Last year, U.S. bottled water sales reached $16 billion, up nearly 10 percent from 2015, according to Beverage Marketing Corp. They outpaced soda sales for the first time as drinkers continue to seek convenience and healthier options and worry about the safety of tap water after the high-profile contamination in Flint, Mich., about a two-hour drive from Mecosta. Nestlé alone sold $7.7 billion worth worldwide, with more than $343 million of it coming from Michigan, where the company bottles Ice Mountain Natural Spring Water and Pure Life, its purified water line.

The Michigan operation is only one small part of Nestlé, the world’s largest food and beverage company. But it illuminates how Nestlé has come to dominate a controversial industry, spring by spring, often going into economically depressed municipalities with the promise of jobs and new infrastructure in exchange for tax breaks and access to a resource that’s scarce for millions. Where Nestlé encounters grass-roots resistance against its industrial-strength guzzling, it deploys lawyers; where it’s welcome, it can push the limits of that hospitality, sometimes with the acquiescence of state and local governments that are too cash-strapped or inept to say no. There are the usual costs of doing business, including transportation, infrastructure, and salaries. But Nestlé pays little for the product it bottles—sometimes a municipal rate and other times just a nominal extraction fee. In Michigan, it’s $200.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-09-21/nestl-makes-billions-bottling-water-it-pays-nearly-nothing-for

Tyrel Ventura and Tabetha Wallace welcome comedian and actor Richard Belzer into the Hawk's Nest to discuss his new book on the corporate puppet master’s currently in control Washington D.C., Corporate Conspiracies: How Wall Street Took Over Washington.

Contrary to what most of us consider to be private property, we don’t really own anything, from the real estate property and the car we’ve been driving from and to the workplace. We are mere tenants to the land we paid for from so many years of toil, who still need to pay for “our own property’s” use through taxes, registration fees and licenses to the corporate government, which is at the very top is wholly controlled by the Corporatocracy.

They were able to do this elaborate sleight of hand by conscripting only the best minds of the day into into their fold. The intellectual elite conscripts understand how the mind works, and how it can be fooled. While each of them might belong to a separate, or a highly compartmentalized team, but at the very top, only a few old men are waving the baton.

The relationship between the Jesuits, Knights of Malta, Freemasons, Knights of Templar, and the Rothschild Khazarian Mafia, is fairly well established, and the lines between them has been blurred over time.

So, if Donald Trump is a Freemason, he is also working for the Jesuits and other stakeholders of the Empire…

https://geopolitics.co/2017/05/01/may-1st-the-day-slavery-system-transferred-from-royalties-to-the-jesuits-freemasonry/

FEW THINGS TRANSFORM us into frustrated baboons like navigating Turbotax each year. It’s incredible any computers physically survive April.

First there’s the maddening fact, when all is said and done, that the U.S. has something approaching a flat tax system. It’s true that, as right-wing think tanks constantly bleat, the top 1 percent pay a much higher rate than everyone else in federal income tax. But most people pay higher rates than the rich do in payroll and state and local taxes. Add everything together, and everyone from the middle class on up is paying about the same percentage in taxes overall.

Then there’s the grim reality that a big chunk of our money goes to buy things like 21,000-pound bombs, which we drop on, say, Afghanistan, a country with an economy one-one thousandth the size of ours.

And then there’s the process of paying taxes itself, which is mind-numbingly baroque — and for absolutely no reason. After all, the government already has copies of all of your tax forms. Countries like Denmark, Sweden and Spain use that information to fill out your return and send it to you. If it looks good, you sign it and you’re done (or if you think you see a mistake, you can change it). The sole reason we don’t have such a system is that the current disaster makes billions of dollars for tax software companies, which then use a slice of that to relentless lobby Congress to keep the status quo.

But if those are the only things turning you into a rage monkey this Tax Day, you’re not paying attention. As an extensive new report from Oxfam America explains, the biggest U.S. multinational corporations have positioned themselves for a political victory that will not just slash their taxes and leave regular people to pick up the bill, but also will set the stage for further corporate tax cuts in the future.

https://theintercept.com/2017/04/17/happy-tax-day-heres-how-corporations-plan-to-screw-you-over/

Only 10 companies control almost every large food and beverage brand in the world.

