Handouts for Corporate Tax Deserters

moneybags_handoutPresident Obama says “I don’t care if it’s legal—it’s wrong.” Even Fortune magazine calls it “positively un-American.” But will Congress do anything to block the brazen moves by a growing number of large U.S. companies to reincorporate abroad to dodge federal taxes?

One group of Democratic lawmakers is trying to discourage the trend by tightening the restrictions on federal contract awards to so-called inverted companies, but such firms still receive another form of financial assistance from Uncle Sam.

The lawmakers have drafted a bill with the appropriately provocative title of No Contracts for Corporate Deserters Act. It would bar contract awards to reincorporators which are at least 50-percent U.S.-owned and which do no substantial business in the country in which they are nominally based.

Tougher rules are definitely necessary. Although Congress pats itself on the back for the restrictions first enacted during an earlier wave of reincorporations, some of the inverted companies have managed to find loopholes allowing them to continue to enjoy the benefits of extensive federal contracting. Ingersoll-Rand, which purports to be an Irish company but derives 60 percent of its revenue from the United States, has 80 percent of its long-lived assets in this country and has its “corporate center” near Charlotte, North Carolina, received $64 million in federal contracts in 2013. Eaton Corporation, which also claims to have become Irish, received $131 million that year.

In his July 24 remarks on the subject, President Obama also declared: “You shouldn’t get to call yourself an American company only when you want a handout from American taxpayers.” Such handouts are not limited to lucrative contract awards. Inverted companies are also receiving cash grants from the federal government.

Take the case of Eaton. In 2013 it received a $2.4 million grant from the Energy Department’s Conservation Research and Development Program. That was just one of eight grants it received from Energy that year with a total value of about $4 million.

Delphi Automotive, which claims to be based on the island of Jersey in the English Channel, has also received numerous grants from the Energy Department, including $5.1 million last year through the Fossil Energy Research and Development Program.

Grants have also gone to companies involved in recent inversion deals. Pfizer, which was seeking to undergo an inversion through a merger with AstraZeneca but which has dropped the bid for now, received $3.8 million in assistance this year from the Defense Department for work on nanoparticles.

These grants are part of a controversial practice by which the federal government underwrites commercial research activity by large companies in industries such as food processing, pharmaceuticals, aerospace and electric utilities. And this, in turn, is part of the larger sphere of federal financial assistance to business that also includes direct payments, low-cost loans, loan guarantees and the like.

These activities, often labeled corporate welfare, are a frequent target of criticism from both the left and the right. Conservatives are currently engaged in a campaign to eliminate the Export-Import Bank, which provides financing for deals benefiting corporations such as Boeing and Bechtel. Bipartisan efforts such as Green Scissors and the Toward Common Ground reports issued by U.S. PIRG and National Taxpayers Union have sought to end funding for the most wasteful programs.

Those efforts are usually driven by ideology (conservatives don’t want governments “picking winners”), by a desire to cut federal spending, or by other issues (progressives point out that many federal subsidies promote environmentally destructive practices). Now there’s another reason to be up in arms over corporate welfare.

The fact that some “corporate deserters” are getting grants from Uncle Sam could provide an additional form of pressure against the tax dodgers. Seeing these companies get contracts is bad enough; realizing that they may be getting direct handouts is even more infuriating.

Dominant and Diabolical Dynasties

mellonFor more than 30 years, Forbes magazine has been publishing a list of the 400 richest Americans. These annual celebrations of wealth are often accompanied by text emphasizing entrepreneurship. Readers are supposed to come away with the conclusion that these tycoons earned their treasure.

Now, in a move that says a great deal about where American society is headed, Forbes has published its first ranking of America’s Richest Families. No longer is the individual striver being venerated; now we are supposed to marvel at the compilation of 185 families with accumulated wealth of at least $1 billion. Forbes, unselfconsciously using a phrase that could have been penned by ruling class analyst William Domhoff, headlines the feature “Dominant Dynasties.”

Perhaps a bit uneasy about glorifying financial aristocracies, Forbes writes: “One thing that stands out is how many of the great fortunes of the mid-19th century have dissipated. The Astors and the Vanderbilts, the Morgans and the Carnegies, none make the cut.”

