Phil Mattera

When Will the Big Banks Be Reined In?

In case anyone had doubts about the venality of the big U.S. banks, some recent news reports provide indisputable proof.

First, David Kocieniewski of the New York Times wrote a mind-boggling front-page report on how Goldman Sachs has been using a metals storage company to move large quantities of aluminum from one warehouse to another in Detroit. The maneuver, which exploits esoteric rules of the London Metal Exchange, generates millions of dollars in profit for Goldman and pushes up the price of products such as soft drinks sold in aluminum cans.

The creation of paper profits from aluminum shuffling is just one of the various ways that banks manipulate commodity prices. Occasionally they are called to task for their actions. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission just announced that JPMorgan Chase would pay $410 million in penalties and disgorgement to ratepayers to settle charges that it manipulated electricity markets in California and the Midwest several years ago. The announcement came shortly after the agency ordered the British bank Barclays and four of its traders to pay $453 million in civil penalties in connection with similar abuses in the western United States.

Apparently these banks decided that Enron’s energy market manipulation from a decade earlier was a game plan rather than a cautionary tale.

Another Times piece reports that major banks have in effect blacklisted more than a million low-income Americans because their names appear in databases of supposedly risky customers. The article highlights a Brooklyn woman who ended up on such a list after she overdrew her checking account by all of $40 in 2010 and subsequently was turned down by numerous banks when she tried to open an account. Many of the blacklisted people had to resort to exploitative check-cashing services and payday lenders to conduct their financial transactions. Among the subscribers to ChexSystems, the largest of the databases, were said to be Bank of America, Citibank, JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo.

Allow that to sink it. Banks that have been involved in multi-billion-dollar scandals involving the deceptive sale of toxic securities, municipal bond bid rigging, foreclosure abuses and the like decide that it is too risky to take on a customer who once had a two-digit overdraft in her checking account.

For institutions such as these, the only proper response is to play as dirty as they do. A third NYT article reports that the city of Richmond, California is doing exactly that by employing its power of eminent domain to take over occupied homes that are under the threat of foreclosure and instead offer the owners new, more affordable mortgages that reflect the diminished value of the property. The banks, which have dragged their feet on foreclosure reforms, are indignant over the move and are, in the words of the Times, threatening to “bring down a hail of lawsuits and all but halt mortgage lending in any city with the temerity” to consider the tactic.

The need for bold tactics such as eminent domain has been brought about not only by the banks but also by the half-hearted efforts of the Obama Administration to deal with the foreclosure crisis. This is just one of the ways the administration has not held the financial industry fully responsible for the financial meltdown of 2008 and the repercussions that are still with us.

The President himself is spending his time these days lobbying Congress to support the selection of Larry Summers as the next chair of the Federal Reserve. This is the same Summers who, as Clinton’s Treasury Secretary, promoted the financial deregulation that helped usher in the bank recklessness that has done so much harm to the economy.

The Wall Street Journal recently revealed for the first time that Summers has been working as a consultant to Citigroup in addition to his previously reported roles advising a hedge fund, a venture capital firm and a money management company. Obama apparently thinks that someone with this kind of track record is well suited to oversee monetary policy as the head of an agency that is also one of the main banking regulators.

I’m more impressed with the public officials in Richmond, California.

R.I.P. for SAC?

SAC indictment It’s not clear what real value hedge funds add to the economy, but the apparent abuses of Steven Cohen’s SAC Capital Advisors have made one significant though unintentional contribution: They have breathed new life into the concept of a corporate death penalty.

The criminal and civil charges just filed against SAC by the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Manhattan for insider trading could very well lead to the demise of the firm, given that prosecutors are reportedly seeking forfeiture of some $10 billion. In fact, some analysts believe that forcing SAC out of business is the primary goal of the feds.

In recent years, federal prosecutors have appeared to do everything possible to avoid prosecutions of even the most egregious companies if the case threatened their viability. This has allowed many of the big banks to avoid major criminal charges for their role in the financial meltdown, money laundering or LIBOR interest rate manipulation.

