Tag: corporate_evil

Ricketts family Screws Up

Seth Anderson1 Comment

 Chicago Cubs

Chicago Cubs

Talk about stupid moves: the New York Times reported today that Joe Ricketts, founder of TD Ameritrade, and patriarch of the family that owns Wrigley Field, is planning to spend at least $10,000,000 on attack ads targeting President Obama, bringing up old smears, and doing whatever nasty tricks the PAC can come up with to defeat Obama.

 Except that the Chicago Cubs are trying to get money from former Obama Chief of Staff, and current Chicago Mayor, Rahm Emanuel, to pay for renovations on Wrigley Field. Ooops.

The Cubs are trying to work out a deal with the city that would involve using $150 million in city amusement taxes for a $300 million renovation of Wrigley Field.

The presidential campaign issue was widely viewed as threatening to upend the delicate talks between the family and city and state government. A mayoral aide said Emanuel was furious when he read about the anti-Obama ad proposal.

At City Hall, it did not go unnoticed that part of the Ricketts family is asking for taxpayer support while gearing up to spend millions on a presidential campaign. The mayoral aide described that as hypocritical.

The Emanuel aide said the Ricketts family has tried to contact Emanuel to discuss the situation, but the mayor declined the overture. Publicly, Emanuel did not have an immediate comment on how the effort by Joe Ricketts might affect those talks. “I’ll have some conversations on that later — comments rather,” Emanuel said.

(click here to continue reading Ricketts family moves to control fallout on Obama attack ad – chicagotribune.com.)

Assholes. I hope they don’t get a single dime of taxpayer money. In fact, the city ought to use the power of eminent domain, and seize control of the stadium until the Ricketts divest from it. Sell the Cubs to Mark Cuban, he’s much smarter than these tone-deaf idiots. 

Las Vegas Showgirls
Las Vegas Showgirls

The media buy for the proposal (source document here – PDF) includes advertising on Meet the Press, Face the Nation, the History Channel, the Weather Channel, TNT, Anderson Cooper’s show on CNN, Fox and Friends, of course, aerial banners to fly over the Democratic Convention in Charlotte, blanketing the Charlotte airport with 15 screens running this clap-trap four times an hour, full page 4-Color newspapers ads, and more. 

No Corporate Welfare for The Ricketts

more from the NYT on the Rickett plan:

Timed to upend the Democratic National Convention in September, the plan would “do exactly what John McCain would not let us do,” the strategists wrote.

The plan, which is awaiting approval, calls for running commercials linking Mr. Obama to incendiary comments by his former spiritual adviser, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., whose race-related sermons made him a highly charged figure in the 2008 campaign.

“The world is about to see Jeremiah Wright and understand his influence on Barack Obama for the first time in a big, attention-arresting way,” says the proposal, which was overseen by Fred Davis and commissioned by Joe Ricketts, the founder of the brokerage firm TD Ameritrade. Mr. Ricketts is increasingly putting his fortune to work in conservative politics.

The $10 million plan, one of several being studied by Mr. Ricketts, includes preparations for how to respond to the charges of race-baiting it envisions if it highlights Mr. Obama’s former ties to Mr. Wright, who espouses what is known as “black liberation theology.”

The group suggested hiring as a spokesman an “extremely literate conservative African-American” who can argue that Mr. Obama misled the nation by presenting himself as what the proposal calls a “metrosexual, black Abe Lincoln.”

A copy of a detailed advertising plan was obtained by The New York Times through a person not connected to the proposal who was alarmed by its tone. It is titled “The Defeat of Barack Hussein Obama: The Ricketts Plan to End His Spending for Good.”

…

The document, which was written by former advisers to Mr. McCain, is critical of his decision in 2008 not to aggressively pursue Mr. Obama’s relationship with Mr. Wright. In the opening paragraphs of the proposal, the Republican strategists refer to Mr. McCain as “a crusty old politician who often seemed confused, burdened with a campaign just as confused.”

“Our plan is to do exactly what John McCain would not let us do: Show the world how Barack Obama’s opinions of America and the world were formed,” the proposal says. “And why the influence of that misguided mentor and our president’s formative years among left-wing intellectuals has brought our country to its knees.”

The plan is designed for maximum impact, far beyond a typical $10 million television advertising campaign. It calls for full-page newspaper advertisements featuring a comment Mr. Wright made the Sunday after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. “America’s chickens are coming home to roost,” he said.

The plan is for the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, N.C., to be “jolted.” The advertising campaign would include television ads, outdoor advertisements and huge aerial banners flying over the convention site for four hours one afternoon.

The strategists grappled with the quandary of running against Mr. Obama that other Republicans have cited this year: “How to inflame their questions on his character and competency, while allowing themselves to still somewhat ‘like’ the man becomes the challenge.”

Lamenting that voters “still aren’t ready to hate this president,” the document concludes that the campaign should “explain how forces out of Obama’s control, that shaped the man, have made him completely the wrong choice as president in these days and times.”

(click here to continue reading G.O.P. ‘Super PAC’ Weighs Hard-Line Attack on Obama – NYTimes.com.)

Look, if Papa Ricketts wants to attack the president with his own TD Ameritrade money, well, I don’t like it, nor their moronic intentions, but I don’t object. However, the Ricketts simultaneously having their hands out to take my tax money is just wrong, and I hope Mayor Emanuel tells them to fuck off, in those words.  If I had a TD Ameritrade account, I’d close it right away. You should close yours right away.

The Cozy Compliance of the News Corp. Board

Seth Anderson0 comment

I Was Doing Foul Shit Very Young
I Was Doing Foul Shit Very Young

If there were justice in this world, Rupert Murdoch would have long ago been stripped of his media empire, and forced to rot in a dungeon. But since money and power trump justice 99 times out of a 100, Rupert Murdoch can continue smiling, and thumbing his nose at the law.

David Carr writes, in part:

There are many reasons Rupert Murdoch has avoided any serious consequences from the scandal despite hundreds of British citizens having had their phones hacked, dozens or more being bribed in law enforcement and several dozen more of his employees having been arrested.

…Mr. Murdoch also remains mostly unscathed because much of News Corporation’s business and most of its profits lie here in the United States, where the scandal is viewed as something happening on a distant island.

There have been reports of corporate misdeeds in America, including computer hacking at its News America Marketing division, but other than some faint rumbles in Washington about further investigations, it’s been mostly smoke, no fire.