The fact that not all 150-year-old family fortunes have survived hardly makes the United States a model of economic egalitarianism. Forbes has to admit that the du Ponts, whose wealth dates back two centuries, are still high on the list (to the tune of $15 billion), as are the Rockefellers ($10 billion). The magazine chose to put on its cover members of the sixth and seventh generations of the Mellon dynasty, whose wealth is pegged at $12 billion.

Even among the newer fortunes, many go back several generations. Few of the listed families include living founders. In some cases family members are living of off the success of their forebears; in other cases, they have built on the achievements of their parents and grandparents. Yet in all cases they have benefited from a tax system that increasingly favors inherited wealth.

That tilt dates back to initiatives taken by the man responsible for the fortune enjoyed by the individuals on the Forbes cover: Andrew Mellon (illustration). As Secretary of the Treasury in the 1920s he unabashedly pushed for reductions in income and estate tax rates, even though as one of the country’s richest men he had a great deal to gain personally from those cuts.

Aside from the questions relating to the perpetuation of class structure, there is the issue of where the fortunes came from in the first place. That subject cannot be avoided when the family at the very top of the list, the Waltons, enjoys wealth estimated at $152 billion thanks to their affiliation with a retail empire built on cheap labor, union-busting and a variety of other sins.

The Kochs, number two with $89 billion, have grown rich through the exploitation of fossil fuel-based industries that are threatening the planet, as did the Rockefellers and many others on the list. The du Pont fortune was originally based on gunpowder and was later enhanced by inventions that included dangerous chemicals such as perfluorinated compounds (used in Teflon) linked to serious health and environmental problems.

Lower down on the list is the Steinbrenner fortune ($3.1 billion), which is based not only on the absurd appreciation in the value of the New York Yankees but also from a shipping business whose interests were furthered by illegal campaign contributions to Richard Nixon in the 1970s. There’s also the Lindner fortune ($1.7 billion), which was built in part by Carl Lindner’s close association with the junk bond empire of the felonious Michael Milken.

Balzac is credited with the statement that “behind every great fortune is a great crime.” Further research will be required to know if that is true of all the entries on the Forbes list, but there are no doubt plenty of examples. And along with any specific crimes is the offense against democracy generated by the unbridled accumulation of intergenerational wealth.

Real Abuses, Sham Reforms

bosses_900It is now a full century since the Progressive Era ended some of the worst abuses of concentrated economic power. This year is the 100th anniversary of the Clayton Act and the Federal Trade Commission Act.   It is 103 years since the dissolution of the Standard Oil trust, 108 years since the passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act.

Yet even a casual reading of the business news these days suggests that we live in an economy disturbingly similar to the age of the robber barons.

Back then, the trusts shifted their incorporation to states such as New Jersey and Delaware that were willing to rewrite their business laws to accommodate the needs of oligopolies. Today large corporations are reincorporating themselves in foreign tax havens to dodge taxes. The practice is reaching epidemic proportions in the pharmaceutical industry.

Back then, unscrupulous drug companies and meatpackers sold adulterated products that could sicken or even kill their customers. Today General Motors is caught in a growing scandal about ignition switch defects that resulted in at least 13 deaths. The news about the automaker’s recklessness grows worse by the day, with the New York Times now reporting that company withheld information from federal regulators about the cause of fatal accidents.

Back then, wheeler-dealers such as James Fisk peddled dubious securities in companies that later collapsed, impoverishing investors. Today we’re still trying to get over the impact of the toxic mortgage-backed securities that the big banks packaged and sold during the housing bubble. Just the other day, Citigroup became the latest of those banks to settle charges brought by the Justice Department. Yet the $7 billion extracted from Citi, like the amounts obtained from the other banks, will cause little pain for the mammoth institution and will thus do little to deter future misconduct. The provision in the settlement for “consumer relief” is too little, too late.

And, of course, back then, the trusts got to be trusts by eliminating their competition. Today concentration is alive and well. Recently, the second largest U.S. tobacco company, Reynolds American, proposed a takeover of Lorillard, the number three in the industry. If this deal goes through, it won’t be long before Reynolds tries to marry Altria/Philip Morris, putting virtually the entire carcinogenic industry in the hands of one player, the way it was a century ago during the reign of the American Tobacco Company, aka the Tobacco Trust.