Those that have faced charges have never been in danger of going under, given their ability to negotiate deferred prosecution agreements or the application of criminal charges to a minor subsidiary. Some of the penalties have been sizable (e.g. $1.9 billion for HSBC and $1.5 billion for UBS) but not big enough to sink them.

SAC is a different story. A $10 billion penalty would cripple the firm, which has already been experiencing a rapid outflow of assets since the insider trading charges first surfaced and SAC paid $616 million last March to settle civil charges brought by the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Prosecutors don’t have to worry about broad economic consequences of an SAC collapse. Some negative ripple effects might be felt in Stamford, Connecticut, where the firm is headquartered, but there are plenty of other wealthy firms and individuals there to generate business for luxury car dealers and the high-end service sector.

The fact that a firm such as SAC could disappear without causing any significant disruption raises the question of what purpose it serves in the first place.

Hedge funds have been around for decades, but they used to be low-profile firms serving a limited clientele of wealthy individuals. During the 1990s hedge funds came out of the shadows. Hordes of young investment professionals like Steven Cohen left the stodgy confines of Wall Street and opened their own hedge funds. No longer satisfied with the prospect of becoming a mere millionaire at a brokerage firm, these hotshots saw the chance to become multimillionaires through esoteric investment techniques beyond the comprehension of mere mortals.

The dream of unlimited wealth was shaken in 1998, when a hedge fund called Long-Term Capital Management—which had used $2.2 billion in assets to acquire financial positions with a value of more than $1 trillion—was on the verge of collapse. Concerned that a failure of this magnitude would weaken the entire financial market, the Federal Reserve intervened by putting together a group of investment banks that bailed out the hedge fund and its rich investors.

Events such as this tarnished the reputation of hedge funds but did not result in a stampede among their clients, which included a growing number of pension funds. In fact, the sluggish performance of the stock market in the wake of the dot.com collapse made affluent investors even more interested in the extraordinary returns that hedge funds seemed to offer.

Despite the hype in the business press about funds pulling in annual returns of 40 percent or more, many hedge funds struggled to outperform the stock market. Looking for the big score, some turned back the clock to the financial maneuvers of the 1980s. Rather than simply engaging in financial plays, they used their holdings in companies to press for corporate restructuring to pump up the stock price or in some cases bought out the firm entirely in order to reshape it. Hedge fund managers began to behave like the corporate raiders of the 1980s, and some of those raiders, such as Carl Icahn, transformed themselves into hedge fund managers.

Yet even these approaches could not provide levels of return high enough to meet the inflated expectations of hedge fund investors. All the evidence suggests that firms such as SAC decided that the only way to beat the market was to obtain information that no one else had; in other words, by resorting to insider trading.

That was the message of the successful prosecution of Galleon Group founder Raj Rajaratnam in 2011 and is also at the heart of the SAC indictment, which alleges not just some isolated instances of insider trading. Instead, it charges that such behavior was inherent in the way SAC has operated:

The relentless pursuit of an information “edge” fostered a business culture within SAC in which there was no meaningful commitment to ensure that such “edge” came from legitimate research and not Inside Information. The predictable and foreseeable result, as charged herein, was systematic insider trading.

If SAC’s goose is indeed cooked, the next issue is what happens to its competitors. There’s no reason to believe that any of the other big hedge funds have been any more scrupulous in their pursuit of an information edge. Perhaps what we should be talking about here is not just the death penalty for a single company but for an entire industry.

China’s Familiar Charges Against Glaxo

big-pharma-pills-and-money Global corporations piously claim to adhere to the laws of the countries in which they do business, knowing full well that those laws in many places are weak or are not rigorously enforced.

It’s thus amusing to see British drug giant GlaxoSmithKline squirm in the face of corruption charges unexpectedly brought by the Chinese government. GSK purports to be shocked by allegations that its Chinese executives used funds laundered through travel agencies to bribe doctors, hospitals and public officials to purchase more of its products. The company insists that it has zero tolerance for such behavior and that a recent internal investigation had found no evidence of corruption in its Chinese operations.

These protestations are as unconvincing as the Chinese government’s claims that it is simply enforcing the law—as opposed to giving its emerging pharmaceutical industry a leg up. GSK’s alleged transgressions are little different from the practices that it and the rest of Big Pharma employ around the world.

