Paying for Protection from Protests

grasberg_mine_11Responding to pressure from groups such as the International Corporate Accountability Roundtable, the Obama Administration has just announced that the United States will finally adopt a national action plan on combating global corruption, especially when it involves questionable foreign payments by transnational corporations that serve to undermine human rights. The White House statement notes that “the extractives industry is especially susceptible to corruption.”

True that. In fact, U.S.-based mining giant Freeport-McMoRan is an egregious case of a company that is reported to have made extensive payments to officials in the Indonesian military and national police who have responded harshly to popular protests over the environmental, labor and human rights practices of the company, which operates one of the world’s largest gold and copper mines at the Grasberg site (photo) in West Papua. There have been reports over the years that the U.S. Justice Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission were investigating the company for violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, but no charges ever emerged.

Here is some background on the story: Freeport moved into Indonesia in 1967, only two years after Suharto’s military coup in which hundreds of thousands of opponents were killed. The company developed close ties with the regime and was able to structure its operations in a way that was unusually profitable. Benefits promised to local indigenous people never fully materialized, and the mining operation caused extensive downstream pollution in three rivers.

Until the mid-1990s these issues were not widely reported, but then Freeport’s practices started to attract more attention. In April 1995 the Australian Council for Overseas Aid issued a report describing the oppressive conditions faced by the Amungme people living near the mine. It also described a series of protests against Freeport that were met with a harsh response from the Indonesian military. A follow-up press release by the Council accused the army of killing unarmed civilians. An article in The Nation in the summer of 1995 provided additional details, including an allegation that Freeport was helping to pay the costs of the military force.

In November 1995, despite reported lobbying efforts on the part of Freeport director Henry Kissinger, the Clinton Administration took the unprecedented step of cancelling the company’s $100 million in insurance coverage through the Overseas Private Investment Corporation because of the damage its mining operation was doing to the tropical rain forest and rivers (the human rights issue was not mentioned).

The company responded with an aggressive public relations campaign in which it attacked its critics both in Indonesia and abroad. Freeport also negotiated a restoration of its OPIC insurance in exchange for a promise to create a trust fund to finance environmental initiatives at the Grasberg site. Within a few months, however, Freeport decided to give up its OPIC coverage and proceeded to increase its output, which meant higher levels of tailings and pollution.

The criticism of Freeport continued. It faced protests by students and faculty members at Loyola University in New Orleans (where the company’s headquarters were located at the time) who called attention both to the situation in Indonesia and to hazardous waste dumping into the Mississippi River by Freeport’s local phosphate processing plant. Another hotbed of protest was the University of Texas, the alma mater of Freeport’s chairman and CEO James (Jim Bob) Moffett and the recipient of substantial grants from the company and from Moffett personally, who had a building named after him in return.

After its ally Suharto resigned amid corruption charges in 1998, Freeport had to take a less combative position. The company brought in Gabrielle McDonald, the first African-American woman to serve as a U.S. District Court judge, as its special counsel on human rights and vowed to share more of the wealth from Grasberg with the people of West Papua. But little actually changed.

Freeport found itself at the center of a new controversy over worker safety. In October 2003 eight employees were killed in a massive landslide at Grasberg that an initial government investigation concluded was probably the result of management negligence. A few weeks later, the government reversed itself, attributing the landslide to a “natural occurrence” and allowing the company to resume normal operations.

In 2005 Global Witness published a report that elaborated on the accusations that Freeport was making direct payments to members of the Indonesian military, especially a general named Mahidin Simbolon. In an investigative report published on December 27, 2005, the New York Times said it had obtained evidence that Freeport had made payments totaling $20 million to members of the Indonesian military in the period from 1998 to 2004. (A 2011 estimate by Indonesia Corruption Watch put company payments to the national police at $79 million over the previous decade.)

Reports such as these raised concerns among some of Freeport’s institutional investors. The New York City Comptroller, who oversees the city’s public pension funds, charged that the company might have violated the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.

Back in Indonesia, protests escalated. In 2006 the military responded to anti-Freeport student demonstrations by instituting what amounted to martial law in the city of Jayapura. Around the same time, the Indonesian government released the results of an investigation by independent experts concluding that the company was dumping nearly 700,000 tons of waste into waterways every day. In 2006 the Norwegian Ministry of Finance cited Freeport’s environmental record in Indonesia as the reason for excluding the company from its investment portfolio.

In 2007 workers at the Grasberg mine staged sit-down strikes to demand changes in management practices along with improved wages and benefits. More strikes occurred in 2011. Two years later, more than two dozen workers were killed in a tunnel collapse at Grasberg. Indonesia’s National Commission on Human Rights charged that the company could have prevented the conditions that caused the accident.

Freeport’s questionable labor, environmental and human rights practices continue, yet aside from that OPIC cancellation two decades ago it has faced little in the way of penalties. It remains to be seen whether the new Obama Administration policy changes this sorry state of affairs.