The movement toward a Media Trust just accelerated with the revelation that Rupert Murdoch’s 21st Century Fox, already huge, is seeking to take over Time Warner. The deal would put a mind-boggling array of entertainment properties under one roof. Murdoch offered to sell off Time Warner’s CNN – a meaningless concession given that the news network has struggled to survive against Murdoch’s despicable Fox News. Murdoch’s move comes as another media octopus, Comcast, is awaiting approval for its deal to take over Time Warner’s previously spun off cable business.

While we have all too many indications of a new Gilded Age, still scarce are signs of an effective response. We’ve got a good amount of muckraking journalism and a fair number of people (and even a few elected officials) who calls themselves progressives. Yet somehow this does not add up to a movement that can take a real bite out of corporate crime.

Part of the problem is that many of those in power professing progressive values are not serious about challenging corporate power. Some historians argue that the original Progressives were, like the New Dealers who came later, mainly concerned with saving capitalism from itself rather than changing the system. Yet they still managed to impose significant restrictions on big business through antitrust and other forms of regulation.

Today’s progressive officials often seem to want nothing more than to give the appearance of reform. That’s the story at the Justice Department, which has raised settlement levels and extracted some token guilty pleas but still allows corporations to buy their way out of serious legal jeopardy. Meanwhile, antitrust enforcement is tepid, and as the GM case increasingly shows, regulation is often a joke.

A resurgence of robber-baron behavior requires real, not sham reform.

Inverted Values

medtronic-headquartersConservatives are up in arms about the surge of undocumented women and children coming across the border from Mexico. So great a threat is purportedly being caused by this influx that Republican members of Congress are clamoring for legislation that would allow faster deportations. Even President Obama seems to agree.

Much less urgency is being expressed about another sort of immigration crisis: the presence of a growing number of foreign-based corporations masquerading as American companies. Large-scale tax dodging by these firms does much more harm to the United States than the modest impact of those desperate Central Americans.

A recent report by the Congressional Research Service describes a new wave of companies going through a process politely known as “inversions.” What’s really happened is that these firms have renounced their U.S. “citizenship” and reincorporated themselves in tax haven countries in order to escape federal taxes.

Yet these companies go on operating as before, keeping their U.S. offices, their U.S. sales and all the other benefits of doing business here but not paying their fair share of the cost of government. They are the real illegitimate aliens.

While a few members of Congress have spoken out against this corporate treason, many adhere to the idea that the companies are blameless — that it is the supposedly oppressive tax system that is to blame. The editorialists at the Wall Street Journal, who can always be counted on to go to any length to defend corporate avarice, recently began a piece on inversions by writing: “What kind of country does this to itself?”

This is typical of the pro-corporate mindset: Big business, apparently, can do no wrong, so if a company does something controversial, it is the rest of us who are to blame.

In reality, many of the companies that have turned to inversions are not only tax dodgers; they are bad actors in other respects. Take the case of Medtronic, which is involved in the most recent re-registration deal involving a plan to merge with Covidien, a competitor in the medical devices industry that earlier turned itself into an “Irish” company.

Only a couple of weeks before the Covidien deal became public, the U.S. Justice Department announced that Medtronic would pay $9.9 million to resolve allegations under the False Claims Act that it made improper payments to physicians to get them to implant the company’s pacemakers and defibrillators in Medicare and Medicaid patients. The settlement came less than three years after Medtronic had to pay $23.5 million to resolve another False Claims Act case involving other kinds of improper inducements to physicians.

And five years before that, Medtronic paid $40 million to settle yet another kickback case. In 2010 the company had to pay $268 million to settle lawsuits claiming that defective wires in its defibrillators caused at least 13 deaths.

An even worse track record belongs to Pfizer, which attempted an inversion a couple of months ago by seeking to acquire Britain’s AstraZeneca but has backed off for now. In 2009 Pfizer agreed to pay $2.3 billion to resolve criminal and civil charges relating to the  improper marketing of Bextra and three other medications. The amount was a record for a healthcare fraud settlement. John Kopchinski, a former Pfizer sales representative whose complaint helped bring about the federal investigation, told the New York Times: “The whole culture of Pfizer is driven by sales, and if you didn’t sell drugs illegally, you were not seen as a team player.”

Like Medtronic, Pfizer has had problems with questionable payments. In August 2012 the SEC announced that it had reached a $45 million settlement with the company to resolve charges that its subsidiaries, especially Wyeth, had bribed overseas doctors and other healthcare professionals to increase foreign sales.