Take the United States. In recent years, GSK has become known as the company that pays massive amounts to resolve wide-ranging allegations brought by regulators and prosecutors.

Some of those charges involved payments very much like the ones it is being accused of making in China. GSK was charged with giving kickbacks to doctors and other health professionals to prescribe drugs such as the anti-depressants Paxil and Wellbutrin for unapproved (and possibly dangerous) purposes. Payments also went to figures such as radio personality Drew Pinsky, who was given $275,000 by the company to promote Wellbutrin on his program.

The kickback allegations were among the charges covered by a $3 billion settlement GSK reached with the U.S. Justice Department in 2012. Also included in the deal were accusations that GSK withheld crucial safety data on its diabetes medication Avandia from the Food & Drug Administration and that it defrauded government healthcare programs in its pricing practices.

These safety and pricing matters were the culmination of years of controversy surrounding GSK and its predecessor companies. The safety issues dated back at least to the 1950s, when Smith, Kline & French was among the firms linked to Thalidomide and its horrible legacy of birth defects.

Until it was sold off in the late 1980s, Glaxo’s infant formula business, like that of Nestle, was accused of undermining public health in the third world by marketing the powder to women who were so poor that they tended to dilute the formula to the point that it lost its nutritional potency.

In the 1980s, SmithKline Beckman was the target of a rare criminal case brought under U.S. drug laws for failing to warn regulators and the public about the potentially lethal side effects of its blood pressure medication Selacryn.

Later years saw frequent charges that GSK suppressed evidence about the dangers of Paxil, especially in children. There were also many cases involving pricing abuses, including one in which GSK paid $150 million to resolve allegations of violating the federal False Claims Act in its dealings with Medicare and Medicaid.

Unlike many corporate settlements, GSK’s $3 billion deal with the feds required it to plead guilty to several criminal counts. It also had to sign a Corporate Integrity Agreement with the Department of Health and Human Services.

In other words, the company is in effect on parole and subject to heightened scrutiny. The Chinese accusations seem to point to a big, fat violation of the U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. That would jeopardize GSK’s settlement and subject it to new penalties and sanctions.

Foreign corporations have long taken advantage of China’s lax regulatory system. Now that the People’s Republic is (selectively) cracking down, a company such as GSK deserves no sympathy.

Deregulation Crashes and Burns

Canada’s Transportation Safety Board is far from reaching a conclusion on what caused an unattended train with 72 tanker cars filled with crude oil to roll downhill and crash into the Quebec town of Lac-Megantic, setting off a huge explosion that killed at least 15 people. But that hasn’t stopped Edward Burkhardt, the chief executive of the railroad, from pointing the finger at everyone in sight — except himself.

Burkhardt first tried to blame local firefighters who had extinguished a small blaze in the train before the larger accident, and now he is accusing his own employee — the person who was operating the train all by himself — for failing to apply all the hand brakes when he parked the train for the night and went to a hotel for some rest after his 12-hour shift.

Whatever were the immediate causes of the accident, Burkhardt and his company — Montreal, Maine & Atlantic (MMA) Railway and its parent Rail World Inc. — bear much of the responsibility.

Burkhardt is a living symbol of the pitfalls of deregulation, deunionization, privatization and the other features of laissez-faire capitalism. He first made his mark in the late 1980s, when his Wisconsin Central Railroad took advantage of federal railroad deregulation, via the 1980 Staggers Rail Act, to purchase 2,700 miles of track from the Soo Line and remake it into a supposedly dynamic and efficient carrier. That efficiency came largely from operating non-union and thus eliminating work rules that had promoted safety.

Wisconsin Central — which also took advantage of privatization to acquire rail operations in countries such as Britain, Australia and New Zealand — racked up a questionable safety record. Burkhardt was forced out of Wisconsin Central in a boardroom dispute in 2001, but he continued his risky practices after his new company, Rail World, took over the Bangor and Aroostook line in 2003 and renamed it MMA.