…But the primary reason Mr. Murdoch has not been held to account is that the board of News Corporation has no independence, little influence and no stomach for confronting its chairman.

Like many media companies (including the one I work for), News Corporation has a two-tiered stock setup that gives the family control of the voting shares. The current board includes family members and several senior executives; the independent slots are filled by a host of familiars.

Viet Dinh, a former Bush administration official, is godfather to Lachlan K. Murdoch’s son. Roderick Eddington was deputy chairman of a division of the company in the late 1990s. Andrew S. B. Knight and Arthur M. Siskind are both former senior executives, and John L. Thornton, the former Goldman Sachs president, served as an adviser to News Corporation on several major deals.

The board also includes Natalie Bancroft, a trained opera singer who made a great deal of money when her family sold Dow Jones, which included The Wall Street Journal, to Mr. Murdoch in 2007, and José Maria Aznar, a former prime minister of Spain, who is a friend of Mr. Murdoch’s.

Being a board member of News Corporation is not a bad gig; it pays over $200,000 a year and requires lifting nothing heavier than a rubber stamp. The directors apparently haven’t asked why the company maintained its “rogue reporter” defense after it became clear that “rogue enterprise” was a more apt description. They appeared to sit silently by while Mr. Murdoch and his son James waited for law enforcement officials to finally ferret out employees of the company’s British newspaper division who were accused of engaging in criminal conduct.

Still, the board may regret being quite so quick to throw its full support behind Mr. Murdoch and the current management. The parliamentary report, as scathing as it was, is only the first of many dominoes expected to fall in the next few weeks and months. Ofcom, the British broadcasting regulator, is assessing whether News Corporation should be allowed to continue to hold its stake in British Sky Broadcasting. For its part, BSkyB was quick to get out the 10-foot pole, reminding everyone that the two companies are separate even though News Corporation owns a 39 percent stake.

(click here to continue reading The Cozy Compliance of the News Corp. Board – NYTimes.com.)

A public company in name only, in other words. A true public company would have to do what was best for shareholders, and a public company’s Board of Directors is supposed to lead a corporation down the Straight and Narrow. Instead, News Corporation smiles at corruption, blinks at lawlessness, and counts profit.  

Mars Says Goodbye to ALEC

Seth Anderson0 comment

Chocolate city
Chocolate city

Yet another corporation whose financial viability depends upon being non-controversial has wised up and left the American-hating group, American Legislative Exchange Council.

Mars Inc., the company that makes everything from Skittles to M&M’s to Uncle Ben’s, has joined McDonald’s, Wendy’s, and a half-dozen other companies in quitting the American Legislative Exchange Council.

ALEC, as it’s known, is a corporate-funded non-profit that writes pro-business and often anti-union draft legislation for state lawmakers to introduce in their legislatures. ALEC has come under fire recently from good-government and civil rights groups for pushing voter identification bills that critics say discriminate against blacks and Hispanics. ALEC foes have also blasted the organization for promoting so-called Stand Your Ground laws like the one at the center of the Trayvon Martin shooting.

Bob Edgar, the president of Common Cause, one of the groups in the anti-ALEC coalition, hailed Mars’ decision. “Its leaders understand that continued support for ALEC’s advocacy of vigilante justice and assaults on voting and employee rights, public schools, and reasonable environmental regulations is neither good business nor good corporate citizenship,” Edgar said in a statement.

(click here to continue reading Mars Inc. Says Adios to ALEC | Mother Jones.)

 

ALEC Hunkers Down As Sponsors Run

Seth Anderson0 comment

Get What You Deserve
Get What You Deserve

For today’s update on the America-hating GOP lobbyists who run the American Legislative Exchange Council, Crooks and Liars blogger karoli writes, in part:

Poor, poor ALEC. They’re being victimized, don’t you know? Wednesday they went into full damage control mode even as more corporate donors bailed out on them. The list now includes Wendy’s, Intuit, McDonalds, Coke, Pepsi, Kraft Foods and the Gates Foundation. More on the Gates Foundation in a minute. On Wednesday, ALEC bleated out a statement, complaining that they’re just a little non-profit organization whose sole purpose is to help businesses turn a bit of a profit, don’t you know? And they’re being victimized by those mean, nasty lefty types.

From their statement:

ALEC is an organization that supports pro-growth, pro-jobs policies and the vigorous exchange of ideas between the public and private sector to develop state based solutions. Today, we find ourselves the focus of a well-funded, expertly coordinated intimidation campaign.

Our members join ALEC because we connect state legislators with other state legislators and with job-creators in their states. They join because we support pro-business policies that promote innovation and spur local and national competitiveness. They’re ALEC members because they’re more interested in solutions than rhetoric.

For years, ALEC has partnered with legislators to research and develop better, more effective public policies – legislation that creates a more transparent, accountable government, policies that place a priority on free enterprise and consumer choice, and tax policies that are fair, simple and that spur the kind of competiveness that puts Americans back to work.

Somebody’s going to have to explain to me how Stand Your Ground laws and Voter ID laws help create jobs. That’s left me scratching my head. How is it that laws which blatantly discriminate against people of color and have absolutely nothing to do with jobs create jobs? And then there’s abortion legislation. What does abortion legislation have to do with job creation?

As to their so-called free enterprise and consumer choice policies, let’s look at one area where they’re working hard to interfere: education. And let’s bring the Gates Foundation back into focus on this one. The Gates Foundation has now declared they will not give any further grants to ALEC. Slow clap for the Gates Foundation.

I’m not particularly impressed because there are 17 months remaining on the grant they’ve already given ALEC for “education reform”

(click here to continue reading ALEC Hunkers Down As Sponsors Run, But Untold Damage Has Already Been Done | Crooks and Liars.)

Cry me a river…

Full list of supporters of ALEC’s anti-American agenda is archived here

Intuit To Drop Voter Suppression Group ALEC

Seth Anderson1 Comment

Sunset Over American Empire
Sunset Over American Empire

Inuit left the hate group, American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a couple of days ago, btw

Software company Intuit, the makers of programs such as Turbo Tax and Quicken, announced today that they will join Coca-Cola, PepsiCo and Kraft as the fourth company to end their partnership with the right-wing American Legislative Exchange Council this week.