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

Taking the Anti Out of Antitrust

brewopolyThe early episodes of the new Ken Burns documentary on the Roosevelts showing on PBS highlight Teddy’s role as a trust-buster, even addressing the debate between those like TR who wanted to more strictly regulate the giant conglomerates and those who wanted to dismantle them.

Today, much of the “anti” seems to have gone out of antitrust, as little in the way of either regulation or dismemberment is on the agenda. Some of the largest players in already highly concentrated industries have no compunction about trying to take over one another and grow larger still. They take it for granted that such combinations will be sanctioned outright or with cosmetic changes to make the outcomes slightly less anti-competitive.

The latest example of one big fish seeking to swallow another is the reported pursuit by Anheuser-Busch InBev of fellow beer leviathan SABMiller. Those who reach for a Bud or a Miller Lite may not realize that those familiar beverages are no longer all-American products. Anheuser-Busch InBev is a Belgian-Brazilian company that took its name after acquiring A-B in 2008 for more than $50 billion. The combined firm grew much larger after buying Mexico’s Grupo Modelo in 2013. Today AB InBev has more than 200 beer brands around the world and some $43 billion in annual revenue.

Its target, London-based SABMiller, is the result of the 2002 purchase of Miller Brewing by South African Breweries. In 2008 SABMiller created a joint venture with Molson Coors (a 2005 marriage) called MillerCoors to sell their brands together in the United States.

The combination of AB InBev and SABMiller would take an already super-concentrated industry and make competition even more of a joke. Sure, there are a few independents left — such as Pabst, Yuengling and Boston Beer Company, maker of Sam Adams — but they would be up against a company with more than three-quarters of the U.S. market.

AB InBev’s move is just the latest in a series of takeover attempts among companies that are already effective oligopolies. In July, number two U.S. tobacco company Reynolds American announced plans to acquire number three, Lorillard. Dollar General, the largest deep-discount retailer, is seeking to purchase the second-largest, Family Dollar, thereby overturning a deal to acquire that firm by Dollar Tree, the third largest player. Earlier, Sysco announced it would purchase rival distribution giant US Foods.

Not every deal goes through: Rupert Murdoch’s 21st Century Fox dropped its bid for Time Warner and Sprint abandoned its bid for T-Mobile. Comcast, one hopes, will not succeed in its attempt to take over Time Warner Cable. But the fact that these deals were even floated is an indication that mergers that were once unthinkable are now considered serious possibilities.

All this is good news for investment bankers, who have been celebrating the fact that merger activity in the first half of 2014 was the highest in seven years and shows no signs of abating. But it does little for the rest of us.

Increased concentration tends to reduce employment, prop up prices, restrict consumer choices and discourage innovation. There was a time when employees of oligopolies had an easier time winning wage increases, but the weakening of labor unions has largely eliminated even that limited benefit.

Such drawbacks were known at the time of Teddy Roosevelt and became only clearer during the following decades. Today these lessons are frequently forgotten. A country that supposedly celebrates free competition instead bows to the desire of large corporations to absorb their competitors and dictate terms to the market. J.P. Morgan’s arrogant statement “I owe the public nothing,” is echoed every time one of these megadeals is announced.

Business Success and Economic Failure

familydollarWhat does it say that an all-out takeover battle is being waged for a chain of no-frills stores selling cheap merchandise at outlets typically located in the most downscale parts of town? The answer is that deep-discount retailing, which entered the mainstream during the recession of the late 2000s, remains a lucrative business as much of the country struggles with stagnating income levels.

The focus of the current bidding war is Family Dollar Stores, the second largest chain of deep discounters, also known as dollar stores. A couple of months ago, Dollar Tree, the third largest chain, announced plans for an $8.5 billion purchase of Family Dollar, which had been targeted by several corporate raiders such as Carl Icahn, who bought a 9 percent stake in the firm.

Family Dollar’s management seemed willing to throw in its lot with Dollar Tree and create a combined company with about 13,000 stores that could not only neutralize Icahn but also challenge the current leviathan of the industry, Dollar General with its 11,000 stores.

Dollar General, which long had its eye on Family Dollar, did not take kindly to the prospect of being relegated to second place. It launched its own fatter bid for Family Dollar, and after being rebuffed, it is now going hostile. It has announced a tender offer under which Family Dollar investors could sell their shares for $80 each, well above the $74.50 that Dollar Tree said it would pay.

As interesting as this may be to analysts of mergers & acquisitions, the takeover battle is not the most significant story here. First, there is the alarming fact that it is taken for granted that the marriage of two giant dollar-store chains can receive antitrust approval. The original Dollar Tree-Family Dollar deal has been promoted by the two companies with the argument that it was likely to be blessed by the Federal Trade Commission. Dollar General argues that its promise to sell off 1,500 outlets would make its deal palatable to the federal regulators. Why shouldn’t any combination among the three chains be considered unacceptable? And what about the even more controversial possibility, as has been widely rumored, that Wal-Mart might try to take over one of the dollar chains to shore up its faltering small-store strategy? Are we to assume that would get approved as well?

