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The Kochs’ Stake in Pollution

Thursday, May 30th, 2013

Accountability_LATimesPuppets_300x250_FINALREVISED050813_2Koch Industries and the billionaire brothers who run it are best known for their involvement in rightwing causes. The latest controversy is over the Kochs’ reported interest in purchasing the Los Angeles Times and other major newspapers owned by the Tribune Co. A campaign centered in L.A. is mobilizing opposition to such a deal among newspaper subscribers and Tribune shareholders, warning that a Koch takeover would create a new Fox News.

What often gets forgotten is that Koch Industries is not just part of the Koch ideological machine. It is a huge privately-held conglomerate with annual revenues of more than $100 billion and operations ranging from oil pipelines and refining to paper products (it owns Georgia-Pacific), synthetic fibers (it bought Lyrca and Stainmaster producer Invista from DuPont), chemicals, mining and cattle ranching.

I’ve just completed one of my Corporate Rap Sheets on Koch Industries, and it’s clear that the sins of the company go far beyond the political realm. The following is some of what I found.

In November 2011 the magazine Bloomberg Markets published a lengthy article entitled “The Secret Sins of Koch Industries” that made some explosive accusations against the company: “For six decades around the world, Koch Industries has blazed a path to riches—in part, by making illicit payments to win contracts, trading with a terrorist state, fixing prices, neglecting safety and ignoring environmental regulations. At the same time, Charles and David Koch have promoted a form of government that interferes less with company actions.”

What Bloomberg revealed for the first time were the allegations involving bribery and dealing with Iran. The article reported that the company’s subsidiary Koch-Glitsch paid bribes to secure contracts in six countries (Algeria, Egypt, India, Morocco, Nigeria and Saudi Arabia) and that it violated U.S. sanctions by doing business with Iran, including the sale of materials that helped the country build the world’s largest plant to convert natural gas to methanol used in plastics, paints and chemicals.

The environmental cases alluded to by Bloomberg had been previously reported and included the following.

In 1995 the U.S Justice Department, the Environmental Protection Agency and the United Stated Coast Guard filed a civil suit against Koch Industries and several of its affiliates for unlawfully discharging millions of gallons of oil into the waters of six states. In one of the largest Clean Water Act cased ever brought up to that time, the agencies accused Koch of being responsible for more than 300 separate spills in Alabama, Kansas, Louisiana, Missouri, Oklahoma and Texas.

In 1997 Tosco Corporation (now part of ConocoPhillips) sued Koch in a dispute over costs related to the clean-up of toxic waste at an oil refinery in Duncan, Oklahoma that used to be owned and operated by Koch. In 1998 a federal judge ordered Koch to contribute to those costs, and that ruling was upheld by an appeals court in 2000. The companies later settled the matter out of court.

In 1998 Koch agreed to pay $6.9 million to settle charges brought by state environmental regulators relating to large oil spills at the company’s Rosemount refinery in Minnesota. The following year it agreed to plead guilty to related federal criminal charges and pay $8 million in fines.

Also in 1998, the National Transportation Safety Board found that the failure of a Koch subsidiary to protect a liquid butane pipeline from corrosion was responsible for a 1996 rupture that released a butane vapor. When a pickup truck drove into the vapor it ignited an explosion that killed the driver and a passenger. In a wrongful death lawsuit a Texas jury awarded the father of one of the victims $296 million in damages.

In 2000 the U.S. Justice Department and the EPA announced that Koch Industries would pay what was then a record civil environmental fine of $30 million to settle the 1995 charges relating to more than 300 oil spills plus additional charges filed in 1997. Along with the penalty, Koch agreed to spend $5 million on environmental projects in Texas, Kansas and Oklahoma, the states where most of its spills had occurred. In announcing the settlement, EPA head Carol Browner said that Koch had quit inspecting its pipelines and instead found flaws by waiting for ruptures to happen.

Later in 2000, DOJ and the EPA announced that Koch Industries would pay a penalty of $4.5 million in connection with Clean Air Act violations at its refineries in Minnesota and Texas. The company also agreed to spend up to $80 million to install improved pollution-control equipment at the facilities.

In a third major environmental case against Koch that year, a federal grand jury in Texas returned a 97-count indictment against the company and four of its employees for violating federal air pollution and hazardous waste laws in connection with benzene emissions at the Koch refinery near Corpus Christi.

The Bloomberg Markets article reported that a former Koch employee said she was told to falsify data in a report to the state on the emissions.  The company was reportedly facing potential penalties of some $350 million, but in early 2001 the newly installed Bush Administration’s Justice Department negotiated a settlement in which many of the charges were dropped and the company pled guilty to concealing violations of air quality laws and paid just $10 million in criminal fines and $10 million for environmental projects in the Corpus Christi area.

With the purchase of Georgia-Pacific in 2005, Koch acquired a company with its own environmental and safety problems. For example, in 1984 a G-P plant in Columbus, Ohio had spilled 2,000 pounds of phenol and formaldehyde that reached a nearby community. Residents complained of health problems from that incident and from a huge industrial waste pond that the company continued to maintain at the plant.

In 2009 the U.S. Justice Department and the EPA announced that G-P would spend $13 million to perform clean-up activities at a Michigan Superfund site where it previously had a paper mill. In 2010 G-P was one of ten companies sued by the Justice Department over PCB contamination of the Fox River in Wisconsin. Unlike the other defendants, G-P had already settled with DOJ by agreeing to a $7 million penalty and to pay for the costs of a portion of the clean-up. One of the other defendants, Appleton Papers, called the settlement a “sweetheart deal.”

More recently, Koch Industries has been caught up in the controversy over the Keystone XL pipeline. In 2011 Inside Climate News reported that Koch already responsible for 25 percent of the tar sands oil being imported from Canada into the United States and stood to benefit greatly from the new pipeline. Koch denied its involvement, but Inside Climate News found documents filed with Canada’s Energy Board contradicting that statement.