The Center for Media & Democracy, which launched ALECexposed.com last year, broke the news:

A stampede seems to be on the way as more and more groups break ties and dump ALEC. Intuit, Inc. (maker of Quicken and QuickBooks accounting software) told the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) that Intuit also decided not to renew its membership after it expired in 2011. That comment came from Bernie McKay, Vice President of Government Affairs. He gave this response when CMD identified that Intuit was no longer listed on the board and contacted the company. CMD began its effort to spotlight Intuit and other corporate funders and tie these corporations to the ALEC agenda when it launched ALECexposed.org in July 2011. … Intuit’s McKay explained to CMD that the company doesn’t “usually issue statements about membership in any organization” and declined to comment further.

Although Pepsi quietly left ALEC as recently as last January, the growing exodus of companies’ from ALEC’s began earlier this week when the progressive group Color of Change announced a petition and boycott campaign targeting ALEC’s corporate supporters. Other corporations that have not yet publicly renounced their support of ALEC include Koch Industries, Wal-Mart, Pfizer, Reynolds American, Altria/Philip Morris, Procter & Gamble, Exxon Mobil and British alcohol firm Diageo (makers of Smirnoff and Johnnie Walker).

(click here to continue reading Intuit Is Now The Fourth Company To Drop Voter Suppression Group ALEC | ThinkProgress.)

Full list of supporters of ALEC’s anti-American agenda is archived here

McDonalds, Gates Foundation to sever ties with ALEC

Seth Anderson0 comment

So Much Unsaid You Won't Say
So Much Unsaid You Won’t Say

Two more wise corporations leaving the hate group, American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC)

Two more institutions, one commercial and one non-profit, have announced that they will part ways with the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation provided an education grant to ALEC, and will not be making future grants. The foundation said it would not award another grant to the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) in the face of criticism of the council’s involvement in voting laws and in “stand your ground” gun laws such as one under scrutiny in the Trayvon Martin shooting in Florida. “At this point, we’ve decided that it’s not the right environment to continue working with them,” Gates Foundation spokesman Chris Williams told Reuters on Tuesday.

The split will take effect once the Gates Foundation pays the balance of a $376,000 education grant that it awarded to the conservative group last year, Williams said.

As the result of the Color of Change campaign to educate and agitate among the corporate sponsors of ALEC, McDonald’s has been proactive in clarifying their position with ALEC. They told Mother Jones that “it recently decided to cut ties with ALEC, the corporate-backed group that drafts pro-free-market legislation for state lawmakers around the country.” “While [we] were a member of ALEC in 2011, we evaluate all professional memberships annually and made the business decision not to renew in 2012,” Ashlee Yingling, a McDonald’s spokeswoman, wrote in an email. Yingling didn’t mention any specific campaign or outside pressure as playing a role in the company’s decision to leave ALEC.

(click here to continue reading Daily Kos: McDonalds, Gates Foundation to sever ties with ALEC.)

 

Kraft drops membership in ALEC

Seth Anderson1 Comment

A Monster Maker an Eye
A Monster Maker an Eye

Like I said, a little sunshine goes a long way, and hate groups like ALEC need to hide their agenda from the public, or else publicly traded corporations will flee. Kudos to PepsiCo, Coca-Cola and Kraft for running away earlier than later…

Kraft Foods joined Coca-Cola in bowing to consumer pressure this week to cut ties with the American Legislative Exchange Council, a conservative lobbying group that has recently backed controversial voter ID and so-called “stand your ground” laws.

Kraft said in a statement that it has “made the decision not to renew” its ALEC membership, which is expiring. The company, based in north suburban Northfield, was opaque in its reasoning, citing “limited resources” and saying that its involvement with ALEC “has been strictly limited to discussions about economic growth and development, transportation and tax policy.”

Advocacy group Color of Change launched a boycott against Coca-Cola for its participation in ALEC’s Private Enterprise Board, but within hours, the soft drink giant issued a statement saying that it had “elected to discontinue its membership.”

The company blamed ALEC’s support of “discriminatory food and beverage taxes” instead of “issues that have no direct bearing on our business.”

“We have a long-standing policy of only taking positions on issues that impact our company and industry,” Coca-Cola said.

The withdrawals pleased ALEC detractors, which includes the Center for Media and Democracy. The liberal-leaning nonprofit said it had launched a protest campaign in tandem with Color of Change opposing what it said were ALEC’s efforts to deny climate change, undermine public schools and encourage laws that would require voters to present various forms of identification before voting.

…In January, PepsiCo quietly pulled itself off the board.

(click here to continue reading Kraft drops membership in conservative group amid protest – chicagotribune.com.)

 

Boycotts Hitting ALEC Behind Stand Your Ground Gun Laws

Seth Anderson3 Comments

Silent Witness to Spring
Silent Witness to Spring

Good to see that the America-hating folks at American Legislative Exchange Council are getting a little press. For far too long, ALEC has been able to operate in secret, manipulating the legislative process with their mounds of corporate-donated cash.

Two of America’s best-known companies, Coca-Cola and PepsiCo, have dropped their memberships in the American Legislative Exchange Council, a low-profile conservative organization behind the national proliferation of “stand your ground” gun laws.

ALEC promotes business-friendly legislation in state capitols and drafts model bills for state legislatures to adopt. They range from little-noticed pro-business bills to more controversial measures, including voter-identification laws and stand your ground laws based on the Florida statute. About two-dozen states now have such laws. Florida’s stand your ground law has been cited in the slaying of Trayvon Martin, an unarmed teen who was shot and killed by neighborhood watch volunteer George Zimmerman on Feb. 26.

…

Until recently, ALEC was best known for its volumes of pro-business legislation: bills to weaken labor unions, as in Wisconsin, to privatize government operations and to reduce regulation.

But this new anti-ALEC campaign comes at a time when some investors have already been pushing for more transparency on corporate political activities.

Tim Smith is a vice president with Walden Asset Management, which does what it calls socially responsible investing. He says corporate boards and top management are paying closer attention now.

“They’re scrutinizing their trade association memberships, their relationships with controversial institutes,” said Smith. “And certainly I think that companies are scrutinizing their ALEC relationship more carefully, too.”

But certainly not every corporation: On Wednesday, another well-known company, Kraft Foods, said it was keeping its membership in ALEC.