Faced with operating losses, Burkhardt and his colleague Robert Grindrod targeted labor costs with little concern about the safety consequences. In 2010 the Bangor Daily News reported that MMA was planning to reduce its crews to one person in Maine, which, amazingly, was allowed by state officials. Grindrod blithely told the newspaper: “Obviously, if you are running two men on a crew and switch to one man, you’re saving 50 percent of your labor component.” The company also succeeded in getting permission for one-man crews in Canada.

Inadequate staffing may have also played a role in a 2009 incident at an MMA maintenance facility in Maine in which more than 100,000 gallons of oil were spilled during a transfer in the facility’s boiler room. In 2011 the EPA fined the company $30,000 for Clean Water Act violations.

MMA continued to have safety problems even before the Lac-Megantic disaster. The Wall Street Journal reported that MMA had 23 accidents, injuries or other reportable mishaps from 2010 to 2012 and that on a per-mile basis the company’s rate was much higher than the U.S. national average.

The Lac-Megantic accident is prompting calls in Canada for a reconsideration of the policy of allowing a high degree of self-regulation on the part of the railroads. A review of lax regulation, including the elimination of work rules, should also occur in the United States. There’s also a scandal in the fact that railroads like MMA are still allowed to use outdated and unsafe tanker cars.

Yet some observers are seeking to exploit the deaths in Quebec by making the bizarre argument that the real lesson of the accident is the need to rely more on pipelines rather than railroads to carry the crude oil gushing out of the North Dakota Bakken fields (the content of the MMA tankers) and the tar sands of Canada. North Dakota Senator John Hoeven, for instance, is using the incident to argue the need for the controversial XL Pipeline.

How quickly these people forget that the safety record of pipelines is far from unblemished. Hoeven’s neighbors in Montana are still recovering from the 2011 rupture of an Exxon Mobil pipeline that spilled some 40,000 gallons of crude oil into the Yellowstone River.

The problem is not the particular delivery system by which hazardous substances are transported but the fact that too many of those systems are under the control of executives such as Burkhardt who put their profits before the safety of the public.

Job Actions Have Wal-Mart Running Scared

Walmart_strike It’s déjà vu all over again at Wal-Mart. Returning to its customary practice of using intimidation to respond to demands for improved working conditions, the company recently began firing some of the “associates” who participated in strikes at its stores. Other workers are being disciplined under the pretext of violating Wal-Mart’s attendance policy.

While this is bad news for the workers affected, the use of heavy-handed tactics is a sign that the company is worried about the historic job actions that have been spreading through its U.S. operations. If Wal-Mart really believed its claims that the OUR Walmart group spearheading the protests has limited support among the company’s massive workforce, then it would be ignoring the movement rather than desperately trying to squelch it.

The current wave of firings is actually an escalation of repressive policies that the company has been implementing since OUR Walmart began ramping up its campaign in 2011. A report released in May by American Rights at Work found that the company has been responding to the activism by disguising acts of retaliation as legitimate discipline or routine enforcement of company policy. Accusing Wal-Mart of fostering a “climate of fear,” the report also documented ways in which the company violated federal labor law by denying OUR Walmart members and organizers access for protected concerted activity.

Such actions continue a tradition of anti-union animus that has characterized Wal-Mart since its earliest years. While some have sought to romanticize founder Sam Walton and pin the blame for the company’s notorious labor policies on his successors, it was Sam himself who first brought in union-busting consultants when some members of his then much smaller workforce began to talk about organizing in the 1970s. The investment paid off for management. For example, after about half of the workers at a Wal-Mart warehouse in Searcy, Arkansas signed cards in support of Teamsters representation in the early 1980s, the consultants used the run-up to the election to scare the workforce into ultimately voting more than three-to-one against the union.

This scenario would play out again and again, both in the United States and Canada. For example, in 1997 the Ontario Labor Relations Board ruled that Wal-Mart had violated Canadian law by intimidating workers in the period preceding a representation election involving the United Steelworkers union. As a result, the board certified the Steelworkers, even though a majority of workers had voted against the union. The company, however, simply refused to bargain with the union.

In 2000 a small group of courageous meatcutters at a Wal-Mart Supercenter in Jacksonville, Texas voted for representation by the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW). Within two weeks, the company announced that it was shutting down the meatcutting operations at that store and at more than 175 more in six states. The NLRB later ruled that the company had violated federal labor law by refusing to discuss the closing with the workers who had chosen union representation, but the issue was by then moot.