An August 2012 report by the Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst identified Koch as being among the top five corporate air polluters in the United States.

The reason the Kochs rail against regulation is clear: they’ve got a big stake in pollution.

Note:  The full rap sheet on Koch Industries can be found here.

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Posted in Climate Change, Corporate Crime, Corporate Lobbying, Corporate Subsidies, Environment | 1 Comment »

The Keystone Kop of Tar Sands Oil

Thursday, April 11th, 2013

KeystoneKopsEven if the Obama Administration decides against the Keystone XL pipeline, the rejection of that project would not put much of a dent in the output of environmentally destructive Alberta tar sands oil.  One reason is that tar sands producers are hedging their bets. They are also hoping to ship their product westward through another pipeline that will extend to the Pacific port of Kitimat in British Columbia.

What is particularly dismaying is that the company behind this Northern Gateway project is Canadian pipeline giant Enbridge, which has what is probably the worst safety record of any oil transportation company in the world. Among other things, it was responsible for the worst inland oil spill in U.S. history—the July 2010 accident that spewed more than 800,000 gallons of oil into Michigan’s Kalamazoo River, a major state waterway that flows into Lake Michigan.

The incident occurred only months after the company was warned that it was not properly monitoring corrosion on the pipeline.

The U.S. Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA) later imposed a record civil penalty of $3.7 million against Enbridge, which it said exhibited a “lack of a safety culture.”  This was echoed in the findings of the National Transportation Safety Board, which determined that it was not until 17 hours after the spill started that Enbridge began to take steps to address the problem. The safety board chair was quoted in an agency press release as saying: “This investigation identified a complete breakdown of safety at Enbridge. Their employees performed like Keystone Kops and failed to recognize their pipeline had ruptured and continued to pump crude into the environment.”

Enbridge’s lack of attention to safety can be seen in its record both before and after the Michigan spill.

For example, in 2001 a seam failure on a pipeline near Enbridge’s Hardisty Terminal in Alberta spilled more than 1 million gallons of oil. The following year, a 34-inch-diameter pipeline owned by its affiliate Enbridge Energy Partners ruptured in northern Minnesota, contaminating five acres of wetland with about 250,000 gallons of crude oil.

In 2003 about 189,000 gallons of crude oil spilled into the Nemadji River from the Enbridge Energy Terminal in Superior, Wisconsin. Fortunately, the river was frozen at the time, so damage to the waterway was limited.

In 2004 the U.S. Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA) proposed a fine of $11,500 against Enbridge for safety violations found during inspections of pipelines in Illinois, Indiana and Michigan. The penalty was later reduced to $5,000. In a parallel case involving Enbridge operations in Minnesota, an initial penalty of $30,000 was revised to $25,000.

In 2007 an Enbridge pipeline in Wisconsin spilled more than 50,000 gallons of crude oil onto a farmer’s field in Clark County. The following month another Enbridge spill in Wisconsin released 176,000 gallons of crude in Rusk County. That same year, two workers were killed in an explosion that occurred at an Enbridge pipeline in Clearbrook, Minnesota. The PHMSA later fined the company $2.4 million for safety violations connected to the incident.

In 2008 the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources charged Enbridge with more than 100 environmental violations relating to the construction of a 320-mile pipeline across much of the state. The agency said that Enbridge workers illegally cleared and disrupted wooded wetlands and were responsible for other actions that resulted in discharging sediment into waterways. In January 2009 the company settled the charges by agreeing to pay $1.1 million in penalties.

In 2009 the PHMSA fined Enbridge $105,000 for a 2007 accident that released more than 9,000 gallons of crude oil. The following year, PHMSA proposed a fine of $28,800 against Enbridge for safety violations in Oklahoma.

Shortly after the Michigan accident, Enbridge experienced another spill at one of its pipelines in Romeoville, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago.

And in In July 2012, less than a month after the publication of the damning National Transportation Safety Board report on the Michigan accident, an Enbridge pipeline in Wisconsin ruptured and spilled some 50,000 gallons of oil. One member of the U.S. Congress responded by saying: “Enbridge is fast becoming to the Midwest what BP was to the Gulf of Mexico.”

These incidents are only the ones big enough to gain press attention and significant regulatory response. A profile of the company by the Polaris Institute put the number even higher—more than 800 spills between 1999 and 2010 in which some 6.8 million gallons of oil were spilled in the U.S. and Canada.

While Keystone XL and its sponsor TransCanada get the attention, Enbridge may be an even bigger threat.

Note: This piece draws from my new Corporate Rap Sheet on Enbridge, which can be found here.

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Posted in Environment, Oil spills, Petroleum Industry | 1 Comment »

Canada’s Other Tar Sands Villain

Thursday, April 4th, 2013

suncor_oil_sandsAs the Obama Administration nears its final decision on the Keystone XL pipeline, the oil industry should be on its best behavior. Yet the purveyors of petroleum can’t seem to help themselves. They keep having accidents that demonstrate the perils of Keystone.

Those perils are not limited to the disastrous contribution the pipeline would make to the climate crisis. Recent events show what a dangerous business it is to transport oil across vast distances, especially when that oil is of the exceedingly dirty variety produced in the tar sands of Canada.

Exxon Mobil has been the center of attention in recent days as the result of a leak of some 10,000 barrels of heavy Canadian crude in a residential area near Little Rock, Arkansas. The incident came only days after the federal Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration proposed that the company be fined $1.7 million in connection with a 2011 pipeline rupture that spewed a large quantity of oil into the Yellowstone River in Montana.

The Arkansas spill came shortly after a Canadian Pacific freight train derailed, spilling some 30,000 barrels of tar sands oil in western Minnesota.

The U.S. press has paid less attention to yet another spill. This one took place right where tar sands oil is produced in Alberta, and the responsible party was Canadian oil giant Suncor Energy. And it turned out that the site of its toxic wastewater spill into the Athabasca River was the same place where a previously unreported spill occurred two years earlier.