A spokeswoman for Kraft said its only concerns at ALEC are business related and have nothing to do with stand your ground or voter ID laws.

(click here to continue reading Boycotts Hitting Group Behind ‘Stand Your Ground’ Gun Laws : NPR.)

Publicly traded companies should be very wary of donating to such partisan organizations – shareholders might not be sanguine. Non-profits such as Susan G Komen For the Cure of Republican Women ought to tread carefully as well. In these days of social media, it won’t take much to bring a firestorm of bad publicity. Of course, some of ALEC’s core corporate sponsors don’t give a shit about such things. Corporations like the Charles Koch Foundation, Richard Mellon Scaife’s Allegheny Foundation, the Coors family Castle Rock Foundation. But I’d be surprised if Johnson & Johnson, FedEx, Visa, Amazon.com, GlaxoSmithKline, Bayer, State Farm Insurance, Walgreens and others wouldn’t get a little nervous if a campaign against them got organized.

Coke Truck
Coke Truck

Coca-Cola’s retraction came in the Examiner’s “Secrets” blog. Blogger Paul Bedard’s interpretation of the facts comes with a strong ideological bias, but the facts are clear: The good guys won.

By contrast, Wal-Mart told the Examiner:

Our membership in any organization does not affirm our agreement with each policy created by the broader group. Wal-Mart has a long history of supporting voter rights, and we continue to be a strong proponent of this issue. In fact, Wal-Mart was an active supporter in 2006 of the renewal of the Voting Rights Act of… One of Wal-Mart’s basic beliefs is respect for the individual, and Wal-Mart will continue to stand with all Americans in ensuring our right to vote. Not good enough. If you support people who are attacking the right to vote, financially and with your reputation, then you are supporting injustice.

Attention Sellers: This could affect your bottom line in a big way. There’s a large majority in this country that feels disenfranchised from the political process — and is. They’ve been, in the crude words of bar patrons everywhere, “screwed, blued, and tattooed.” They’ve lost their jobs, or their wages have stagnated, while organizations like ALEC strip them of organizing rights and the chance for a job at a living wage.

They’ve also been disenfranchised by voter laws like the ones ALEC supports, and by a money-driven, corporate political process. But that disenfranchised majority has enormous economic power — and it’s learning how to use it. One of our most effective tools for responding to the power of corporate money is by cutting off the source of that money.

(click here to continue reading Good Guys Win: With ALEC, Things Go Better Without Coke | Crooks and Liars.)

Union
Union

Some other things ALEC is busy passing: banning living wages, privatizing schools, privatizing prisons, crippling collective bargaining.

The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) is the most powerful corporate front group you’ve never heard of. The organization, funded mostly by large corporations, writes model legislation and then sends these bills to state legislators across the country. It has successfully passed scores of laws on various issues.

ALEC has come under scrutiny lately for writing and helping to pass “Stand Your Ground” laws, which allow for an expansive definition of self defense that lets individuals use deadly force if they feel threatened. It is a law like this in Florida which may allow Trayvon Martin’s killer to go free. The National Rifle Association, which is partly funded by the gun industry, worked closely with ALEC to pass the law. (It also sponsors ALEC’s conferences.)

But ALEC’s “Stand Your Ground” is far from the only deadly law that this corporate front group has pushed. ALEC’s network of laws have endangered every area of American life, from the air we breathe to the water we drink to the education our children receive in our schools. Here are five despicable laws that ALEC has helped pass in states nationwide:

(click here to continue reading The Top Five Most Despicable Laws Passed By Corporate Front Group ALEC.)

Dixie Motel
Dixie Motel

The Department of Justice overturned at least a couple of ALEC’s voter ID laws, including in Texas:

The Department of Justice has blocked the Texas voter ID law. Of the 8 states where American Legislative Exchange Council’s (ALEC) inspired voter ID laws were enacted, two have now been struck down for discrimination under the historic 1965 Voting Rights Act.

Under the act, 16 states that have a history of discrimination must get federal approval before changing voting laws. Texas changed their law in May of 2011 to require the following ID: driver’s license, a military identification card, a birth certificate with a photo, a current U.S. passport, or a concealed handgun permit.

The Obama administration’s Department of Justice blocked Texas’ voter ID law because even conservative data showed it discriminated against Hispanics:

“Even using the data most favorable to the state, Hispanics disproportionately lack either a driver’s license or a personal identification card,” wrote Thomas Perez, head of the Justice Department’s civil rights division, in a letter to Keith Ingram, director of elections for the Texas Secretary of State. So what made the voter ID laws such a priority?

Republicans pushed ALEC inspired voter ID laws in over 33 states and passed them in states like South Carolina (whose voter ID law was also struck down by the DOJ for discrimination), Kansas, Alabama, Rhode Island, Tennessee and Wisconsin. This legislation is meant to give Republicans a much needed edge, allowing military ID and concealed handgun permits to suffice for ID, while cutting out student IDs in some states. In fact, the NRA was the corporate co-chair of ALEC Public Safety and Elections in 2011.

 

(click here to continue reading Another ALEC Law Bites the Dust: DOJ Kills Texas Voter ID Law.)

Muted Voice of Angry Fear

Muted Voice of Angry Fear

Governor Christie, the GOP Angry Man in NJ, is a fan of ALEC:

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie denies any connection with the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), but a Star-Ledger investigation finds plenty of evidence to the contrary, particularly when it comes to Christie’s union-busting, privatizing education agenda.

First off: At least three bills, one executive order and one agency rule accomplish the same goals set out by ALEC using the same specific policies. In eight passages contained in those documents, New Jersey initiatives and ALEC proposals line up almost word for word. Two other Republican bills not pushed by the governor’s office are nearly identical to ALEC models. This includes policies on teacher tenure, pay, and hiring and firing; easing training requirements for charter school teachers; waivers of environmental regulations that businesses don’t like; and more.

Beyond the similar legislation and executive actions: […] Christie’s then-chief of staff and former health commissioner were involved in an ALEC policy seminar in Trenton in December. Legislative liaisons inside the governor’s office have mined ALEC for advice on budgetary matters, Medicaid changes and privatizing government services, according to e-mail records, beginning in the earliest days of Christie’s governorship and as recently as December.

(click here to continue reading Daily Kos: New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie denies connection to ALEC while pushing its agenda.)

