bill Black

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Sackler family to pay $6bn for role in US opioid crisis

The wealthy Sackler family, owners of Purdue Pharma, is set to pay $6bn (£4.5bn) for its role in America’s opioid epidemic under a new deal.

The sum is nearly $1.7bn more than a previous settlement.

Purdue, which filed for bankruptcy in 2019 amid thousands of lawsuits, made drugs like OxyContin, and is blamed for fuelling the opioid crisis.

Addiction to both legal and illegal opioid painkillers has been a serious, ongoing problem in the US.

The country saw nearly half a million deaths from overdoses between 1999 and 2019, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

— source bbc.com | 3 Mar 2022

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Rightwing Lobby Group ALEC Driving Laws to Blacklist Companies That Boycott the Oil Industry

The influential rightwing lobby group the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) is driving a surge in new state laws to block boycotts of the oil industry. The group’s strategy, which aims to protect large oil firms and other conservative-friendly industries, is modelled on legislation to punish divestment from Israel. Since the beginning of the year, state legislatures in West Virginia, Oklahoma, and Indiana have introduced a version of a law drafted by ALEC, called the Energy Discrimination Elimination Act, to shield big oil from share selloffs and other measures intended to protest the fossil fuel industry’s role in the climate crisis. A dozen other states have publicly supported the intent of the legislation.

— source desmog.com | Feb 11, 2022

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Commercial Defrauding of Uncle Sam—Biggest Booming Business

The biggest business in America is stealing and defrauding the federal government, Uncle Sam and you the taxpayers. In terms of sheer stolen dollars, the total amount is greater than the annual sales of Amazon and Walmart over the past two years.

Before getting to the real big stuff, start with how much was stolen or not delivered by the contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan. Just in one program, John Sopko—Special Inspector General for Afghan Reconstruction (SIGAR), estimated that $30 billion of the $100 billion repairs project was purloined. Despite his many damning reports on what was also wasted—like the $40 million natural gas-powered fueling station (there were no natural gas-powered cars in Afghanistan)—no one was indicted, no one was fired, no one missed a promotion. This is according to author Andrew Cockburn, who interviewed Spoko extensively for his new book The Spoils of War: Power, Profit and the American War Machine. In fact, Cockburn writes: “They were giving bonuses to people for stealing our money.”

Of the $360 billion in annual billing fraud by the health care industry, over $100 billion is fraud on Medicare and Medicaid.

Turning to the $6 trillion appropriated (without reversing the tax cuts by Trump on the super-rich) by both Trump and Biden since March 2020, government investigators and the

— source nader.org | Ralph Nader | Mar 18, 2022

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Who is the partner for Zim to collect taxes from companies like Facebook

Nothing leads to more delays and inefficiencies than a government department/parastatal trying to go it alone. It is therefore refreshing to see more and more public private partnerships in Zimbabwe.

We saw the Justice Service commission partner a globally known company to help establish a tech-first approach. Now, the government has partnered with another global player, this time to help collect taxes on its behalf.

The Zimbabwe Revenue Authority (ZIMRA) is responsible for collecting taxes and other revenues for the govt. But believe it or not, even with over a thousand employees, they are still understaffed. In a mostly informal economy, Zimra would have to employ half the population to keep track of every business venture in the country. Hence why we ended up getting the 2% tax.

Now, the 2% tax was not the last of our finance minister’s revenue generating innovations. He also introduced taxes on companies that provide digital advertising, content, cloud

— source techzim.co.zw | Leonard Sengere | Feb 7, 2022

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How Big Tech Helped Big Oil Automate the Climate Crisis

When it comes to increasing profitability through automation, the orbits of Big Tech and Big Oil have merged, and household names such as Google, Amazon, and Microsoft have led the way. They’ve done so under the umbrella of their lesser-known subsidiaries Google Cloud, Amazon Web Services, and Microsoft Azure. Both Microsoft and Amazon had a major presence at the recent CERAWeek conference in Houston, considered one of the biggest annual convenings of oil and gas industry thought leaders in the world. Andrew Jassy, CEO of Amazon Web Services, even spoke at the event. Let’s listen a little bit what he had to say.

ANDREW JASSY: A lot of the things that we have built and released recently have been very much informed by conversations with our oil and gas customers and partners. And these are companies like Shell, and BP, and ConocoPhillips, and Halliburton and Woodside. You know, we have a pretty broad group.

DIMITRI LASCARIS: Tech companies often bill themselves as pioneers in the use of renewable energy and clean technology. But a far different reality arises in recent reporting by Gizmodo reporter Brian Merchant. Brian

— source https://therealnews.com/stories/how-big-tech-has-helped-big-oil-automate-the-climate-crisis | Apr 1, 2019

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Corporate Courts Vs The Climate

Fossil fuel companies are using secretive tribunals written into trade deals to sue governments for more than $18 billion over climate policy.

These big polluters should be paying to fix the climate crisis they caused, but instead they want a payout.

Energy Charter treaty

Fossil fuel companies are using tribunals set up outside of national legal systems specifically for corporations to use – effectively they are ‘corporate courts’. It’s a system written into trade and investment deals which allows foreign corporations to sue governments for vast amounts. Formally, it is known as investor-state dispute settlement or ISDS.

The Energy Charter Treaty is a giant corporate court deal which many of the fossil fuel companies are using to sue. The UK government is also trying to include corporate courts in several new trade deals.

— source globaljustice.org.uk | Jean Blaylock | 18 Mar 2022

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