Suncor, which is the subject of my latest Corporate Rap Sheet, tends to get less attention from U.S. tar sands activists than Transcanada, which is the company behind Keystone XL. Yet Suncor is one of a handful of operators that produce the tar sands oil that would flow through the pipeline.

It was Suncor, in its previous incarnation as a subsidiary of Sunoco, that pioneered tar sands production in the 1950s and went on to invest billions of dollars to develop the dirty business. Suncor has thus been a target of anti-tar sands protests by groups such as Greenpeace Canada.

The recent spill in Alberta and the belatedly reported 2011 incident are far from the only blemishes on the company’s safety and environmental record.

In 2008 there was a scandal over reports that a leak of nearly 1 million liters of waste water from a Suncor containment pond into the Athabasca River went unreported for up to eight months. Alberta Environment later charged the company with being out of compliance with its Water Act license but fined it only C$275,000.

In 2009 there was a bigger scandal over reports that a Suncor contractor, Compass Group Canada, had failed to properly treat human waste from a company work camp before dumping sewage into the same river. Suncor was fined C$175,000 for failing to properly supervise Compass, which was fined C$225,000 for failing to report the problem.

At the same time, Suncor was fined C$675,000 for failing to install pollution control equipment at its Firebag oil sands facility. In July 2009 Suncor was fined C$625,000 for excessive discharges of sulfur dioxide at its Sarnia oil refinery in Ontario.

In 2010 Environment Canada ordered Suncor to pay C$200,000 after it pleaded guilty to two violations of the Canadian Fisheries Act in connection with a 2008 incident in which wastewater overflowed from a containment pond into the Steepbank River in Alberta.

In December 2011 an accident at Suncor’s refinery in Commerce City, Colorado resulted in the seepage of hazardous waste into Sand Creek and the South Platte River. Tests by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency found that the contamination included the carcinogenic substance benzene. The drinking water at the refinery was also found to contain high levels of benzene. Meanwhile, the refinery continued to spread contamination into surrounding groundwater sources. Six months after the spill, Colorado officials were saying that a complete clean-up could take years.

In April 2012 the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment announced that Suncor would pay $2.2 million in negotiated fines in connection with airborne benzene releases at the Commerce City refinery unrelated to the accident.

In October 2012, the Canada-Newfoundland and Labrador Offshore Petroleum Board announced that Suncor had admitted to regulatory violations in connection with a spill of lubricating fluid at its drilling platform in the Jeanne d’Arc basin the year before; the company was ordered to pay C$130,000 in penalties.

Transcanada deserves all the criticism it gets for its Keystone plan, but companies like Suncor that actually produce the dirty oil that will travel through that system also need to feel the heat.

Read the full Corporate Rap Sheet on Suncor Energy here.

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Posted in Environment, Oil spills, Petroleum Industry | No Comments »

Corporate Power and the Second Obama Administration

Thursday, November 8th, 2012

The corporate lobby is dumbfounded. After spending billions of dollars to defeat President Obama and take Republican control of the Senate, business interests have nothing to show for their efforts.

By all rights, Thomas Donohue of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which went all-out for Republican candidates, should be handing in his resignation. The Big Business-loving editorial page of the Wall Street Journal should be exhibiting a bit of contrition.

Instead, Donohue issued a press release reiterating the Chamber’s laissez-faire position: “It is the private sector that drives economic growth and jobs, and it is the government’s responsibility to work on a bipartisan basis to pass policies that will unleash the private sector and help put Americans back to work.”  The Journal warns Obama not to “consider his reelection to be a mandate to repeat his first-term record of rejecting all GOP ideas and insisting on his priorities.” God forbid that a President returned to office with a resounding victory should seek to promote his own priorities.

Even with the election is over, conservatives cannot let go of their caricature of Obama as a radical leftist who refuses to compromise. This may have something to do with the fact that many of them are radical rightists who refuse to compromise.

After Obama was first elected in 2008, the Journal predicted that he would “seek middle ground with business on thorny issues.” You wouldn’t know it from the campaign, but that was often what happened during the past four years.  Far from being the Bolshevik envisioned in the fevered imagination of his critics, Obama led Democrats in pursuing an agenda that was solidly middle-of-the-road or, in some respects, conservative, by earlier standards. Let’s recall that Obama:

  • Promoted and got enacted a healthcare reform plan that preserves the private insurance industry;
  • Enacted a stimulus plan that, among other things, funneled billions into subsidies, grants and contracts for large corporations;
  • Helped rescue the auto industry through a plan that forced workers to make major contract concessions and that took a hands-off approach to the management of companies such as General Motors and Chrysler that received tens of billions in federal aid;
  • Occasionally talked tough but ultimately did little to prosecute the financial institutions that were responsible for the near meltdown of the economy through predatory lending and reckless speculation;
  • Enacted a financial reform bill that allowed venal megabanks such as Citigroup to remain in existence and then did little to challenge Republican efforts to stonewall implementation of its consumer protection provisions;
  • Abandoned, in the face of Republican opposition, the pro-union Employee Free Choice Act and cap-and-trade legislation;
  • Continued the practice of allowing corporate criminals to escape real punishment through deferred prosecution agreements;
  • Continued to promote the myth of “clean coal” and adopted a weak or inconsistent position on dangerous energy practices such as offshore drilling and fracking;
  • Went along with the wrong-headed notion that corporate income tax rates are too high;
  • Claimed to be reducing the influence of corporate lobbyists but chose as a senior advisor someone who also serves as a strategist for clients such as military contractor Pratt & Whitney and Keystone XL pipeline developer TransCanada;
  • Declined to directly criticize large profitable companies that have refused to rehire adequate numbers of U.S. workers; and
  • Chose executives from union-unfriendly offshore outsourcers such as General Electric to advise him on job creation.

