Business

A small state entity that few even know exists has become a cash cow for a Birmingham PR firm. Using funding from the Education Trust Fund, Alabama's Department of Commerce signed a no-bid contract for $99,000 to get itself a new Web site - that uses WordPress.

In another sign of undue corporate influence, a new study has found widespread conflicts of interest by the people deciding whether food additives are determined to be "generally recognized as safe" (GRAS) over the past 15 years.

Katie Barnett of MacArthur, Ohio, returned from her vacation to find her home broken into and all of her belongings gone. It turns out First National Bank in Wellston are the one's who broke into her house and took her belongings . . . after they foreclosed on her house instead of the house across of the street. The bank now refuses to replace what they took and the police won't press charges.

An Entergy employee falsified safety documents pertaining to the Indian Point nuclear power plant in New York City. The employee faces jail time, but the company has yet to punished.

As bankrupted governments are starved of revenue, global corporations and its upper echelon evade taxes at an unprecedented rate. In the UK, protesters shut down HSBC banks and set up food banks. It was a poignant representative image of after effects that come from harsh austerity measures that only benefit the 1%. Now, the G20 is agreeing to get serious about tax avoidance — but will it actually matter?

GlaxoSmithKline has been accused of bribing doctors in China in order to boost sales. Chinese government officials say they have uncovered evidence of a bribery scheme involving 700 travel agencies who were used to funnel as much as three billion yuan ($480 million) in payments.

Last summer, Connecticut Governor Dannel Malloy announced that Alexion Pharmaceuticals would become the fourth company to collect taxpayer subsidies (aka, Corporate Welfare) under his "First Five" economic development initiative. So what will happen to that money now that Alexion is in the process of being bought by a Swiss company?

In response to protests against test drilling for a controversial proposed $1.5 billion open-pit iron ore mine in northern Wisconsin by Gogebic Taconite, the mining company has hired masked, camouflaged, assault-rifle-toting guards to "instinctively and smoothly manage surrounding threats."

Shifting the burden of a major bank collapse from the blameless taxpayer to the blameless depositor is another case of robbing Peter to pay Paul, while the real perpetrators carry on with their risky, speculative banking schemes. The only way to truly prevent risky derivatives from blowing up in the economy's face is to prevent the risks in the first place, through regulation or, gasp, even bank nationalization.

Following his recent trip to Africa, President Obama has been lauding his new 'Power Africa' program, which he claims will funnel money and resources to "double access to power in sub-Saharan Africa." Yet, the money the U.S. government is throwing at the program will in fact be pumped into U.S.-based multinational corporations.