These companies — Nestlé, PepsiCo, Coca-Cola, Unilever, Danone, General Mills, Kellogg's, Mars, Associated British Foods, and Mondelez — each employ thousands and make billions of dollars in revenue every year.

In an effort to push these companies to make positive changes — and for customers to realize who controls the brands they're buying — Oxfam created a mind-boggling infographic that shows how interconnected consumer brands really are.

http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/companies-control-everything-you-buy-kelloggs-nestle-unilever-a7666731.html

CLARIFYING EVENTS in politics are often healthy even when they produce awful outcomes. Such is the case with yesterday’s vote by House Republicans to free internet service providers (ISPs) – primarily AT&T, Comcast and Verizon – from the Obama-era FCC regulations barring them from storing and selling their users’ browsing histories without their consent. The vote followed an identical one last week in the Senate exclusively along party lines.

It’s hard to overstate what a blow to individual privacy this is. Unlike Silicon Valley giants like Facebook and Google – which can track and sell only those activities of yours which you engage in while using their specific service – ISPs can track everything you do online. “These companies carry all of your Internet traffic and can examine each packet in detail to build up a profile on you,” explained two experts from the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Worse, it is not particularly difficult to avoid using specific services (such as Facebook) that are known to undermine privacy, but consumers often have very few choices for ISPs; it’s a virtual monopoly.

It’s hardly rare for the U.S. Congress to enact measures gutting online privacy: indeed, the last two decades have ushered in a legislative scheme that implements a virtually ubiquitous Surveillance State composed of both public intelligence and military agencies along with their private-sector “partners.” Members of Congress voting for these pro-surveillance measures invariably offer the pretext that they are acting for the benefit of American citizens – whose privacy they are gutting – by Keeping Them Safe™.

But what distinguishes this latest vote is that this pretext is unavailable. Nobody can claim with a straight face that allowing AT&T and Comcast to sell their users’ browser histories has any relationship to national security. Indeed, there’s no minimally persuasive rationale that can be concocted for this vote. It manifestly has only one purpose: maximizing the commercial interests of these telecom giants at the expense of ordinary citizens. It’s so blatant here that it cannot even be disguised.

https://theintercept.com/2017/03/29/to-serve-att-and-comcast-congressional-gop-votes-to-destroy-online-privacy/

Chiquita Brands says it was “an extortion victim in Colombia, paying left- and right-wing groups to protect its employees, not to promote violence,” reports the Business Courier in Cincinnati, Ohio, where Chiquita Brands is headquartered.

But the lawsuit suggests Chiquita’s involvement with FARC may have been more pro-active than simply paying protection money. The suit alleges that the company created dummy corporations and falsified its payroll records to hide payments to FARC, and used its network of local transportation contractors to funnel weapons to the group.

Chiquita has a long and sordid history in Colombia. The most notorious incident took place in 1928, when the company was still known as United Fruit Company. Colombian troops massacred an unknown number of UFC workers — believed to be in the thousands — during a protest over bad work conditions on the company’s plantations.

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By Glenn Greenwald

In a political culture drowning in hidden conflicts of interests, exploitation of political office for profit, and a rapidly eroding wall separating the public and private spheres, Michael McConnell stands out as the perfect embodiment of all those afflictions. Few people have blurred the line between public office and private profit more egregiously and shamelessly than he. McConnell's behavior is the classic never-ending "revolving door" syndrome: public officials serve private interests while in office and are then lavishly rewarded by those same interests once they leave. He went from being head of the National Security Agency under Bush 41 and Clinton directly to Booz Allen, one of the nation's largest private intelligence contractors, then became Bush's Director of National Intelligence (DNI), then went back to Booz Allen, where he is now Executive Vice President.

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Following the Supreme Court decision implicitly granting corporations the right to free speech (by determining that political spending is a kind of speech), a corporation has decided to take what it believes to be “democracy’s next step”: It is running for Congress.

With more than a twinge of irony, Murray Hill Incorporated, a liberal public relations firm, recently announced that it planned to run in the Republican primary in Maryland’s 8th Congressional District.

