Phil Mattera

Living Large on Capitol Hill

After being in office for a while, many lawmakers cannot wait to go through the revolving door to the private sector so they can earn a lot more than the salary of $169,300 currently paid to members of Congress. However, a new tool created by the Sunlight Foundation suggests that some senators and representatives do quite well in building up their nest egg while still on the public payroll.

The Fortune 535 is a website that approximates changes over time in the net worth of members of Congress. First among these accumulators of wealth is Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), who is estimated to have grown richer by some $210 million since 2000. Two others are said to have boosted their net worth by more than $100 million: Rep. Jane Harman (D-Calif.) and Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.).

Although the Fortune 535 is based on the personal financial disclosure forms filed by members of Congress and made available on the web by the Open Secrets website of the Center for Responsive Politics, its net worth numbers are not quite ironclad. That’s because legislators are allowed to report their assets and liabilities in exceedingly broad ranges. Fortune 535 combines the midpoints of the ranges for each asset and liability and compares the overall result for the earliest available disclosure form to the legislator’s most recent filing. The site does not attempt to explain the changes in the estimated net worth figures. By necessity, it is not the most rigorous data source, but it serves both to illustrate the flaws in the current financial disclosure system and to suggest that many members of Congress are not sharing the financial distress being experienced by their constituents.

Another new data source on Congress appears at first to contain more precise data. Legistorm has introduced the Foreign Gifts Database, which contains information on both tangible items and travel/lodging given by foreign governments to senators, representatives and their staff over the past decade. The database can be searched by recipient, country or description of the gift. Former Speaker Dennis Hastert, for example, reported receiving a ceremonial dagger from the government of Morocco worth $10,000. Hastert filed his reports on the dagger and other gifts only upon leaving office rather than within the specified 60 days after receiving the items.

Legistorm, which also provides databases of Congressional member and staff salaries and trips, also raises questions about the completeness of the reporting: Hastert’s filings are the only ones made by a member of the House in the past five years.

Social Responsibility for Sale

A feature article by two academics in today’s Wall Street Journal provides further evidence that the concept of corporate ethics is an oxymoron—or at least is a far cry from human ethics. The piece, by Remi Trudel and June Cotte of the University of Western Ontario’s Ivey School of Business, is headlined: “Does Being Ethical Pay?”

The authors don’t seem to think there is anything odd about discussing behavioral norms exclusively in terms of the material payoff. They unself-consciously refer to corporate social responsibility as a “big business” and thus don’t have any problem analyzing it in the same terms used for any investment.

Trudel and Cotte start out asking the question: “How Much are Ethics Worth?” What this means in practical terms is: how much extra can companies charge for products that are advertised as having been produced in an ethical manner. They ignore the question of how much more such goods actually cost to produce and consider only how much consumers are willing to pay. Based on experiments with a random group of adults, they found that people are willing to pay significantly more for the ethical goods, which suggests that consumers are a lot more ethical than companies.

Amazingly, the authors then address the question: “How Ethical Do You Need to Be?” Here they found that consumers would, for example, pay a differential for a shirt advertised as 25 percent organic but not much more for one said to have a higher organic content. The lesson Trudel and Cotte seem to draw from this is that companies should make some effort to give their products an ethical patina but need not go too far, since there will not be a proportional return for the additional effort.

The analysis of Trudel and Cotte is at the same time appalling and refreshing. It cuts through the social responsibility hype that permeates so much large-company marketing these days and shows that corporations will do the right thing only if it somehow enhances their bottom line. Lenin famously said that capitalists would sell the rope with which they would be hanged. Today’s corporate executives are happy to sell us the appearance of social responsibility—and, if we are lucky, the real thing.

Will the Justice Department Prosecute Company Linked to Mine Deaths?

Too many members of Congress behave as if they were corporate lobbyists who just happen to be on the public payroll. One outstanding exception to that tendency is Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.), who has been a consistent champion of the not-so-monied interests, especially workers. Yesterday, Miller, who serves as chairman of the House Committee on Education and Labor, announced that he has asked the Justice Department to initiate a criminal investigation of the general manager of the Crandall Canyon Mine near Huntington, Utah, where nine miners were killed in two accidents last August. (The official federal fatality reports are here and here.)

Miller based his request on the results of an investigation conducted by his committee, which found evidence that the mine manager, Laine W. Adair, had concealed the full story of a previous collapse of the mine involving the same technique—retreat mining—that was linked to last summer’s deaths. Had the Mine Safety and Health Administration been given a complete account of the earlier accident, Miller argued, the mine might have been barred from continuing to use the technique.

In Miller’s referral letter to the Attorney General, he notes that Adair has vowed to invoke the Fifth Amendment protection against self-incrimination if he is forced to testify before the committee, as have other officials of the mine’s corporate owner, Murray Energy, including CEO Robert Murray, who has “argued” that an earthquake caused the collapse at his mine.

It remains to be seen how the Justice Department responds to Miller’s request, which just happened to be announced the same week that the national hiatus on the death penalty came to an end with the execution of a convicted murderer in Georgia. When will this country exhibit the same blood lust for punishing corporate killers as it has for individual ones?