Benjamins
Benjamins

One last point, so I don’t have to look this up again. Here are the corporations who I will think twice about doing business with because they are sponsors of the radical GOP agenda, and I don’t want to give them my money (and I won’t own any stock from these corporations either):

  • Allergan
  • Altria
  • Amazon.com
  • American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity
  • American Electric Power
  • American Federation for Children
  • AT&T
  • Atmos Energy
  • Bayer
  • BlueCross Blue Shield of Lousiana
  • BlueCross BlueShield Association
  • BNSF
  • BP
  • CashAmerica
  • CenturyLink
  • Chesapeake Energy
  • Chevron
  • Cleco
  • CN
  • ConocoPhillips
  • Cox
  • CSX
  • Dow
  • Encana
  • Energy Transfer
  • Entergy
  • ExxonMobil
  • EZCorp
  • FedEx
  • Franklin Center for Government and Public Integrity
  • Freepont-McMoran Copper & Gold
  • Genesee & Wyoming Inc.
  • Gulf States Toyota
  • Harris Deville & Associates
  • HP
  • International Paper
  • Intuit
  • Jacobs Entertainment
  • Johnson & Johnson
  • Kansas City Southern
  • Koch Industries
  • Kraft Foods
  • Lilly
  • LouisDreyfus Commodities
  • Louisiana Chemical Association
  • Louisiana Railroads Association
  • Louisiana Realtors
  • Louisiana Seafood
  • LouisianaTravel.com
  • Lumina Foundation
  • McMoran Exploration
  • Merck
  • National Rifle Association
  • NetChoice
  • Norfolk Southern
  • Peabody
  • Pfizer
  • PhRMA
  • QEP Resources
  • RestoringFreedom.org
  • Reynolds American
  • Sanofi
  • Shell
  • Society of Louisiana CPAs
  • Southern Strategy Group
  • Spectra Energy
  • State Farm
  • State Policy Network
  • StateNet
  • Takeda Pharmaceutical
  • The Capitol Group
  • TimeWarner
  • TogetherRX Access
  • Union Pacific
  • UnitedHealthcare
  • UPS
  • USAA
  • Visa
  • Walgreens
  • Walmart
  • Walton Family Foundation
  • WellPoint

Clear Channel in Trouble

Seth Anderson0 comment

Cleaning Up
Cleaning Up

I wonder when Bain Capital is going to hollow out Clear Channel, home to the Vulgar Pigboy, Rush Limbaugh.

A hedge fund is accusing a subsidiary of Clear Channel Communications Inc. of improperly moving $656 million to its debt-laden parent, which is owned by private-equity giants Bain Capital Partners and Thomas H. Lee Capital Partners.

The cash transfers, which were fully disclosed, were made from billboard company Clear Channel Outdoor Holdings Inc. The company is 89% owned by Clear Channel Communications, with the rest owned by public shareholders.

JHL Capital Group, a $1.5 billion Chicago hedge fund, argues in a letter to the billboard company that its board members may be liable for “breach of duty” due to cash transfers to the larger media company, according to the Nov. 29 letter. The hedge fund owns less than 1% of Clear Channel Outdoor, according to securities filings.

The private-equity firms, which are named in the letter, are at the center of the dispute. Bain and Thomas H. Lee teamed up to purchase Clear Channel Communications in 2008 in what has thus far been one of the more disappointing buyouts of recent years. In addition, four members of the billboard company’s board are employed by the two firms.

…Bain and Thomas H. Lee paid $17.9 billion to buy media-and-entertainment company Clear Channel Communications just before the economy headed south and radio advertising deteriorated. Today, Clear Channel’s actively traded debt is rated at the lower end of the “junk”-bond universe, even though revenue and operating income rose last year. The company has more than $12 billion in debt due in 2016 and default is a “real possibility,” said Melissa Link, an analyst at Fitch Ratings, in an interview. Clear Channel declined to comment on Ms. Link’s analysis.
The $656 million moved to Clear Channel Communications has risen from $123 million two years ago and could exceed $1 billion “in the next several years,” the company recently told investors in bond-offering papers. The company wouldn’t comment on the offering.

(click here to continue reading Transfers At Clear Channel in Dispute – WSJ.com.)

We Three Pigs
We Three Pigs

And a possible reason why Mitt Romney refuses to say much about Limbaugh – Romney still gets most of his money from Bain, remember?

Clear Channel is going to host Rush until the bitter end…

Rush Limbaugh is probably not sweating this one, folks. The critics keep piling on. But the immensely popular talk radio host has the biggest “sponsor” of all on his side: Clear Channel radio network.

Arizona Sen. John McCain, Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich, and New York’s Cardinal Timothy Dolan are among the latest to criticize Limbaugh for calling a Georgetown University student a “slut” and a “prostitute” after she testified in favor of birth control insurance coverage.

But Clear Channel’s Premiere Radio Networks Inc., which hosts Limbaugh’s conservative talk show, has voiced its unwavering support for Limbaugh, whose contract runs through 2016.

“The contraception debate is one that sparks strong emotion and opinions on both sides of the issue,” Premiere Networks told the Associated Press. “We respect the right of Mr. Limbaugh, as well as the rights of those who disagree with him, to express those opinions.”

A representative for Premiere declined to tell the news service how much revenue the company is losing over the recent loss of advertisers seeking to distance themselves from Limbaugh and his comments.

(click here to continue reading Rush Limbaugh has the biggest support of all from Clear Channel. – latimes.com.)

Fresh allegations increase likelihood of News Corp being prosecuted under Foreign Corrupt Practices Act

Seth Anderson0 comment

Join The Accusations
Join The Accusations

As always, waiting with bated breath for Rupert Murdoch and News Corporation to be prosecuted. Murdoch needs to go to jail, his company needs to lose its license to broadcast over the public airwaves, and his empire should be broken apart.

This week, Metropolitan police deputy assistant commissioner Sue Akers told the Leveson inquiry, which is investigating the state of the British press following the phone-hacking scandal, that there was a “culture of illegal payments” at the Sun to a “network of corrupted officials”.

The Sun and its former sister paper, the News of the World, are owned by News International, a wholly owned subsidiary of News Corp, the US media gaint that owns Fox, the Wall Street Journal and a controlling stake in Sky, among other assets.