In 2001 the UFCW said it was launching a national organizing drive at Wal-Mart, but it focused on a few areas such as Las Vegas, where it engaged in a fierce battle with a slew of anti-union specialists flown in from corporate headquarters in Bentonville, Arkansas. Years later, the NLRB found that the company had engaged in various unfair labor practices, but by then the organizing effort had fizzled out. Looking back on the situation, the Las Vegas Sun published an article headlined WAL-MART BREAKS THE LAW, GETS PUNISHED, WINS ANYWAY.

Wal-Mart’s labor relations practices have been so egregious that they go beyond regulatory infractions and enter the realm of human rights abuses. It’s thus no surprise that Human Rights Watch, which typically analyzes atrocities in dictatorial governments, once published a report concluding Wal-Mart violated the right of its workers to freedom of association.

The problem for current Wal-Mart management is that its workers are more difficult to intimidate than they were in the past. Organizing efforts used to be limited to single locations; now OUR Walmart, using non-traditional tactics, is operating in many places and can mobilize large numbers of people, as seen in last year’s Black Friday job actions as well as the recent strikes and the protests at the company’s annual meeting.

One way Wal-Mart management is responding to the growing solidarity is by increasing its use of a category of worker it believes it can more readily control: temps. The company traditionally used such contingent workers only during the holiday season. Recently there have been reports that some Wal-Mart stores are hiring only temps.

So much for those TV ads that sought to portray a job at Wal-Mart as the stepping-stone to a career.

Subsidy Megadeals for Megacorporations

The Miami Herald recently published a story with the headline “Amazon Doesn’t Need Tax Incentives, But Localities Offer Millions in Tax Breaks.” Throwing large sums of money at large corporations in a desperate attempt to create jobs is an affliction not limited to public officials in Florida. It is a wasteful and self-defeating public policy that can be found throughout the United States.

An indication of just how pervasive the practice has become can be found in a new report my colleagues and I at Good Jobs First have just issued. The title is Megadeals, and it is a look back at the largest state and local subsidy packages of the past three decades.

In the course of five months of painstaking research, we identified 240 of those packages with a total value of at least $75 million each; the aggregate cost is more than $64 billion. Many of them reach into nine and even ten figures. There are eleven deals costing $1 billion or more in public money.

Most astounding are the costs per job. The average for our 240 megadeals is $456,000 and there are 18 for which the cost per job is $1 million or more.

Megadeals have been awarded to many of the largest and best known companies based in the United States as well as foreign ones doing business here, including: General Motors, Ford, Nissan, Toyota and just about every other large automaker; oil giants such as Exxon Mobil and Royal Dutch Shell; aerospace leaders Boeing and Airbus; banks such as Citigroup and Goldman Sachs; media companies such as Walt Disney and its subsidiary ESPN; retailers such as Sears and Cabela’s; old-line industrials such as General Electric and Dow Chemical; and tech stars such as Amazon.com, Apple, Intel and Samsung.

Sixteen of the Fortune 50 are represented. Not included is the company atop of the Fortune list: Wal-Mart. That’s not because Wal-Mart doesn’t receive subsidies—Good Jobs First has separately documented more than $1.2 billion in such taxpayer assistance in our Wal-Mart Subsidy Watch website—but its deals have been worth less than $75 million each and thus don’t qualify for our list.

The most expensive single listing is a 30-year discounted-electricity deal worth an estimated $5.6 billion given to aluminum producer Alcoa by the New York Power Authority. Taking all of a company’s megadeals into account, Alcoa is at the top with its single $5.6 billion deal, followed by Boeing (four deals worth a total of $4.4 billion), Intel (six deals worth $3.6 billion), General Motors (11 deals worth $2.7 billion), Ford Motor (9 deals worth $2.1 billion), Nike (1 deal worth $2 billion) and Nissan (four deals worth $1.8 billion).

The overall costs of megadeals have risen over the past three decades (in current dollars). The megadeals from the 1980s averaged $157 million. The average rose to $175 million in the 1990s and $325 million in the 2000s. It then declined to $260 million in the 2010s. The average for the list as a whole is $269 million.

