Corporations & Media

Salon.com | Google vs. China represents a clash of what may be the two most powerful forces of the first decade of the 21^st century. Like China, Google has changed the terms of competition in crucial markets, thanks to its advantages in hardware, productive capacity, and engineering brainpower.

NY Daily News | The Queens Democrat put no money down when he obtained private stock in the company, Xenonics Inc., relying on $14,000 borrowed in 2002 from the company's top shareholder, a longtime friend.

Huffington Post | Far from the old pull-yourself-up-by-the-bootstraps model of acknowledging failure and starting anew, the shadow elite do not admit failure at all. More important, past failure may guarantee their future success.

The Rumpus | This past summer Facebook relocated from University Avenue in Palo Alto, CA — where several buildings fan out along the downtown strip — to a new central office in Stanford Research Park. A good friend and two-year veteran of Facebook invited me to check out the new space.

Information Liberation | Explosive emails released last week could see Treasury secretary Timothy Geithner become embroiled in criminal charges for his role in a cover up that exposes the monumental criminality behind the $182.3 billion bailout of American International Group Inc.

Now Public | Michael Chertoff, Former Department of Homeland Security, is the head of the Chertoff Group, the lead cheerleader for what is being called the Full Body Scanner Lobby, reports the Washington Post and the Washington Examiner.

Reuters | Google, the world's top search engine, said on Tuesday it might shut down its Chinese site, Google.cn, after an attack on its infrastructure it believed was primarily aimed at accessing the Google mail accounts of Chinese human rights activists.

America Blog | Google doesn't say it outright, but it's pretty clear to me they're blamely the cyber attack on the Chinese govt. And Google is not amused.  "[W]e have evidence to suggest that a primary goal of the attackers was accessing the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists. Based on our investigation to date we believe their attack did not achieve that objective."

Consumerist | Last October, Bank of America screwed up and seized a vacation home that didn't belong to them. They also changed the locks and shut off the power, leaving 75 pounds of salmon and halibut rotting for a week before it was discovered, writes Laura Elder of the Galveston Daily News.

New Kind of Mind | In a nutrition class I took in college I remember hearing that only 20 cents of every dollar in cost for McDonald’s was spent on actual food. The rest I was told was spend on advertising. Whether or not this is true is rather inconsequential (actually it does seem highly suspect because there are many other overhead costs beyond just advertising)

Salon.com | Consider the record of the American media over the last two weeks alone.  Justin Elliott of TPM documents how an absolute falsehood about the attempted Christmas Day airline bombing -- that Abdulmutallab purchased a "one-way ticket" to the U.S., when it was actually a round-trip ticket -- has been repeated far and wide by U.S. media outlets as fact. 

Huffington Post | The absence of Google's query suggestions is puzzling, since typing in "Christianity is," "Buddhism is," "Judaism is," "Hinduism is," and other similar queries presents users with an array of 'Google Suggest' options.

Examiner | The media is a better source of intelligence than Defense Department assets, according to Maj. Gen. Michael Flynn, President Obama’s top military intelligence officer in Afghanistan.  This is one of many scathing denigrations of the U.S. intelligence community found in a report put forth by General Flynn earlier this week – an assessment published by a D.C-based think tank that has rubbed Pentagon officials the wrong way.

New York Times | At the back entrance on 35th Street, awaiting trash haulers, were bags of garments that appear to have never been worn. And to make sure that they never would be worn or sold, someone had slashed most of them with box cutters or razors.

Online Journal | WMR has learned from a veteran member of the White House Press Corps that the Obama administration has made it known through White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs and other White House Communications officials that certain questions posed by the reporters who cover the White House are definitely off-limits.

Huffington Post | Many, especially those selling small or inexpensive vehicles, reported improvements last month and expressed hope for a mildly better 2010.

Washington Times | "Lax enforcement of U.S. sanctions is allowing Chinese companies to continue to ship goods to the United States even after being hit with an import ban for proliferation to Iran," the report by the Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control stated.

BBC | Video-sharing website YouTube has removed hundreds of pornographic videos which were uploaded in what is believed to be a planned attack.

Boston.com | Since the attempted bombing of a US airliner on Christmas Day, former Homeland Security secretary Michael Chertoff has given dozens of media interviews touting the need for the federal government to buy more full-body scanners for airports.

Risk Management News Feed | On December 17, 2009, a class action suit was filed against online movie rental giant, Netflix, Inc., in the United States District Court for the Northern District of California. Plaintiffs in the suit are claiming that Netflix has “perpetrated the largest voluntary privacy breach to date

Guardian | Product placement will harm health of children, doctors and teachers fear

Kokomo Perspective | The virtual world of online gaming seems like the perfect place to hide. There is plenty of anonymity, and it’s almost impossible for someone to trace activity back to its source, right? Wrong.

Times Online | For years, Dubai boasted that whatever bling project it embarked upon, from carving its coastline into palm-tree-shaped resorts to building vast ski domes in the sand, it would be the “number one in the world”. After the credit crunch, however, it looked like the only record the Gulf city state would claim is the biggest boom and bust.

Huffington Post | The defenders of Wall Street pay usually rely on a rather familiar argument. It goes something like this: CEOs demand millions because they deliver profits, which are passed along to their shareholders. And, the argument goes, corporate executives who aren't paid well will simply pack up and take their vaunted leadership skills somewhere else.