“This is obviously a very significant development with regards to the likelihood of a US prosecution,” said Mark MacDougall, partner in the Washington office of the law firm Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld and a former federal prosecutor. “If the British authorities are articulating a pattern, a defined scheme, to bribe officials, that is a very big deal.”

The latest allegations significantly increase the likelihood of an FCPA action, said Mike Koehler, professor of business law at Butler University and author of the FCPA Professor blog.

“Last July, when we first started talking about this, there was one newspaper, the News of the World, and one category of foreign official, the police. Now we have another newspaper and a much broader category of foreign officials,” said Koehler.

“The evidence seems to suggest that there was a recognition that these payments may have been illegal and the notion that there were attempts to disguise the nature of these payments,” said Koehler. These elements would fall under the remit of the FCPA.

The original investigation centered on payment to police officers, and there had been some argument that the police did not fit the FCPA’s definition of “foreign government officials”.

Tom Fox, a Houston-based lawyer who specialises in FCPA cases and anti-corruption law, said Akers’s allegations that payments had been made to “police, military, government, prison and health and others” had destroyed that argument.

“Speaking of a culture of corruption is really bad,” said Fox. “There are two main types of FCPA case. In the first, a company has policies in place but fails to detect corruption. The second is far worse. And that’s when there is a programme in place and you ignore it.”

(click here to continue reading News Corp: threat of US legal action raised in light of ‘illegal payment’ claim | Media | guardian.co.uk.)

 

Heartland’s Corporate Sponsors

Seth Anderson1 Comment

Drive Towards the Sun
Drive Towards the Sun

Any corporation that donates money to the anti-planet, anti-humanity hateful organization the Heartland Institute, is on my shite list. There is no excuse to support them.

Along with tobacco giants Altria and Reynolds America, and drug firms GlaxoSmithKline, Pfizer and Eli Lilley, major corporations have given over $1.1m in the past two years to the institute, and are planning to give another $705,000 this year.

Some of the companies included on Heartland’s list of donors were surprising. Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft Corporation, has vigorously promoted clean energy in a number of speeches, and his charitable foundation works on helping farmers in the developing world, who will be badly affected by climate change.

But Heartland claims in a fundraising document to have received $59,908 from Microsoft in 2011.

…

A spokeswoman for GSK said the $50,000 the company donated in the last two years was for a healthcare initiative. She could not comment on whether GSK would be working with Heartland in the future.

…

General Motors Foundation, which is committed to social responsibility, has also made modest donations to Heartland, contributing $15,000 in 2010 and 2011.

…

Diageo, the drinks company which owns Smirnoff, Johnnie Walker and Baileys, said its funding of Heartland was now under review. It gave $10,000 over the last two years, according to the leaked papers, and was projected to give another $10,000 this year.

(click here to continue reading Climate science attack machine took donations from major corporations | Environment | The Guardian.)

I don’t buy the excuse that some of what the Heartland Institute does is ok, and is worthy of corporate sponsorship. I wouldn’t excuse a crack dealer who happened to purchase neighborhood kids a pair of shoes either – the main business is still selling crack, just like the Heartland Institute’s main business is denying climate change.

Some other corporate sponsors I recognize, and now despise:

  • Amgen
  • Anheuser-Busch Companies
  • AT&T
  • Bayer Corporation
  • Comcast
  • Eli Lilly
  • Farmers’ Insurance (Zurich)
  • Marathon Petroleum
  • Nationwide Insurance
  • Nucor Corp.
  • PepsiCo, Inc.
  • Pfizer
  • State Farm
  • Time Warner Cable
  • Verizon
  • and of course, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce

Rupert Murdoch and American Scandals

Seth Anderson1 Comment

St Paul's Cathedral London
St Paul’s Cathedral London

Nothing relevatory, but still, any more discussion of Rupert Murdoch’s criminal enterprise is good…

Tim Dickenson reports, in part:

At first glance, the systemic campaign of bribery and wiretapping at the News of the World certainly does seem extraordinary. Reporters and editors at what was the largest-circulation Sunday paper in the English-speaking world stand accused of bribing police, hacking the private voicemails of everyone from the royal family to the parents of soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan, and paying more than $2 million in gag settlements to victims — allegedly with the full knowledge of Murdoch’s son and heir apparent, James.

But the corruption exposed at the News of the World is not the work of a “rogue” element within News Corp. — it’s a reflection of the lawless culture that defines the company. As CEO, Murdoch not only tolerates employees and executives who push the boundaries of legality and good taste, he celebrates them — at least until the cops show up. “There’s a broader culture within the company,” Col Allan, editor of Murdoch’s New York Post, crowed in 2007. “We like being pirates.” Whatever veneer of integrity News Corp. may have accrued after its purchase of The Wall Street Journal the very same year masks an ingrained corporate ethos that believes integrity is for suckers. The attitude passed down from the top, says one veteran of Murdoch’s tabloids, is aggressive and straightforward: “Anything we do is OK. We’re News Corp. — so fuck you and fuck your mother.”

Indeed, an examination of Murdoch’s corporate history reveals that each of the elements of the scandal in London – hacking, thuggish reporting tactics, unethical entanglements with police, hush-money settlements and efforts to corrupt officials at the highest levels of government – extend far beyond Fleet Street. Over the past decade, News Corp. has systematically employed such tactics in its U.S. operations, exhibiting what a recent lawsuit filed against the firm calls a “culture run amok.” As a former high-ranking News Corp. executive tells Rolling Stone: “It’s the same shit, different day.”

HACKING AND HUSH MONEY News America Marketing, a News Corp. subsidiary based in Connecticut, has been accused of engaging in “illegal computer espionage,” repeatedly hacking a rival firm’s computer system between 2003 and 2004 — a period that happens to coincide with NOTW’s voicemail hacking in London. According to a lawsuit against News America, which dominates the lucrative market for ads on supermarket shelves and shopping carts, the Murdoch subsidiary grew alarmed when a competitor called Floorgraphics Inc. entered the market in the late 1990s with a novel concept — ad decals pasted on supermarket aisles. Paul Carlucci, the CEO of News America, responded by convening a meeting with FGI executives and allegedly delivering a Mafia­like ultimatum: Sell to Murdoch or be destroyed. “I work for a man who wants it all,” Carlucci warned, “and doesn’t understand anyone telling him he can’t have it all.”