Some of the deals involve little if any new-job creation; indeed, one in ten of the deals involves the mere relocation of an existing facility, usually within the same state and often a short distance. Some of these retention deals were granted in so-called job blackmail episodes in which a company threatened to move jobs out of state unless it got new tax breaks or other subsidies.

The megadeals list is a new enhancement of Good Jobs First’s Subsidy Tracker database, the first compilation of company-specific data on economic development deals from around the country.

Until now, the content of Subsidy Tracker has consisted exclusively of official disclosure data provided by state and local governments. The information has been obtained from government websites and from direct requests to agencies. Given the limitations of the disclosure practices among state and local governments—and often from program to program within jurisdictions—the exclusive reliance on official data meant that Subsidy Tracker was missing information on many large deals that had been reported in the media. Either those deals were missing entirely if there was no official disclosure for the programs involved, or else Tracker had incomplete data if some but not all of the programs used in the package were disclosed.

To rectify this problem, we went back and collected information on large deals using a variety of sources, including press releases, newspaper articles and reports on specific projects as well as the official data we already had. The results went into the creation of the megadeals list and have been incorporated into Subsidy Tracker.

Note: The page containing the Megadeals report also has a link to a spreadsheet with full details on all 240 of the deals.

Corporate Privacy is Alive and Well

we-the-corporations02-e1294670618870 Recent revelations about the electronic surveillance programs of the federal government, which are being carried out with the cooperation of large telecommunications and internet companies, show that personal privacy rights are in serious peril.

Much is being said and written about the discrepancy between the seemingly invincible status of the Second Amendment and the disintegrating Fourth Amendment. Yet the more significant contrast may be between individuals and corporations with regard to privacy and protection from government intrusion.

Despite all the complaints from business groups about the supposedly overbearing Obama Administration, large corporations have it pretty good. This is especially the case in the matter of taxes.

Although the finances of publicly traded companies are supposed to be an open book, firms are not required to make public their tax returns. This allows them to conceal the inconsistencies between what they disclose to shareholders and what they report to Uncle Sam. The recent report by the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations about tax dodging by Apple showed there was a $4.4 billion discrepancy between the FY2011 tax liability presented in the company’s 10-K annual report and what it listed in its corporate tax return (which the committee had to subpoena).

Revelations about Apple and other tax dodging companies has not resulted in any action by Congress. The European Union, by contrast, is moving ahead with a transparency initiative that will thwart tax avoidance and illegal financial flows.

Anti-corruption and pro-transparency groups in the Financial Accountability and Corporate Transparency (FACT) Coalition have been pressing the Obama Administration to support a plan, backed by British Prime Minister David Cameron, to require the registration of owners of shell companies—a move that would make illicit financial transfers more difficult. The idea will be discussed at the upcoming G8 summit, but there is little indication that Obama, much less the U.S. Congress, is prepared to sign on to Cameron’s “transparency revolution.”

Large corporations enjoy a great deal of privacy with regard to state as well as federal tax liabilities. Publicly traded companies are required only to disclose aggregate figures on the taxes they are paying (or not paying) to the states overall, making it impossible to get a clue on how much dodging is going on in individual states. Although there have been efforts at times to compel publicly traded companies to make public their state tax returns, those documents remain as private as their federal returns.

Corporate financial statements are also usually devoid of any information on the billions of dollars companies receive each year in economic development subsidies from state and local governments. There has, however, been progress in piercing the corporate privacy veil in this arena, but it is mixed.

At the state level, disclosure is better than it has ever been, but there is a great deal of inconsistency from state to state and from program to program within states. Much of the transparency progress relates to grant and low-cost loans, while the tax breaks—which are often the big-ticket items—lag. Fewer than half the states post a significant amount of information online about corporate tax credits.

And as my colleagues and I at Good Jobs First showed in a recent report, disclosure is even more primitive among most large cities and counties. All the disclosed data is collected in our Subsidy Tracker search engine.