The list could go on. By any reasonable assessment, this record could be considered business-friendly or at least not overly hostile. The problem is that business groups are comparing the reality of Obama to a fantasy of token regulation, minimal taxation, vanished unions—in other words, totally unfettered corporate power—and thus feel frustrated.

Unfortunately, left to its own devices, a second Obama Administration is likely to go on trying to placate corporate interests and the Right by promoting policies that will never satisfy them but will dilute critical progressive goals.  Wouldn’t it be great if the President felt he needed to try that hard to satisfy the other end of the political spectrum?

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Posted in Campaign Contributions, Corporate Lobbying, Corporate Power, Environment, Financial Crisis, Recovery Act, Unions | No Comments »

Wal-Mart’s Other Sins

Thursday, October 25th, 2012

The job actions taking place at many Wal-Mart locations around the United States have brought new attention to the abysmal labor practices of the country’s largest private employer. More than any other company, Wal-Mart depends on low wages, meager benefits, overtime abuses and gender discrimination to keep its labor costs artificially low while quashing any efforts by workers to rectify those conditions.

Two weeks ago, I used this blog to recount Wal-Mart’s labor and employment track record. Here I want to remind readers of some of the company’s many sins outside the workplace, using information I assembled for the new 5,000-word Wal-Mart entry in my Corporate Rap Sheets series.

Corruption. Wal-Mart doesn’t seem to mind its hardline reputation on personnel matters, but it has tried to otherwise paint itself as a squeaky-clean operation. That image was shattered last spring, when the New York Times published an 8,000-word front-page exposé about moves by top management to thwart and ultimately shelve an investigation of Foreign Corrupt Practices Act violations, focusing on extensive bribes paid by lower-level company officials as part of an effort to increase Wal-Mart’s market share in Mexico.

That story made a huge splash and reportedly undermined the company’s urban expansion efforts. A major public pension fund, the California State Teachers’ Retirement System, sued the company for breach of fiduciary duty in connection with the bribery scandal. It and other institutional investors showed their discontent with top management by opposing the official slate of directors at Wal-Mart’s annual meeting. About 12 percent of the shares outstanding were voted against the slate, an unprecedented level of dissent by the company’s previously quiescent shareholders. The company, apparently still trying to deal with the fallout, has just announced an overhaul of its compliance department.

State income tax avoidance. In 2007 the Wall Street Journal published a front-page story revealing that Wal-Mart was using a real estate gimmick to avoid paying many millions of dollars in state corporate income taxes each year. It was doing this by putting many of its stores under the ownership of a real estate investment trust (REIT) controlled by the company. The stores would pay rent to the captive REIT and deduct those payments as a business expense.

This trick, essentially paying rent to itself, reduced the company’s taxable income and thus lowered its state tax bill (the REIT was structured so its income wasn’t taxed by any state). A report by Citizens for Tax Justice estimated that Wal-Mart had thereby avoided some $2.3 billion in state income tax payments between 1999 and 2005–an average of more than $300 million a year.

Local property tax avoidance.  A 2007 report by my colleagues and me at Good Jobs First found that Wal-Mart has sought to reduce its property tax payments by frequently and aggressively challenging the assessed value attached to its U.S. stores and distribution centers by local officials.  The report examined a 10 percent random sample of the stores and found that such challenges had been filed for about one-third of them; an examination of all of the distribution centers found challenges at 40 percent, even though many of the latter had been granted property tax abatements when they were built.

Sales tax “skimming.” In a 2008 report by Good Jobs First entitled Skimming the Sales Tax, we found that Wal-Mart was receiving an estimated $60 million a year as a result of the little-known practice in some states of compensating retailers for collecting sales taxes and calculating the amount of that compensation based on total sales. This, in addition to the estimated $130 million in sales-tax-based economic development subsidies, means that Wal-Mart is depriving hard-pressed state and local governments of at least $73 million each year. This is just a small part of the more than $1.2 billion in state and local subsidies that Good Jobs First has documented on our website Wal-Mart Subsidy Watch.

Environmental violations. Wal-Mart has tried very hard in recent years to depict itself as a pioneer of sustainability by wide-ranging initiatives with regard to energy efficiency and the addition of organic foods and other green products to its shelves. Wal-Mart is largely silent about the environmental impact of the millions of customers who in most cases must still drive to the company’s retail outlets. It also wants us to forget that the company itself has had its share of environmental violations. For example, in 2004 the U.S. Department of Justice and the Environmental Protection Agency announced that Wal-Mart would pay a $3.1 million civil penalty and take remedial action to resolve alleged violations of the Clean Water Act in connection with storm water runoff from two dozen company construction sites in nine states. The following year, the company agreed to pay $1.15 million to the state of Connecticut to settle a suit alleging that it had allowed rain water to carry fertilizer, pesticides and other harmful substances stored outside its retail outlets into rivers and streams. It also signed a consent decree with the EPA to resolve charges relating to diesel truck idling at its facilities.

Undocumented Workers. When talking about Wal-Mart it is difficult to avoid the workplace entirely. Aside from its mistreatment of its own employees, the company takes advantage of exploited contract workers. For example, in 2003 a federal racketeering suit was filed against Wal-Mart by lawyers seeking to represent thousands of janitors who cleaned company stores and were reported to be working seven days a week and not receiving overtime pay. The filing took place 18 days after federal agents raided 60 Wal-Mart stores in 21 states to round up about 250 janitors described as undocumented aliens. In 2005 Wal-Mart agreed to pay $11 million to settle federal immigration charges. Documents later emerged suggesting that Wal-Mart executives knew that the company’s cleaning contractors were using undocumented immigrants.

“Dead Peasant” Insurance. Wal-Mart has not only worked people to death but also continued exploiting them after their demise. The mega-retailer is one of the large companies that engaged in the repugnant practice of secretly taking out life insurance on low-paid employees and making itself the beneficiary. The polite term for this is corporate-owned life insurance, though critics have labeled it “janitor’s insurance” or “dead peasant insurance.” In 2004 Wal-Mart settled one case brought in Houston for an undisclosed amount. Two years later it agreed to pay $5.1 million for a class action brought by the estates of former employees in Oklahoma, and in 2011 the company agreed to pay just over $2 million in a class-action suit filed in Florida.