Or take the case of Walgreen, which is reported to be planning an inversion of its own. In 2008 it had to pay $35 million to settle claims that it defrauded the federal government by improperly switching patients to different version of three prescription drugs in order to increase its reimbursements from Medicaid. Last year, the Drug Enforcement Administration announced that the giant pharmacy chain would pay a record $80 million in civil penalties to resolve charges that it failed to properly control the sales of narcotic painkillers at some of its stores.

The examples could continue. Corporations resorting to extreme measures such as foreign re-incorporations are not innocent victims. Their tax dodging is just another symptom of corporate cultures that put profit maximization above loyalty to country and adherence to the law.

Religion Inc.

samuel-alito-jr-2009-9-29-10-13-28Is Justice Samuel Alito really that clueless? During the 2010 State of the Union address, he nervously mouthed the words “not true” when President Obama warned that the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling would allow corporate special interests to dominate U.S. elections. A few days ago, Alito wrote an outrageous opinion in the Hobby Lobby case affirming the religious rights of corporations but insisting this would not do much other than prevent a few companies from having to include several kinds of birth control in their health insurance plans.

Alito’s claim about the narrow scope is already beginning to unravel. Although the written opinion suggested that only four types of contraception such as IUDs that religious zealots view as tantamount to abortion would be affected, the Court subsequently ordered lower courts to rehear cases in which employers sought to deny coverage for any form of birth control.

Business owners with other religious views contrary to federal policy will undoubtedly soon speak up. This is exactly what Justice Ginsburg warned about in her powerful dissent, calling Alito’s opinion “a decision of startling breadth” that enables “commercial enterprises, including corporations, along with partnerships and sole proprietorships, [to] opt out of any law (saving only tax laws) they judge incompatible with their sincerely held religious beliefs.”

Alito was apparently so shaken by Ginsburg’s accusation that he felt a need to deny it at length. The denial is not only unconvincing, it is clumsy and takes Alito into some strange territory for a supposed business-friendly conservative.

In their religious zeal, Alito and the other conservatives on the Court apparently forgot that corporations have been trying for the past century to depict themselves as totally apart from religious and moral concerns. Business enterprises are amoral institutions, laissez-faire proponents such as Milton Friedman repeatedly told us—they exist only to maximize their profit. It has often been corporate critics who have brought religious and moral issues into disputes over business practices.

Alito seems to embrace the notion of corporate social responsibility (CSR) when he writes (p.23):

Modern corporate law does not require for-profit corporations to pursue profit at the expense of everything else, and many do not do so. For-profit corporations, with ownership approval, support a wide variety of charitable causes, and it is not at all uncommon for such corporations to further humanitarian and other altruistic objectives.

Alito even makes reference to growing acceptance of the benefit corporation, which he describes as “a dual-purpose entity that seeks to achieve both a benefit for the public and a profit for its owners” (p.24).

It’s unclear whether Alito sincerely believes in the validity of CSR initiatives or is simply using this comparison to try to make his assertion of corporate religious rights more palatable. Oddly, he describes as “unlikely” the possibility that a large publicly traded company would ever make a religious claim, even though such firms are among the biggest promoters of CSR.

Whatever Alito really thinks, his reference to CSR does not make the ruling any more convincing. CSR is already problematic to the extent that its practitioners try to use their supposedly high-minded voluntary initiatives to discourage more stringent and more enforceable government regulation. But at least these corporations are simply trying to influence government policymaking rather than asserting an absolute right to be exempt because of supposed religious convictions.

As much as Alito tries to deny it, his ruling has the potential to cause a great deal of mischief. A religious component can already be seen in the climate crisis denial camp; what will prevent companies from asserting that their beliefs prevent them from complying with environmental regulations? Is it that hard to imagine that business owners holding a scripture-based belief that women should be subservient to men may claim they should not be subject to anti-discrimination and equal pay laws?

Alito seems to be opening the door to such aggressive stances when he insists that “federal courts have no business addressing” the question of whether a religious claim by a corporation is reasonable (p.36). It’s true that, in general, government should not be passing judgment on matters of faith, but that principle falls apart when special interests try to use religion to undermine democratically adopted public policies. It’s even worse when those interests are employers asserting their beliefs at the expense of their workers.

The Supreme Court has done considerable damage by elevating the free speech rights of corporations; now it is compounding the sin by giving those corporations special religious rights as well.