When FGI rebuffed the takeover bid, according to a lawsuit the company filed in 2004, News America embarked on a campaign of “illegal, anti-competitive and unfair business practices.” After hacking into FGI’s database, the suit alleged, News America used the information to steal away top clients like Safeway, effectively destroying its rival’s business. FGI petitioned Chris Christie, then a U.S. attorney, to launch a criminal investigation into the alleged hacking, but the future governor of New Jersey refused to file charges. By then, the damage was done. News America was able to snap up FGI for $30 million — not only achieving Murdoch’s original goal of market domination but also quashing FGI’s lawsuit in the process.

News Corp. shareholders have paid far more to hush up other complaints about News America’s monopolistic abuses. To box out two more rival firms, Valassis Communications and Insignia, News America used its market position to hike ad rates for supermarket clients who refused to also advertise in Murdoch newspaper circulars. “It feels like they are raping us and they enjoy it,” an executive at Sara Lee complained. In 2009, a Michigan court awarded Valassis $300 million for News America’s illegal attempt to corner the market. News Corp. eventually silenced the affair with a $500 million payment to Valassis that blocked the threat of further litigation. It also reached a $125 million settlement with Insignia. The combined settlements of $655 million more than wiped out the profits News Corp. reaped from its record box-office smash Avatar.

(click here to continue reading Rupert Murdoch’s American Scandals | Rolling Stone Politics.)

 

News Corp Skates on Paying US Taxes

Seth Anderson0 comment

Ready for a scotch
Ready for a scotch

What a surprise, News Corp is a tax scofflaw as well as a regular criminal enterprise…

Over the past four years Murdoch’s U.S.-based News Corp. has made money on income taxes. Having earned $10.4 billion in profits, News Corp. would have been expected to pay $3.6 billion at the 35 percent corporate tax rate. Instead, it actually collected $4.8 billion in income tax refunds, all or nearly all from the U.S. government.

The relevant figure is the cash paid tax rate. This is the net amount of corporate income taxes actually paid after refunds. For those four years, it was minus 46 percent, disclosure statements show.

Even on an accounting basis, which measures taxes incurred but often not actually paid for years, News Corp. had a tax rate of under 20 percent, little more than half the 35 percent statutory rate, company disclosures examined by Reuters show. News Corp. had no comment.

 

(click here to continue reading RPT-COLUMN-It pays to be Murdoch. Just ask US gov’t: DCJohnston | Reuters.)

Of course, despite these facts, the ditto-heads on Fox News never stop repeating the mantra about U.S. taxes being too high.

…Update 6:46 PM

Hmm, author retracts article. Strange, but perhaps no conspiracy. Perhaps.

No excuses. But I will explain how I made such a bonehead error.

The other facts I reported remain:

* Among the 100 largest companies in the United States, News Corp has the third largest number of subsidiaries in tax havens, a Government Accountability Office study found in 2009.

* On an accounting basis, which measures taxes incurred but often not actually paid for years, News Corp had a tax rate of under 20 percent, little more than half the 35 percent statutory rate, its disclosures show.

* Murdoch has bought companies with tax losses and fought to be able to use them, which reduces his company’s costs.

* News Corp lawyers and accountants are experts at making use of tax deferrals, though the company’s net tax assets have shrunken from $5.7 billion in 2007 to $3.3 billion last year as the benefits were either used or expired.

 

Rupert Murdoch and his cozy relationship with power

Seth Anderson1 Comment

Damn Tourists
Damn Tourists

More on the News of the World cellphone scandal, and on why Rupert Murdoch isn’t already in jail…

Let’s try a thought experiment. Let’s imagine that BP threw an extravagant party, with oysters and expensive champagne. Let’s imagine that Britain’s most senior politicians were there — including the Prime Minister and his chief spin doctor. And now let’s imagine that BP was the subject of two separate police investigations, that key BP executives had already been arrested, that further such arrests were likely, and that the chief executive was heavily implicated.

Let’s take this mental experiment a stage further: BP’s chief executive had refused to appear before a Commons enquiry, while MPs who sought to call the company to account were claiming to have been threatened. Meanwhile, BP was paying what looked like hush money to silence people it had wronged, thereby preventing embarrassing information entering the public domain.

And now let’s stretch probability way beyond breaking point. Imagine that the government was about to make a hugely controversial ruling on BP’s control over the domestic petroleum market. And that BP had a record of non-payment of British tax. The stench would be overwhelming. There would be outrage in the Sun and the Daily Mail — and rightly so — about Downing Street collusion with criminality. The Sunday Times would have conducted a fearless investigation, and the Times penned a pained leader. In parliament David Cameron would have been torn to shreds.

Instead, until this week there has been almost nothing, save for a lonely campaign by the Guardian. Because the company portrayed above is not BP, but News International, owner of the Times, the Sunday Times, the News of the World and the Sun, approximately one third of the domestic newspaper market. And last week, Jeremy Hunt ruled that Murdoch, who owns a 39 per cent stake in BSkyB, can now buy it outright (save for Sky’s news channel). This consolidates the Australian-born mogul as by far the most significant media magnate in this country, wielding vast political and commercial power.

 

(click here to continue reading What the papers won’t say.)

Parliament Buildings London

Parliament Buildings London

and one last bit:

Perhaps Baldwin, like his former News International colleagues, doesn’t find phone hacking too shocking. Indeed, one of his first actions as Miliband’s spin-doctor was to instruct Labour MPs to go easy on the scandal. In a leaked memo, he ordered them not to link it to the impending takeover decision on BSkyB. But this was to let News International crucially off the hook. For the key question — and it burns deeper than ever in the light of the Milly Dowler revelations — is exactly whether the owner of News International is any longer a ‘fit and proper’ person to occupy such a dominant position in the British media.

This is a question that has almost never been asked. This is partly because of heavy political protection of the kind that was on such vivid display at the Orangery last month. But Murdoch could not have got away with it for so long but for the silence in the British press. The Sunday Mirror is the News of the World’s most direct competitor: one would have expected it to revel in its rival’s problems. Instead it has largely ignored the story — except for an attack on the News of the World on Wednesday — as has Express Newspapers.

The Daily Mail, likewise, has written almost nothing. Paul Dacre, editor-in-chief at Associated Newspapers, is rightly regarded as the greatest newspaper editor of his time. But in this case Fleet Street’s moralist has lost his compass: his failure to engage seriously with the phone-hacking story is a most unfortunate blot on a brilliant career. The Daily Telegraph, for which I write, has done better, but the minimum. Only the Guardian, and belatedly the Independent, have covered the story with flair and integrity.