The list could go on. In fact, it is difficult to find a form of corporate misconduct Wal-Mart has not exhibited. Yet it is probably the labor arena that counts the most in determining whether the company will be reined in. Support your local Wal-Mart “associates” in their efforts to stand up to the bully of Bentonville.

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Posted in Bribery, Discrimination, Employee Rights, Environment, Retail, Subsidies, Tax avoidance/evasion, Unions | No Comments »

Through A Corporate Glass, Darkly

Thursday, July 19th, 2012

Conventional wisdom has it that we live in an age of hyper-transparency. That’s true if you look at what people are willing to reveal about themselves to Facebook, but it’s another story for large corporations and the 1%.

The Republican filibuster of the DISCLOSE Act and Mitt Romney’s reluctance to release more of his income tax returns are strong reminders of how those at the top of the economic pyramid seek to hide the ways they accumulate their wealth and influence public policy.

The current preoccupation with disclosure issues makes this a good time to step back and review the state of corporate transparency. Do we know enough about the workings of the huge private institutions that dominate so much of modern life?

Of course, the answer is no. Yet the quantity and quality of disclosure vary greatly depending on the structure of a given company and the aspect of its operations one chooses to examine. Depending on which piece of the business elephant we touch, corporations may seen somewhat translucent or completely opaque.

It’s also worth remembering that there are two main forms of disclosure: information that companies, especially those whose stock is publicly traded, are compelled to reveal and the data that government agencies collect about firms and release to the public. What corporations release on their own initiative is, given its selective nature, self-serving spin rather than disclosure.

Most of what U.S. companies are required to disclose is contained in the financial filings required by the Securities and Exchange Commission. It’s great that the SEC makes these documents readily available via its EDGAR online system, but the information required from companies is meant to serve the needs of investors rather than those of us concerned with corporate accountability. There is thus an abundance of data on financial results and a meager amount on a company’s social impacts. Here’s a rundown and critique of disclosure practices regarding the latter.

LEGAL PROCEEDINGS. Each company filing a 10-K annual report has to include a section summarizing significant litigation and other legal proceedings in which it is involved. For some companies, these sections can go on for pages, which says a lot about the corporate tendency to run afoul of the law. Even so, these sections are often incomplete, since companies are given discretion in deciding which cases are “material,” meaning that fines and other penalties could have a significant impact on earnings.  To get a fuller picture of corporate legal entanglements, you need to search the dockets on the PACER subscription service, which for large companies will be voluminous, or use the free summaries on the Justia website.

EXECUTIVE COMPENSATION. The annual proxy statements filed by publicly traded companies provide exhaustive details on the salaries, bonuses and other compensation received by top executives (and directors).  Designated in the EDGAR system as Form DEF14A, these documents seem to try to drown the reader in details to downplay the impact of lavish pay packages. Note that what is called the Summary Compensation Table does not include essential information such as the amount (shown elsewhere) that an executive realized from the exercise of stock options.

EMPLOYMENT ISSUES. Companies are required to disclose their total number of employees but do not have to provide a geographical breakdown. Some do so voluntarily, but many others can hide the tendency to create many more jobs in foreign cheap-labor havens than at home. Because the penalties are usually small, companies tend not to disclose violations of federal rules regarding overtime pay, the minimum wage and other Fair Labor Standards Act issues.  Fortunately, the Department of Labor has included wage and hour compliance information in its new enforcement website.

OCCUPATIONAL SAFETY AND HEALTH. Companies also rarely mention violations of occupational safety and health, for which penalties are also meager. The U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration, to its credit, makes available a database of all workplace inspection results going back to the creation of the agency; the DOL enforcement website provides access to this as well. Unfortunately, there are no summaries of the compliance records of large companies across their various establishments.

LABOR RELATIONS. Companies are required to report on labor relations issues only if there is a likelihood of a work stoppage that could affect corporate profits. With the decline of unions in the U.S. private sector, many companies do not bother to mention labor relations at all. Disputes that result in a formal ruling by the National Labor Relations Board will show up on that agency’s website.

ENVIRONMENTAL COMPLIANCE. Companies frequently discuss environmental regulation in the 10-K filings and will mention major enforcement actions. Yet these accounts are usually incomplete.  The Environmental Protection Agency fills in the gaps with its Enforcement and Compliance History Online (ECHO) database.

TAXES. Buried in the notes to the company’s financial statements is a section with details on how much it paid (or in many cases did not pay) in the way of taxes. This information is presented with a high degree of obfuscation, so it is fortunate that Citizens for Tax Justice publishes reports that summarize the extent to which large U.S. companies engage in flagrant tax avoidance.

SUBSIDIES. Corporate filings usually say little or nothing about the subsidies received from government, and it is often impossible to learn from other sources what those amounts may be when it comes to subsidies that take the form of federal tax breaks. There is much more company-specific data available on subsidies from state governments. In my capacity as research director of Good Jobs First, I have collected that data and assembled it in the Subsidy Tracker database.

GOVERNMENT CONTRACTS. Companies will report on government contracts only if they make up a substantial portion of their total revenue. Thanks to the work of OMB Watch in creating the FedSpending database, which the federal government adapted for its USASpending tool, it is possible to learn a great deal about how much business a given firm is doing with Uncle Sam. Data on contracts with state governments can often, though not always, be found via state procurement websites.

LOBBYING AND POLITICAL SPENDING. Corporations are not eager to disclose their efforts to shape public policy, and the SEC does not require them to do so. The Center for Political Accountability, on the other hand, was created to put pressure on companies to be more open about their political spending. The group has succeeded in getting about 100 corporations to adopt political disclosure. The inadequate information that gets disclosed at the behest of the Federal Election Commission can be found on websites such as Open Secrets, while state-level electoral data is summarized on the Follow the Money site. Both also provide access to the available data on lobbying.