Taxes and subsidies are not the only areas in which corporate privacy remains strong. There are also serious limitations, for example, in what companies have to reveal about their labor practices. Even publicly traded companies are providing less and less in their 10-K annual reports about collective bargaining. Reading the 10-K of Wal-Mart, for instance, you would never know that it has fought tooth-and-nail against unions and is now facing a non-traditional organizing campaign. Whether they are sympathetic or not to the goals of the campaign, shouldn’t shareholders at least be told that it exists and what the company is doing in response?

As poor as the transparency rules are for publicly traded companies, they shine in connection with the absence of significant requirements with regard to privately held firms. The secrecy afforded to family-controlled mega-corporations such as Koch Industries and Cargill is a serious public policy problem.

While companies such as Facebook and Google claim to be sympathetic to the concerns of their customers about government surveillance, they continue to enjoy a higher level of privacy. Corporations have been aggressive in asserting First Amendment rights equivalent to those of natural persons, but when it comes to the Fourth Amendment, they seem to be ahead of us humans.

How Taxpayers Subsidize Union Avoidance by Wal-Mart and Nissan

Most Americans have been made to believe that they have no stake in private sector labor issues. Unions, we are told, are irrelevant to the working life of the vast majority of the population, whose economic fate is supposedly being determined solely by their employers or by individual skills in maneuvering through the labor market.

This narrative, however, is being challenged by organizing campaigns that are taking on two giant corporations – Wal-Mart and Nissan – and showing that collective action is not defunct. And two reports related to the campaigns show that not only the workers involved, but also taxpayers in general, have a stake in their outcome.

For the past 30 years, Wal-Mart has fought bitterly against the efforts of its employees to organize for better pay and benefits. It showed no hesitation in firing workers who supported union drives and routinely closed down operations where successful representation elections were held.

A new wave of non-traditional organizing by Making Change at Walmart and OUR Walmart has revived the prospects for change at the giant retailer. Strikes have become a frequent occurrence at Wal-Mart stores in recent weeks, and large numbers of Wal-Mart workers and their supporters have been converging on Bentonville, Arkansas to make their voices heard at the company’s annual meeting.

A recent report by the Democratic staff of the U.S. House Committee on Education and the Workforce is a reminder that taxpayers are put in a position of subsidizing the low wages and poor benefits that the Wal-Mart campaigners are protesting. The study, which updates a 2004 report by the committee, reviews the hidden taxpayer costs stemming from the fact that many Wal-Mart workers have no choice but to use social safety net programs—such as Medicaid, Section 8 Housing, food stamps and the Earned Income Tax Credit—that were designed for individuals not in the labor force or those working for small companies that failed to provide decent compensation, not a leviathan with $17 billion in annual profits.

The Democratic staff report estimates that today the workers in a typical Wal-Mart Supercenter (Wisconsin is used as the example) make use of programs that cost taxpayers at least $904,542 a year and possibly as much as $1.7 million. Since Wal-Mart has more than 3,000 Supercenters in the U.S., plus hundreds of other types of stores, those costs run into the billions.

Nissan has been following in Wal-Mart’s footsteps in Mississippi, where it opened a large assembly plant a decade ago. The plant brought several thousand direct jobs to the state, but the problem is that many of the jobs are substandard. The company makes extensive use of temps, who are currently paid only about $12 an hour.

In response to the use of temps as well as issues concerning the conditions faced by regular employees, Nissan workers have been organizing themselves with the help of the United Auto Workers. Rather than accepting labor representation, as it does in numerous other countries, Nissan is seeking to intimidate workers using the usual toolbox of union avoidance techniques such as threats and bombarding workers with anti-union propaganda. The workers, however, have been bolstered by strong community support from groups such as the Mississippi Alliance for Fairness at Nissan.

My colleagues and I at Good Jobs First recently issued a report commissioned by the UAW documenting the extent to which Nissan has enjoyed lavish tax breaks and other financial assistance from state and local government agencies. We found that the subsidies, which were originally estimated at around $300 million when the company first came to the state in 2000, have mushroomed to the point that they could be worth some $1.3 billion. That works out to some $290,000 per job. Noting the over-dependence on temps, we state that Mississippi taxpayers are paying “premium amounts for jobs that in many cases are far from premium.”