NPR | There's an abundance of journalist coverage of U.S. involvement in the Iraq war, but Jeremy Scahill has found a niche investigating Blackwater, a military contractor with a long involvement in the war. He's broken many stories in The Nation, and his latest, published Nov. 23, uncovers the contractor's involvement in a covert program run by the U.S. Joint Special Command (JSOC).

Weekly Sift | Looking back through the year's Weekly Sifts, one theme pulls everything together: the dark influence of corporations. I've never been a big fan of corporate power and its ability to set our country's agenda, but as the year went on I got more and more radicalized.

WikiLeaks | Website calls for lawyers, activists and politicians to join their defense.  "Wikileaks is currently overloaded by readers. This is a regular difficulty that can only be resolved by deploying additional resources. If you support our mission, you can help us by integrating new hardware into our project infrastructure or developing software for the project..."

Truthout | This month, a British government report admitted that one of the major rationales for invading Iraq -- the claim that Saddam could deploy WMDs in 45 minutes -- probably came from a cab driver. Had the public originally been told about this sketchy sourcing, there may have been a more, ahem, forceful mass opposition to pre-emptive war in the Middle East.

ABC | A Pennsylvania Walmart Supercenter videotaped employees and customers in a unisex bathroom, several former and current Walmart employees alleged in a lawsuit filed this week.

CS Moniter | The Tulsa, Okla., trucking company stopped payment on the gas cards of its drivers, leaving some of them stranded Tuesday around the United States, miles from home. No explanation on the website. No one at the company answering phones.

New York Times | The Ford Motor Company and the Chinese automaker, Zhejiang Geely Holding Group, said Wednesday that they had settled “all substantive” details on a sale of Volvo, clearing the way for Geely to buy Ford’s Swedish unit.

Torrent Freak | Comcast has decided to settle one of the lawsuits brought about over their use of the Sandvine BitTorrent throttling hardware to ‘manage’ their network. For those who were affected, there is the possibility of receiving a payment from a $16 million fund set up by the Internet service provider.

Harper's Index | Wal Mart Watch (fact checking site on the company) has discovered tax evasion

Times Online | A healthcare firm is seeking to silence a Danish academic from expressing doubts about one of its products by using England’s draconian libel laws.  Two years ago in a conference room in the Randolph hotel in Oxford, Henrik Thomsen gave his inside account of a medical “nightmare”.

Daily Finance | Ikea looks like a model of openness and visibility. From its voluminous warehouse-size stores to its furniture's clean lines, the retailer presents a vision of honesty and total disclosure

Infowars | Internet censorship bills currently working their way into law in the UK, Australia and the U.S. legislate for government powers to restrict and filter any website that it deems to be undesirable for public consumption.

Video | Mark Dice explains the details

Huffington Post | Confidential contracts detailing Monsanto Co.'s business practices reveal how the world's biggest seed developer is squeezing competitors, controlling smaller seed companies and protecting its dominance over the multibillion-dollar market for genetically altered crops, an Associated Press investigation has found.

Visual Graphic | Check out this chart made to illustrate where the money goes in the long run

Wiki Leaks | This file contains a deleted BBC news article on the toxic-waste dumping of commodities giant Trafigura. According to a September 2009 UN report, the dumping drove 108,000 people in the Ivory Coast to seek medical attention.

Ahmed Quraishi | The American defense contractor DynCorp is suspected of having bribed a personal assistant to the country’s interior minister to get a cache of sophisticated weapons into Pakistan without clearance from Pakistani security authorities

WLNS | Employees Working for No Pay : Dozens of employees at a local company work without pay for weeks. In May, WJG Enterprises in Charlotte got a four million dollar state grant to expand and add jobs, but that growing company isn't even paying the workers it's got. 

24/7 Wall St | This list is based on a review of each firm’s financial situation and other operating data, the current and ongoing value of its brand, and whether the company that controls that brand can sell its assets.

Orange County Register | U.S. District Judge Cormac J. Carney made the unexpected ruling after hearing Samueli testify in the criminal accounting-fraud trial of Broadcom's former chief financial officer, William J. Ruehle.

Wired | Shortly after Threat Level reported this week that Yahoo had blocked the FOIA release of its law enforcement and intelligence price list, someone provided a copy of the company’s spying guide to the whistleblower site Cryptome.

Small Farmers Big Change | José Gregorio Mangones Lugo, alias “Carlos Tijeras,” who commanded the William Rivas Front of the AUC’s Northern Block, has provided a sworn statement which sheds new light on the nature of Dole’s relationship to the AUC paramilitaries

Mathaba | After earlier reports this week that Yahoo had blocked a FOIA Freedom of Information release of its "law enforcement and intelligence price list", someone helpfully provided a copy of the Yahoo company’s spying guide to the whistleblower web site Cryptome.org.

RAND.org | Establishing security is the sine qua non of stability operations, since it is a prerequisite for reconstruction and development. Security requires a mix of military and police forces to deal with a range of threats from insurgents to criminal organizations

Washington Post |  A Nov. 26 article in the District edition of Local Living incorrectly said a Public Enemy song declared 9/11 a joke. The song refers to 911, the emergency phone number.

New York Post | The guy lucky enough to have gotten in on Facebook revolution at the beginning is poised to get another dose of misfortune when it comes to his hedge fund.  Peter Thiel, the PayPal co-founder who struck gold when he invested $500,000 in Facebook five years ago, is facing a second consecutive year of losses at his hedge fund Clarium.