Tonight NBC will take a hard look at Carnival CEO Micky Arison who I have written about on this blog.
Micky Arison is well liked here in Miami, mostly for bringing a couple of NBA basketball championships to South Florida – first with Shaq and later with D-Wade and Lebron James who he has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on. He is extraordinarily wealthy with somewhere between 5 and 6 billion dollars.
Arison is also extraordinary in his ability to exploit crew members from impoverished countries like India and the Caribbean islands who work over 350 hours a month for as little as $550.
At 10:00 PM EST tonight, NBC’s Rock Center television program will air its investigation into Carnival’s cruise line business and how Arison has profited greatly from it.
Carnival’s CEO Micky Arison has incurred the wrath of Senator Jay Rockefeller who expressed his outrage to NBC over Carnival’s abuse of the loopholes in the tax system. Rockefller recently sent a letter to Arison which you can read about here.
Rockefeller, chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, told Rock Center’s Harry Smith that he regards Carnival “very poorly” as a corporate citizen. Rockefeller says Carnival’s extremely low tax rate is "disgusting" particularly because of the cruise line’s extensive use of federal agencies like the US Coast Guard.
NBC points out that the cost of US assistance to the fire-disabled Triumph cruise ship was $779,914.26. And another Carnival ship, the Splendor, suffered an engine fire two years ago that required assistance from the US Coast Guard and the Navy. That cost each service more than $1,500,000 which Carnival did not pay.
During the program tonight, you will see veteran newsman Harry Smith interview me as well. You can watch the video here or wattch the video below.
Will CEO Arison be on the program? No. He’s a no-show, just like he has never appeared at the scene of a cruise fire, collision, or catasrophe involving his cruise line guests.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/32545640
Interested in this issue? Here are some other articles I wrote on Micky Arison:
Hard Times For Carnival? Hardly.
Profits Over People: Carnival’s Exploitation of Crew Members is Standard Industry Practice
Is Carnival’s Micky Arison a Greedy Corporate Pig?
Art Credit: Nickolay Lamm from MyVoucherCodes.co.uk