This should have been one of the great stories of all time. It has almost everything — royalty, police corruption, Downing Street complicity, celebrities by the cartload, Fleet Street at its most evil and disgusting. One day, I guess, it will be turned into a brilliant film, and there will be a compulsive book as well.

The truth is that very few newspapers can declare themselves entirely innocent of buying illegal information from private detectives. A 2006 report by the Information Commissioner gave a snapshot into the affairs of one such ‘detective’, caught in so-called ‘Operation Motorman’. The commissioner’s report found that 305 journalists had been identified ‘as customers driving the illegal trade in confidential personal information’. It named each newspaper group, the number of offences and the number of guilty journalists (see above). But, as the commission observed, coverage of this scandal ‘even in the broadsheets, at the time of publication, was limited’. The same reticence has been seen, until now, over the voicemail-hacking scandal.

By minimising these stories, media groups are coming dangerously close to making a very significant statement: they are essentially part of the same bent system as News International and complicit in its criminality. At heart this is a story about the failure of the British system, which relies on a series of checks and balances to prevent high-level corruption. Each one of them has failed: parliament because MPs feel intimidated by the power of newspapers to expose and destroy them; and opposition, because Ed Miliband lacked the moral imagination to escape the News International mindset — until he was forced to confront it all by the sheer horror of the Milly Dowler episode.

Legal Tender

Legal Tender

and from D.D. Guttenplan of The Nation, a little history:

Rupert Murdoch may have finally gone too far. For decades the billionaire media baron has relentlessly amassed power on three continents. But it is worth recalling that his first move out of his native Australia—and out from under the shadow of his father, newspaper magnate Sir Keith Murdoch—came in 1969, when he snatched a very downmarket British Sunday title, the News of the World, away from Robert Maxwell. (Maxwell’s fraudulent dealings were still unsuspected, but his Czech Jewish origins were held against him by the paper’s editor, who remarked that the News of the World “was—and should remain—as British as roast beef and Yorkshire pudding.”) In considerable decline from its heyday in the 1950s, when it sold over 8 million copies, the paper Murdoch acquired relied on a mix of kiss and tell stories—the News of the World bought Christine Keeler’s account of her involvement in the Profumo Scandal—and “investigations” of London vice dens, with the exposé typically ending with the line “I made my excuses and left.”

But it was still the biggest-selling English language paper in the world, and though Murdoch steered it even deeper into sleaze—earning him the nickname “the Dirty Digger”—the News of the World and its weekday stablemate, the Sun, which he acquired a year later, supplied the steady profits that enabled Murdoch to build his British empire. (In 2010, a terrible year in the newspaper business, the two titles reported a profit of £86 million.) So there was something not just shocking but brutal about James Murdoch’s announcement that “this Sunday will be the last issue” of the 168-year-old paper.

The immediate cause of the paper’s demise was public revulsion in Britain to the news that News of the World reporters had hacked into the mobile phone messages of Milly Dowler, a 13-year-old girl who was abducted on her way home from school in March 2002, but whose body wasn’t discovered for another six months. Guardian reporter Nick Davies’s disclosure that the News of the World had not only listened to messages left by Milly’s frantic friends and family but had deleted messages from her voice mailbox to keep the supply coming—creating false hope for the girl’s family and possibly destroying evidence—sparked a boycott of the paper’s advertisers and widespread denunciation. Prime Minister David Cameron condemned the hacking as “dreadful,” Labour Party leader Ed Miliband called for Rebekah Brooks, a Murdoch executive who was editor of the News of the World when the murdered teenager’s phone was hacked, to resign. The Royal British Legion, the country’s largest veterans’ organization, announced it was cutting its ties with the paper after reports emerged suggesting that the phones of soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan had also been hacked. Even Rupert Murdoch described the mounting scandal as “deplorable and unacceptable.”

 

(click here to continue reading Sky Falling, Murdoch Sacks Hacks. Game Over? | The Nation.)

and for some inexplicable reason, this tidbit made me happy:

There is no doubt that Murdoch has been seriously damaged by all of these disclosures. It has often been said of Murdoch that the only thing he cares about is his share price. Events over the past week wiped some $2.5 billion off the value of News Corporation, his US-based holding company.

Terrorist Attack victims were targets of phone hacking by News Corp

Seth Anderson1 Comment

Mounted Police, Black Friars Lane

Mounted Police, Black Friars Lane

In an expansion of the ongoing British investigation into the Rupert Murdoch criminal empire, this despicable fact emerges:

The phone-hacking crisis enveloping the News of the World intensified on Tuesday night after it emerged that Scotland Yard has started to contact the relatives of victims of the 7 July 2005 attacks to warn them they were targeted by the paper.

The revelation that bereaved family members may have had their mobile phone messages intercepted by Glenn Mulcaire, a private investigator employed by the paper, in the days following the 2005 London bombings will heap further pressure on the title’s owner, News International, part of Rupert Murdoch’s media empire.

Graham Foulkes, whose son David was killed in the attack at Edgware Road tube station, confirmed that he had been contacted by officers from Operation Weeting, the Met’s investigation into phone hacking. He said they had told him his mobile phone number, ex-directory landline number and address had been found in records made by Mulcaire that were recovered from the investigator’s office in south London.

Foulkes’s solicitor, Clifford Tibber, who represents several families who had relatives killed in the terrorist attack, said the news had “come as a terrible shock” to them as they prepared to mark the sixth anniversary of the bombings this week.

The news capped a dramatic day of unfolding developments in the News of the World phone-hacking scandal.

Police officers are turning their attention to examine every high-profile case involving the murder, abduction or attack on any child since 2001 – in response to the revelation that journalists from the tabloid newspaper hacked into the voicemail messages of the murdered schoolgirl Milly Dowler.

Officers have already told the parents of Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman, the girls killed in Soham in 2002 by Ian Huntley, that their mobiles had been hacked. Documents seized by the Metropolitan police in a 2006 raid on Mulcaire’s home show he targeted Leslie Chapman, the father of Jessica Chapman.

(click here to continue reading Families of 7/7 victims ‘were targets of phone hacking’ | Media | The Guardian.)