At the same time, there has been surprisingly little discussion of how these companies operate. For example, there’s the matter of their labor practices. Dollar General, Family Dollar and Dollar Tree are not often mentioned alongside Wal-Mart, yet they are also low-paying, non-union employers that have been involved in numerous wage & hour controversies. The dollar stores, whose outlets have much smaller staffs than those at Supercenters, have mainly been accused of improperly denying overtime pay to so-called store managers and assistant managers who spend most of their time on non-managerial tasks such as stocking shelves and unloading trucks. Family Dollar, for instance, fought one such case all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, where it lost and finally had to pay a $33 million judgment.

And then there’s the issue of the basic business model of the dollar stores. This is a sector that to a great extent profits from economic desperation. Although a small portion of its customers are middle-class people looking for a bargain, most are lower-income individuals who cannot afford to shop at the likes of Wal-Mart, much less non-discount chains.

The deep-discount chains were supposed to have shrunk once the economy was in recovery. Their continued growth is a symptom of ongoing wage stagnation, and their business success is a sign of a broader economic failure.

Introducing the Dirt Diggers Digest Guide to Strategic Corporate Research

GoodjobsdetectiveWhat is the quantity of greenhouse gas emissions coming from Duke Energy’s Hanging Rock power plant in Ironton, Ohio?

What are the terms of a typical agreement between McDonald’s and one of its franchisees?

Which insurance companies hold the most bonds issued by Monsanto?

Is BP on the list of companies excluded from doing business with the federal government?

How much are members of Verizon’s board paid and how many shares of stock does each director own?

Which watchdog groups monitor the paper industry?

If you deal with questions such as these, you are probably a corporate researcher for a union, environmental group or other progressive organization, and you will be interested to know about the new Dirt Diggers Digest Guide to Strategic Corporate Research.

This is an updated and greatly expanded version of a guide that I began publishing under the auspices of the Corporate Research Project more than ten years ago. Until now it has had three main parts covering sources of general company information, sources for analyzing a company’s key relationships (institutional investors, creditors, major customers, etc.), and sources for reconstructing a company’s accountability record (legal entanglements, labor relations, environment compliance, political influence, etc.).

Designed to be a resource for a wide variety of activist researchers, the guide focused on sources that applied to a broad range of businesses. Along with dozens of additional entries in the existing parts, the new version of the guide contains a section which for the first time provides detailed lists of industry-specific sources in the following categories:

  • Specialized directories and data compilations
  • Trade associations
  • Trade publications
  • Unions representing workers in the industry
  • Watchdog groups monitoring the industry
  • Regulatory agencies and disclosure documents

The guide provides hundreds of such sources for all major industries, among them aerospace, chemicals, electric utilities, mining, pharmaceuticals, semiconductors, steel, telecommunications, and trucking. The directories, trade publications and data compilations include many resources known mainly to industry insiders. The lists of unions include both those representing workers in each sector in the United States as well as international labor federations bringing together unions from around the world dealing with the industry. The lists of watchdog groups include diverse organizations working to get companies in the sector to act in a more responsible manner.

Below is the full table of contents for the guide with links to the individual sections. Happy hunting!

PART I. GETTING STARTED: THE KEY SOURCES OF COMPANY INFORMATION

A. Sources for basic corporate profiles

B. Company websites

C. State corporation filings and property records

D. Securities and Exchange Commission filings

E. D&B and other sources on privately held firms

F. Media coverage

 

PART II. EXPLORING A COMPANY’S ESSENTIAL RELATIONSHIPS

A. Parent company/subsidiaries

B. Outside directors (plus various sources on individuals)

C. Institutional shareholders

D. Wall Street analysts

E. Creditors

F. Customers, suppliers and franchisees

 

PART III. ANALYZING A COMPANY’S ACCOUNTABILITY RECORD

A. Accountability profiles and ratings; case studies; dissident websites

B. Court proceedings

C. Federal regulatory matters

D. Labor relations and employment practices

E. Workplace safety and health

F. Environmental compliance

G. Campaign contributions and lobbying

H. Public relations, corporate philanthropy and sponsored research

I. Executive compensation

J. Government subsidies

 

PART IV. INDUSTRY-SPECIFIC SOURCES

A. Multi-Industry

B. Aerospace and Military Contracting

C. Automobiles and Auto Parts

D. Banking, Investment, Insurance & other Financial Services

E. Chemicals, Plastics and Coatings

F. Computers: Hardware and Software, Semiconductors, Consumer Electronics

G. Construction and Engineering; Real Estate

H. Energy: Coal, Oil & Gas, Nuclear, Solar & Wind, Utilities

I. Entertainment: Broadcasting, Cable, Film, Music

J. Food and Beverages; Agriculture; Tobacco

K. Forest Products

L. Pharmaceuticals, Hospitals and other Healthcare

M. Publishing: Books, Newspapers, Magazines, Internet

N. Restaurants, Hotels & Casinos

O. Retailing & Wholesaling; Apparel

P. Steel and other Metals; Mining

Q. Telecommunications

R. Transportation: Airlines, Railroads, Shipping, Trucking