Although it was outside the scope of our report, it is clear that the Nissan temps, like the Wal-Mart workers, are also generating hidden taxpayer costs through their use of safety net programs. And we have previously documented that Wal-Mart frequently gets the kind of economic development subsidies Nissan is enjoying in Mississippi.

Whether through hidden taxpayer costs or job subsidies, the public is frequently put in the position of aiding companies like Wal-Mart and Nissan that disregard labor rights while failing to pay their fair share of the cost of government. Perhaps the interests of taxpayers and workers are not so different after all.

The Kochs’ Stake in Pollution

Accountability_LATimesPuppets_300x250_FINALREVISED050813_2 Koch 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.

Apologies and Apple

In 2010 Texas Rep. Joe Barton took the bizarre step of apologizing to BP for the Obama Administration’s effort to get the oil giant to compensate those affected by its massive spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Barton faced a firestorm of criticism and had to retract his statement.

It will be interesting to see if Sen. Rand Paul has to do the same with his outrageous statement the other day arguing that the Senate should apologize to Apple for the report of its investigations subcommittee documenting brazen tax dodging by the company. “I would say what we really need to do is to apologize to Apple, compliment them for the job creation they are doing, and get about doing our job,” Paul declared at a hearing to discuss the report.

I don’t know how Apple CEO Tim Cook restrained himself from jumping up and giving Paul a big wet kiss on the lips. Cook instead offered testimony that was part p.r. spiel about the wonderfulness of Apple and part outright dishonesty about its tax practices. Among his claims: “Apple does not use tax gimmicks.”

The problem is that the investigations subcommittee’s 40-page report described an array of loopholes and tricks by which Apple has shielded tens of billions of dollars from federal taxation. At the center of the scheme is the artificial designation of vast amounts of cash as being held offshore to keep it outside the reach of the IRS. That hoard, which now totals more than $100 billion, is actually, the New York Times reports, held in bank accounts in New York in the name of Apple subsidiaries based in Ireland.

For tax purposes, Apple claims that its key Irish entity has no legal residency (nor a physical presence or employees), meaning that it is not effectively taxed anywhere. A recent analysis by Citizens for Tax Justice concluded that Apple has paid “almost no income taxes to any country” on its offshore stash. This undermines the arguments made by Apple and other corporations for a new repatriation tax holiday or a shift to a territorial tax system.

“Apple has a very strong moral compass, and we believe in really good corporate citizenship,” Cook recently told the Washington Post. That claim was already preposterous, given past revelations about abysmal working conditions at the company’s supplier plants in China.

Tax dodging, unfortunately, is not widely regarded as being on a par with sweatshops as an indicator of corporate social irresponsibility. Apple, for instance, feels compelled to publish material asserting that it and its suppliers support labor and human rights and that they operate in an environmentally sound manner. There is no such statement on its website about compliance with tax laws.

Apple, like just about every other large corporation, not only manipulates the federal tax code but does the same at the state and local level, both through accounting schemes and by negotiating economic development subsidy deals, which frequently include corporate income tax credits, business property tax abatements and the like.

Last year, for example, Apple took an $89 million subsidy package to build a data center in Reno, Nevada that was expected to create only 35 permanent Apple employees. Three years earlier, Apple got a state subsidy package in North Carolina worth over $46 million (plus more at the local level) for a similar facility that was projected to produce only 50 permanent jobs.

Apple and other companies justify the taking of subsidies because it is legal and because it is usually linked to job creation, though in the case of Apple the number of jobs, at the data centers at least, is minute compared to the lost tax revenue.

What demands by rich companies for subsidies they don’t need really shows is that tax minimization is not, as corporate apologists would have us believe, just a response to the complexity of the federal tax code. It is a compulsion to increase net income, regardless of the consequences for the public. That is part of the definition of corporate irresponsibility.

Companies like Apple will continue to get away with fiscal murder until tax dodging and excessive subsidy taking are as stigmatized as the use of sweatshop labor and toxic dumping. At that point, even politicians of Rand Paul’s ilk might have to think twice about challenging the right of Congress to investigate unscrupulous tax accounting practices.