Inadequate political disclosure by corporations is not limited to the United States. A recent study by Transparency International on 105 of the world’s large companies found that only 26 engaged in satisfactory reporting of political contributions. That was just one component of an analysis that looks at a variety of transparency measures that relate broadly to anti-corruption initiatives. Some of the worst results concern the simple matter of whether firms provide full country-by-country data on their operations and financial results.

The latter shows how disclosure issues of concern to investors and financial analysts can intersect with those relating to corporate accountability. When a company is allowed to use excessive forms of aggregation in its reporting, it may be hiding either poor management or corporate misconduct or both.

Note: The information sources discussed above as well as many others are discussed in my guide to online corporate research.

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Posted in Disclosure, Environment, Executive Compensation, Regulation, Unions, Workplace Safety & Health | No Comments »

Corporate Capture in Rio and at Home

Thursday, June 21st, 2012

The 50,000-person United Nations conference on sustainable development in Rio de Janeiro is bound to be followed by recriminations about what the nations of the world failed to accomplish. Perhaps the real story is what the planet’s giant corporations did accomplish in Rio — to advance their own interests.

Rio +20 is following what is now a familiar pattern in which governments drag their feet while major companies try to give the impression that they are the vanguard of environmental reform. The extent to which the United Nations — whose Centre on Transnational Corporations was once somewhat critical of big business — has embraced this dynamic can be seen on the website Business.UN.org, whose tagline is “Partnering for a Better World.” Corporations can post their sustainability goals on the site under the misleading category of Commitments. Whether the various goals are timid or ambitious, they are all, of course, voluntary in nature and thus unenforceable by the UN or any other body.

More is at work here than simple image-burnishing by many of the planet’s biggest polluters. According to a report issued for Rio +20 by Friends of the Earth International, large corporations and business associations have in effect hijacked the UN’s policymaking process: “There is increased business influence over the positions of national governments in multilateral negotiations; business representatives dominate certain UN discussion spaces and some UN bodies; business groups are given a privileged advisory role.”

“An even greater cause of concern,” the FOEI report goes on to say, “is the emergence of an ideology among some UN agencies and staff that what is good for business is good for society. This is reflected in a shift away from policies and measures designed to address the role of business in creating many of the problems that we face, towards policies that aim to define these problems in terms dictated by the corporate sector, meeting their needs without tackling the underlying causes of the multiple crises.”

All of this constitutes what FOEI calls “corporate capture” of the UN, a phrase that echoes the term “regulatory capture” used to describe what happens when the interests of corporations come to dominate the proceedings of government oversight agencies. FOEI has issued a statement with other NGOs decrying the excessive corporate influence over UN deliberations that has been endorsed by more than 400 groups from around the world.

It’s heartening that so many groups are willing to speak out, but it’s discouraging to realize that the same criticisms have been made for more than a decade, to little avail. At the time of the 2002 UN earth summit in Johannesburg, CorpWatch issued a report called Greenwash +10 that was already warning about the risks of the UN’s increasing commitment to corporate partnerships. It noted that one of those partnerships, Global Compact, claimed to be promoting business support for UN sustainability goals yet included among its members companies such as mining giant Rio Tinto with atrocious environmental records.

Rio Tinto is one of the companies singled out in the new FOEI report for continuing to engage in the same kind of hypocrisy. The mining company is also one of the main targets (along with BP and Dow Chemical) of the Greenwash Gold campaign, which  accuses the companies of covering up environmental destruction “while pretending to be a good corporate citizen by sponsoring the Olympic games” being held this summer in London.

Undue corporate influence over climate policy is also the theme of a recent report by the Union of Concerned Scientists.  While acknowledging that some U.S. companies have taken “consistent and laudable” actions in support of science-based climate reforms, it finds that others have worked aggressively to undermine such progress.

Most interesting is its finding that some large corporations have taken contradictory positions depending on the circumstances. For example, some companies are found to make legitimate statements of concern over climate change on their websites and in their filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission while misrepresenting the state of climate science in their comments submitted to Environmental Protection Agency proceedings. Companies that fall into the contradictory category — such as Alcoa, ConocoPhillips and General Electric — are said to be standing in the way of meaningful change.

Whatever positions corporations take, there will always be tension between their interests and the common good. The fact that those two goals may occasionally coincide does not justify the outsized role that corporations now have in policymaking at both the national and international levels. Progress on climate change and many other fronts will be a lot easier when we are free from corporate capture in all its forms.

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Posted in Climate Change, Corporate "Social Responsibility", Environment | No Comments »

The Collapse of Wal-Mart’s Social Responsibility Charade

Thursday, June 7th, 2012

For the past eight years, Wal-Mart has pursued an image campaign apparently inspired by the Marx Brothers line: “Who you gonna believe, me or your own eyes?”

Despite the preponderance of evidence of its unenlightened practices, the company has tried to give the impression that it is really a model corporate citizen. Recent events suggest that the giant retailer’s social responsibility charade is now crumbling.

Through all of its scandals and controversies over the years, Wal-Mart could at least count on the support of its institutional shareholders, which for a long time turned a blind eye to the company’s transgressions and focused on its growth. Now even that is changing. The recently released results of voting at the company’s annual meeting indicate unprecedented discontent with its leadership. Not counting the large bloc of shares controlled by descendants of founder Sam Walton, more than 30 percent of the votes were cast against CEO Mike Duke, board chair Rob Walton and former CEO and board member Lee Scott. In the past, Wal-Mart board members typically had approval rates close to 100 percent.

The high degree of no-confidence this time around is largely attributable to the fallout from an 8,000-word exposé by New York Times alleging that high-level executives at the company quashed an internal investigation of foreign bribery. Before the annual meeting, the California State Teachers’ Retirement System filed a lawsuit against current and former Wal-Mart executives and board members for breach of their fiduciary duties in connection with the bribery scandal.

