USDA, EPA, DOT .... all they do is keep you safe ... from corporations!

Why are the roads safe to drive on? Hell, why do we get to drive for hours without stopping to pay private tolls on roads?

United State Department of Transportation .... which is making sure roads are designed for safety.

Why don't we choke to death like people in China? EPA ... which is making sure we have clean air.

USDA ... is a little behind in their work. For over a year, a private, job creating, legal person called a corporation has been killing Americans with salmonella.

A year. Link to story at Yahoo.

WASHINGTON (AP) -- An outbreak of antibiotic-resistant salmonella linked to a California chicken producer continues to sicken people more than a year after it started.

Despite the illnesses, producer Foster Farms has not initiated a recall, and the government has no apparent plans to shut it down.

The federal Centers for Disease Control says there were 50 new reported illnesses in the last two months, bringing to 574 the total number of cases in the outbreak. Most of the illnesses are in California.

574 cases of salmonella and no one has died? Make me believe it. " Bloodstream infections caused by nontyphoidal salmonellae in Africa were reported in 2012 to have a case fatality rate of 20–25%."

For this outbreak? "Thirty-seven percent of victims were hospitalized and 13 percent of the victims had developed blood infections, almost three times the normal rate."

In a letter from USDA to Foster Farms last October, the department said inspectors had documented "fecal material on carcasses" along with "poor sanitary dressing practices, insanitary food contact surfaces, insanitary nonfood contact surfaces and direct product contamination."

In January, USDA inspectors briefly closed a Foster Farms plant after finding cockroaches.

Yeah. No one has died from this version of corporate citizenship. That we know about.

Drug dealers work for the NFL and pay no taxes

I have no clue on this headline. Who made that up?

Link

A group of retired NFL players says in a lawsuit filed Tuesday that the league, thirsty for profits, illegally supplied them with risky narcotics and other painkillers that numbed their injuries for games and led to medical complications ...

Not a big story in some ways. Employees are often subjected to unsafe working conditions. But, if you're one of the players living through Hell, it ain't funny.

Demand by consumers creates nothing

“The mature corporation,” wrote Galbraith, has “readily at hand the means for controlling the prices at which it sells as well as those at which it buys.... Since General Motors produces some half of all the automobiles, its designs do not reflect the current mode, but are the current mode. The proper shape of an automobile, for most people, will be what the automobile makers decree the current shape to be”

Extend that to fast food. Wages. Benefits. Quality of housing. Interest rates on auto loans. Revolving credit. Mortgage terms. Foreclosure practices. Political agenda in Washington or Atlanta. We need jobs. We get gun rights. We need jobs. We get corporate tax cuts for outsourced jobs. We want income and employment security. We get temporary employment agencies hiring people inside manufacturing plants like Kubota, Gainesville.

The world is not what people want.

For more reading on how the mature corporation has acted in our lifetimes, read about Enron.

Or Domino's Pizza in New York.

That's corporate citizenship at its very, very best.

If corporations are people, tax them like people!

There's an article out of USA Today about corporate tax rates.

Yes, the maximum corporate tax rate is 35%. I don't know exactly where the US ranks in corporate taxation, but I bet our maximum tax rate has us in the top ten world wide.

But, corporations don't pay the maximum. The average for corporations were 12.6% in 2010. Wish I was taxed at that average rate.

Think about it in rough numbers. If you make $8,700, your tax bracket is 15%. That's for a single filer in 2013.

Are you making over $36,000, you're in the 25% tax bracket. That's $9,000 leaving you $27,000 to live on.

That's just federal taxes. I'm not adding in Georgia's 6 percent income taxes or the 7 percent withholding for Social Security.

Here's a cut and paste from the article.

The news comes months after after the Government Accountability Office released a report showing that companies in 2010 reported an average effective tax rate of 12.6%, well below the 35% federal corporate tax rate.

Corporate giants such as telecom firm Verizon, drugmaker Bristol-Myers Squibb and power management firm Eaton, all reported effective tax rates of 0% during the past 12 months.