{"id":110302,"date":"2014-03-26T15:17:12","date_gmt":"2014-03-26T15:17:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/?p=110302"},"modified":"2014-03-26T15:17:12","modified_gmt":"2014-03-26T15:17:12","slug":"apple-google-microsoft-nfl-suicide-greed","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/latest-news\/apple-google-microsoft-nfl-suicide-greed\/","title":{"rendered":"Apple, Google, Microsoft, NFL: suicide by greed"},"content":{"rendered":"

Jon Rappoport<\/strong>
\nRINF Alternative News<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

The old movie line, \u201cStop me before I kill again,\u201d comes to mind. In this case, however, it\u2019s \u201cStop me before I kill myself.\u201d<\/p>\n

PandoDaily has uncovered a wide-ranging scandal among tech giants<\/a>. It\u2019s basically an illegal scheme to limit wages by agreeing not to lure employees away from each other with the promise of higher salaries (see also\u00a0this link<\/a>).<\/p>\n

Companies involved? At first, just a few. But Pando has found evidence that many giants are in on the scheme, and \u201call told, the combined workforces of the companies involved totals well over a million employees.\u201d<\/p>\n

The companies? Google, Apple, Microsoft, Pixar, Intuit, Lucasfilm, IBM, Dell, eBay, Comcast, Clear Channel, Dreamworks, Adobe, Genentech. That\u2019s quite a list.<\/p>\n

Obviously, these corporations fear dents in their bottom-line, because prior to wage-fixing agreements, they were engaged in escalating bidding wars to grab employees from each other.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey\u2019re only paying you X over there? We\u2019ll offer you X plus 100!\u201d<\/p>\n

Well, whose fault is that? Who created the problem in the first place? The companies themselves, through their willingness to pay wild amounts of money to prospective talent.<\/p>\n

It was nobody\u2019s fault but their own.<\/p>\n

You see the same problem in pro sports. The National Football League, the National Basketball Association, Major League Baseball. Bidding wars for players. Salaries through the roof.<\/p>\n

So the team owners agree to various wage-fixing schemes, including paying fines, \u201cluxury taxes,\u201d for excessive payrolls.<\/p>\n

Television networks have gotten into the act, too. In their competition to sign contracts to broadcast the games, they\u2019re paying out billions to these sports leagues.<\/p>\n

And therefore, the networks have to turn around and charge outlandish prices to corporations who want to advertise during the games. Some of these corporations are now opting out of sponsorship. They can\u2019t afford it.<\/p>\n

For those who can, for example, cough up $4 million for a single 30-second ad during the Super Bowl, there is yet another level of insane competition: who produced the most creative commercial?<\/p>\n

Yes, there are post-game rankings of these ads published every year. In a final irony, Communicas has published a study showing that only one out of five Super Bowl ads results in the sale of a product.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s apparently the \u201ccreativity\u201d of the ad that makes the TV viewer fail to associate the ad with the brand name of the sponsor. Beautiful.<\/p>\n

Escalating greed eventually has consequences.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, a McDonald\u2019s tries to figure out how little they can pay their employees and keep them alive enough to show up for work.<\/p>\n

Selling a trillion toxic burgers a day doesn\u2019t quite result in sufficient profits.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t want to get into the pharmaceutical cartel, because I\u2019ll be here all day.\u00a0But as I recently wrote<\/a>, Gilead Sciences\u2019 new blockbuster-selling drug, Sovaldi, costs $84,000 for a 12-week treatment. That\u2019s a 1000 dollars a pill.<\/p>\n

Sovaldi treats hepatitis C. The late ABC News reporter, Nick Regush, one of the last true mainstream investigative medical reporters in America, offered evidence that the virus \u201ccausing\u201d hepatitis C was a complete fake. It had never been isolated and identified as existing at all.<\/p>\n

Regush challenged researchers to a public debate. No one took him up on it.<\/p>\n

A thousand dollars a pill to kill a virus that doesn\u2019t exist. Now, that\u2019s a business strategy for the ages.<\/p>\n

This post originally appeared at\u00a0www.nomorefakenews.com<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Jon Rappoport RINF Alternative News The old movie line, \u201cStop me before I kill again,\u201d comes to mind. In this case, however, it\u2019s \u201cStop me before I kill myself.\u201d PandoDaily has uncovered a wide-ranging scandal among tech giants. It\u2019s basically an illegal scheme to limit wages by agreeing not to lure employees away from each […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":58214,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-110302","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-latest-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/110302","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=110302"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/110302\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/58214"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=110302"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=110302"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=110302"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}