That scandal also appears to have played a significant role in Wal-Mart’s decision to cave in to calls to suspend its membership in the American Legislative Exchange Council, which is under siege for its role in promoting “stand your ground” laws such as the one in Florida linked to the shooting of Trayvon Martin. In the past, Wal-Mart, long a stalwart member of ALEC, would have ignored pressure of the kind being exerted by the anti-ALEC campaign.

By all rights, the disintegration of Wal-Mart’s responsibility image should have come from its retrograde labor and employment practices, which were the main reason for the public relations effort but which didn’t substantially change during the campaign. The company has never strayed from its uncompromising opposition to unions (except for toothless ones in China). The Organization United for Respect at Walmart is not a conventional union-organizing effort, yet the company recently fired several activists in the group in an apparent act of intimidation.

In its 1.4 million-employee U.S. retail operations, Wal-Mart has maintained a low-road approach of meager wages, inadequate benefits and overuse of part-timers. Workers at its more than 100 distribution centers had enjoyed somewhat better conditions, but it appears that is no longer the case. A new report from the National Employment Law Project finds that the company is increasingly using logistics subcontractors and temp agencies that engage in rampant wage-and-hour abuses and other labor-law violations.

In the latest in a long line of its own fair labor standards cases, Wal-Mart was recently forced by the U.S. Labor Department to pay $5.3 million in back pay, penalties and damages for violating overtime rules. Although the U.S. Supreme Court came to Wal-Mart’s rescue last year by blocking a massive class-action sex discrimination case, several non-class actions have been brought in recent months making the same allegations on behalf of thousands of women.

One area in which Wal-Mart believes it has attained a measure of legitimacy is environmental policy. It has succeeded in winning over some green groups, which cannot resist the temptation of working with such a mammoth company to change industry standards.

Yet the funny thing about Wal-Mart’s green initiatives is that most of them involve changes that the retailer is requiring from its suppliers, who are expected to bear the costs of altering their products and their packaging. This is consistent with Wal-Mart’s longstanding practice of forcing suppliers to cut their wholesale prices to the bone. When Wal-Mart does take steps on its own, such as in reducing energy usage in its facilities, those reforms are ones that reduce its operating costs and thus add to its bottom line.

Even if you believe it is okay for Wal-Mart to boost its profits while pressing suppliers to be more environmentally responsible, it’s important to remember that many of those suppliers are in countries such as China where oversight is difficult. A recent investigative report in Mother Jones found that Wal-Mart’s monitoring of Chinese plants left a lot to be desired and that this is causing frustration among some of the environmentalists who have been working with the company.

A report by Stacy Mitchell of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance finds that Wal-Mart’s domestic green initiatives, such as using more renewable energy sources, are also faltering, while the company ignores the detrimental environmental impacts of its land use practices. All this is compounded, Mitchell notes, by Wal-Mart’s extensive political contributions to candidates who are global warming deniers or otherwise have poor voting records on the environment.

The demise of  Wal-Mart’s phony social responsibility initiative poses a fascinating question: Can the company return to its old critics-be-damned stance, or will it finally have to make some genuine reforms in the way it does business?

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Posted in Corporate "Social Responsibility", Environment, Public Relations, Retail, Shareholder Activism, Supply Chain, Unions | No Comments »

A Rogues Gallery of the One Percent

Thursday, October 13th, 2011

For the past 30 years, Forbes magazine has used its annual list of the 400 richest Americans as a platform for celebrating the wealthy. This year, amid the persistent jobs crisis and the growing challenge posed by the Occupy movement, the Forbes list has to be viewed in a different light. Rather than a scorecard of success, it comes across as a rogues gallery of the 1 Percent who have hijacked the U.S. economy.

Start with the overall numbers. Combined, the 400 are worth an estimated $1.5 trillion, up 12 percent from the year before. This at a time when both the net worth and annual income of the typical American household have been sinking. When the first Forbes list was published in 1982 there were only about a dozen billionaires. Today, every single member of the 400 has a ten-figure fortune. Their average net worth is $3.8 billion.

And where did this wealth come from? Forbes tries to justify the skyrocketing assets of the 400 by saying that “an alltime-high 70% are self-made…This is the working elite.” New riches may indeed be better than inherited wealth, but how did this “elite” climb the ladder of success?

The question is all the more pertinent, given the current inclination of conservatives to refer to the wealthy as “job-creators” as a way of rebuffing efforts to get the plutocrats to pay their fair share of taxes.

How much job creation can be attributed to the Forbes 400? In a chart on Sources of Wealth, the magazine notes that the largest single “industry” is investments, accounting for the fortunes of 96 of the 400. By contrast, manufacturing, which is more labor intensive, is listed as the source for only 17 of the tycoons.

Within the investments category, about one-sixth of the people in the top 100 made their fortunes from hedge funds, private equity and leveraged buyouts—activities that are more likely to result in the destruction than the creation of jobs. For example, Sam Zell (net worth: $4.7 billion) was ruthless in laying off workers after his takeover of the Tribune newspaper company.

Forbes no doubt would respond by pointing to the 48 people on the list who got fabulously wealthy from the technology sector. Yet many of these companies create very few jobs: Facebook, which made Mark Zuckerberg worth $17.5 billion, has only about 2,000 employees. Or, like Apple, which gave the late Steve Jobs a $7 billion fortune, they create most of their jobs abroad in low-wage countries such as China rather than manufacturing their gadgets in the United States. The same is now true for Dell—source of Michael Dell’s $15 billion fortune—which has closed most of its U.S. assembly operations.

The few people on the list who are associated with large-scale job creation in the United States got rich from a company known for paying lousy wages and fighting unions. Christy Walton and her immediate family enjoy a net worth of more than $24 billion deriving from the notorious Wal-Mart retail empire (other Waltons are worth billions more). The Koch Brothers ($25 billion) are bankrolling the effort to weaken collective bargaining rights and thereby depress wage levels, while satellite TV pioneer Stanley Hubbard ($1.9 billion) has been an outspoken critic of labor unions and was an aggressive campaigner against the Employee Free Choice Act.