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In the midst of two wars and the fight against Al Qaeda, the CIA is offering operatives a chance to peddle their expertise to private companies on the side — a policy that gives financial firms and hedge funds access to the nation’s top-level intelligence talent, POLITICO has learned.

In one case, these active-duty officers moonlighted at a hedge-fund consulting firm that wanted to tap their expertise in “deception detection,” the highly specialized art of telling when executives may be lying based on clues in a conversation.

The never-before-revealed policy comes to light as the CIA and other intelligence agencies are once again under fire for failing to “connect the dots,” this time in the Christmas Day bombing plot on Northwest Flight 253.

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In short, there are now no checks on the ability of corporations or unions or other giant aggregations of power to decide our elections.

None. They can spend all the money they want. And if they can spend all the money they want — sooner, rather than later — they will implant the legislators of their choice in every office from President to head of the Visiting Nurse Service. ...

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The Supreme Court may have ruled in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission days ago, but the decision's shockwaves are still rippling across American democracy.

Key among them is a concern first raised by Justice John Paul Stevens, who wrote in his dissent that the court, by removing all prohibitions against corporate or union money in U.S. elections, "would appear to afford the same protection to multinational corporations controlled by foreigners as to individual Americans."

President Barack Obama, in his weekly YouTube address on Saturday, blasted the court's decision, saying that it "strikes at our democracy itself." He has ordered Congress to "develop a forceful response" to the court's move, but Newsweek notes that a significant reformation of U.S. election law may not be in place before the 2010 mid-term elections.

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A divided Supreme Court struck down decades-old limits on corporate political expenditures, potentially reshaping the 2010 election landscape by permitting businesses and unions to spend freely on commercials for or against candidates.

The ruling, which overturned two precedents, underscored the impact of former President George W. Bush's two appointments to the court. Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito joined the five-justice majority that struck down not only a provision of the 2002 McCain-Feingold campaign-finance act limiting corporate-funded political ads immediately before federal elections, but also federal laws dating to 1947, and state laws that were older still. Those earlier laws restricted corporations from directly funding political activity from their general treasuries.

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In a landmark decision, the Supreme Court rules corporations can spend unlimited amounts of money to elect and defeat candidates. One lawmaker describes it as the worst Supreme Court decision since the Dred Scott case justifying slavery.

Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (Docket No. 08-205) »»

Until now, corporations and unions have been barred from spending their own treasury funds on broadcast ads or billboards that urge the election or defeat of a federal candidate. This restriction dates back to 1907, when President Theodore Roosevelt called on Congress to forbid corporations, railroads and national banks from using their money in federal election campaigns. After World War II, Congress extended this ban to labor unions.

In today's decision, the high court struck down that restriction and said the 1st Amendment gives corporations, just like individuals, a right to spend their own money on political ads.

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A growing number of Americans and researchers suggest that many corporations in the U.S. contribute to both Democrats and Republicans, so that no matter who wins the election, corporations can still exert their influence in Washington.

The problem in America isn't that the Republican party has sold its soul to corporate wealth, Christian fundamentalism and plutarchs. The problem with America is that Democrats have, too. The problem with America is that the Republicans and the Democrats are units of the same organization, an organization that has consolidated its control over the American political process to the exclusion of all others.

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Yes, folks, democracy is dead. Oh, the illusion will be kept alive in our history books, in the rhetoric of politicians, in the manipulated minds of America's 95 million Main Street investors. The propaganda machine works. Like a child's fairy tale, democracy has been deeply imbedded in our brains for decades; we prefer believing old, familiar stories. They comfort us, even when no longer true. The real democracy, what so many fought and died for since 1776, is dead.

Lobbyists now run America, own America, rule America. Forget the 537 politicians you thought we elected to the White House, Senate and Congress to run America for us. No, they're mere puppets, pawns for the "Happy Conspiracy," an oligopoly, plutocracy, cabal, monopoly all-in-one -- a private club of America's richest few on Wall Street, in Washington and in Corporate America.

Voters and elections are irrelevant. Lobbyists decide what's in the best interests of this elite club. The usual suspects? Try the Forbes 400.

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