Poor job creation performance and anti-union animus are not the only sins of the 400 and their companies. Some of them have a checkered record when it comes to other aspects of accountability and good corporate behavior.

Start at the top of the list. Bill Gates, whose $59 billion net worth makes him the richest individual in the United States, is known today mainly for his philanthropic activities. Yet it was not long ago that Gates was viewed as a modern-day robber baron and Microsoft was being prosecuted by the European Commission, the U.S. Justice Department and some 20 states for anti-competitive practices. In the 1990s there were widespread calls for the company to be broken up, but Microsoft reached a controversial settlement with the Bush Administration that kept it largely intact.

Today it is Google, whose founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page are estimated by Forbes to be worth $16.7 billion, that is at the center of accusations of monopolistic practices.

Amazon.com, headed by Jeff Bezos ($19.1 billion), has fought against the efforts of a variety of state governments to get the online retailer to collect sales taxes from its customers. By failing to collect taxes on most transactions, Amazon gains an advantage over its brick-and-mortar competitors but deprives states of billions of dollars in badly needed revenue.

Cleaning products giant S.C. Johnson & Son, the source of the combined $11.5 billion fortune of the Johnson family, recently admitted that it has used aggressive tax avoidance practices to the extent that it pays no corporate income taxes at all in its home state of Wisconsin. Forbes ignores this issue, but instead describes in detail the criminal sexual molestation charges that have been filed against one member of the family.

And then there are the environmental offenders, such as Ira Rennert ($5.9 billion.) His Renco Group was for years one of the country’s biggest polluters, and the Peruvian lead smelter of his Doe Run operation is one of the most hazardous sites in the world.

This is only a small sampling of the transgressions of the 400 and their companies. Rather than being hailed as job creators, they should be made to answer for their job destruction, their tax avoidance, their anti-competitive practices, their environmental violations and much more.  Rather than celebration, the Forbes 400 and the rest of the 1 Percent are in need of investigation.

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Posted in 1%, Antitrust, Corporate Accountability, Corporate Crime, Corporate Power, Corporate Profits, Employment, Environment, Layoffs, Tax avoidance/evasion, Unions | No Comments »

Green Accountability

Thursday, September 15th, 2011

Obamacare, abortion, gay marriage and taxes are apparently not enough to complain about. Conservative politicians have a new whipping boy: green jobs. Republican members of Congress and GOP Presidential hopefuls seem to think these days that the greatest sin of the Obama Administration is its effort to encourage employment growth in the renewable energy sector.

Mitt Romney’s recently released economic plan accuses Obama of having “an unhealthy ‘green’ jobs obsession.” In her response to the President’s jobs speech, Michele Bachmann charged that the Administration is imitating the green-jobs policies of Spain, which she bizarrely suggested were responsible for that country’s astronomical rates of unemployment. Rick Perry’s attacks on the reality of climate change imply that green jobs are unnecessary.

At the same time, Republicans in Congress are trying to turn the bankruptcy of solar company Solyndra, which leaves the federal government on the hook for $535 million in loan guarantees, into a morality tale not only about supposed cronyism but also about the folly of government support for green jobs.

As usual, there is a high dose of hypocrisy among those making the criticisms. As USA Today points out, while he was governor of Massachusetts, Romney supported the use of public funds to support renewable energy businesses. What the paper did not mention was that one of the recipients of those funds was Evergreen Solar, which got a $2.5 million state grant in 2003 and went on to receive $44 million more from Romney’s successor Deval Patrick. Earlier this year, Evergreen announced plans to shift its production to China and later filed for bankruptcy.

In 2008 the Texas Enterprise Fund, a subsidy program overseen by Gov. Perry, gave $1 million to the solar company HelioVolt. The company has also struggled and earlier this year put itself up for sale. A report by Texans for Public Justice noted that the fund had relaxed HelioVolt’s job-creation requirement. Perry’s fund also gave $2.5 million to SunPower Corp.

Romney and Perry are far from the only Republic governors who have overseen the use of taxpayer funds to invest in renewable energy companies. Under the leadership of Gov. Jan Brewer, Arizona has been offering a Renewable Energy Tax Incentive. In her State of the State speech last year, Brewer said she was “proud to announce the arrival of Suntech Power Holdings. It’s the first solar company to come to Arizona because of the renewable energy tax incentive program I signed into law in June.”

Recently, Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour, who flirted with a run for the Republican Presidential nomination earlier this year, supported and then signed legislation that will provide a whopping $75 million subsidy for Calisolar, a California company that plans to produce solar cells in the Magnolia State. The law also includes $100 million in financial assistance for biomass energy company HCL CleanTech.

The fact that Republicans are disingenuous in their criticism of the Obama Administration’s renewable energy efforts does not mean that green subsidies at the federal or state level are necessarily a good thing. While the need to develop alternative energy systems is an urgent task for the nation, it does not make sense to repeat the mistakes of conventional economic development policy in helping the green sector.

That means, for one thing, not simply throwing money (including tax breaks and loan guarantees) at companies simply because they are making green promises. In many cases it may make more sense to let the private sector finance new renewable energy ventures and save public funds for energy infrastructure investments and for worker training in green occupations. Adopting aggressive renewable portfolio standards is also a key role for government to play.

In cases where some direct government assistance makes sense, public officials need to perform due diligence on the recipient company and impose strong safeguards, including job quality standards and clawbacks if the firm does not live up to its job-creation obligations.

As the Solyndra and Evergreen episodes show, the fact that corporations are focused on renewable energy does not make them angels. They may still be incompetent or engage in the same types of corporate misconduct seen among their conventional counterparts. Green business must also be accountable business.

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Posted in Corporate Subsidies, Environment, Green Jobs, Tax avoidance/evasion | No Comments »

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