Postcard from the Good Jobs First conference

If you are a researcher or campaigner concerned about economic development accountability, the place to be this week is the national conference of Good Jobs First outside Baltimore. Gathered here are activists who are seeking to remake the relationship between the public and the private sectors.

Some of the most impressive presentations came this morning in a plenary session put together by the Partnership for Working Families (PWF). Madeline Janis, head of the Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy, and Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins, who runs the South Bay AFL-CIO and Working Partnerships USA, described remarkable changes that have taken place in parts of California. Union-sponsored non-profit organizations, working with community allies, are turning the tables on developers who used to have the red carpet rolled out for them. Now the right to build large subsidized projects is being made contingent on providing benefits to the community ranging from apprenticeship programs and living-wage jobs to affordable housing, more green space and air pollution abatement. Janis and Ellis-Lamkins seemed to be describing a parallel universe in which the common good takes precedence over monied interests.

Their themes were echoed later in a presentation by Cecilia Estolano, chief executive of the Los Angeles Community Redevelopment Agency, a remarkable public official who is converting the agency from what she said was a “cookie jar” for developers into a promoter of projects that bring about broad improvements in living standards.

The good news comes not only from California. For example, Deborah Scott of Georgia Stand Up recounted how her group cajoled local officials in Atlanta to provide for community participation in major development projects taking place adjacent to an old rail line ringing the city.

I was unable to attend the PWF workshops (one of five tracks) because I was giving presentations of my own — in my capacity as research director of Good Jobs First — in workshops on advanced research techniques relating to subsidies and corporate taxes. Joining me in the latter were Matt Gardner of the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, who told us how to unearth the real tax rates of major corporations (which are often well below what the company claims), and Michael Mazerov of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, who described his proposal to compel corporations to disclose abbreviated versions of their state tax returns.

This is only a sample of the provocative ideas swirling around this conference. Wish you could be here.

(This item is being crossposted on Clawback.org.)

Rebuffed by Supreme Court, NAM Complies with Disclosure Law—for Now

It’s rare these days for powerful business interests to be rebuffed by the U.S. Supreme Court, but that’s what happened when Chief Justice John Roberts denied an emergency request from the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) last week having to do with disclosure. NAM has been waging a court battle against a new law (Section 207 of P.L. 110-81) that requires trade associations to list member companies that are extensively involved in developing the organization’s lobbying strategies or that contribute at least $5,000 toward those efforts. NAM believes its members should be able to lobby confidentially.

NAM was seeking a stay on enforcement of a portion of the Honest Leadership and Open Government Act that took effect on April 21. The DC Court of Appeals turned down the request, so NAM went to the Supreme Court, which also said no.

This week, NAM submitted an amended lobbying disclosure filing to the Clerk of the House and the Secretary of the Senate. Beginning on page 54 of the 71-page document, NAM responded to a question about additional affiliated organizations by including a link to a page on its website.

That page contains the names of 63 large corporations and two trade associations (American Petroleum Institute and the Edison Electric Institute) whose lobbying involvement, NAM decided, now has to be made public. Not surprisingly, the companies include giant industrials in sectors such as energy, pharmaceuticals, chemicals, heavy equipment, food processing and aerospace. In other words, companies that have a lot of interests that need to be fostered in Washington.

Here’s the complete list: Albemarle Corporation, American Electric Power, American Petroleum Institute, AREVA Group, AT&T, Bayer Corporation, BD, Boston Scientific Corporation, BP Corporation North America, Bristol-Myers Squibb Company, Campbell Soup Company, Caterpillar Inc., Chevron Corporation, CN, CONSOL Energy, Corning Incorporated, Deloitte & Touche LLP, Delphi Corporation, Dominion Resources Services, Dow Corning Corporation, Eastman Chemical Company, Edison Electric Institute, Entergy Corporation, Exxon Mobil Corporation, FirstEnergy Corp., FMC Technologies, General Electric, Goodrich Corporation, Illinois Tool Works, Ingersoll-Rand, JELD-WEN, Inc., Johnson Controls, Koch Industries, Loews Corporation, Marathon Oil, Mead Westvaco, Merck & Company, Northrop Grumman, Occidental Petroleum, Owens-Illinois, PPG Industries, PPL Corporation, Rockwell Automation, Rohm and Haas, SABIC Americas, Inc., Sanofi-Aventis, Shell Oil, Smurfit-Stone Container, Sony Electronics, Temple-Inland, Terra Industries, Textron, The Clorox Company, The Hershey Company, The Timken Company, Unilever United States, Union Pacific, United States Steel, USEC, Verizon, Volvo Group North America, W L Gore & Associates, W. R. Grace & Co., Weyerhaeuser Company, and Xerox Corporation.

It is no great surprise that companies such as these are deeply involved in trying to shape federal policies, but what’s important here is the principle: lobbying is not a process that companies can engage in surreptitiously by funneling their spending through business associations. NAM President John Engler (former Republican Governor of Michigan) warned that the new disclosure requirement might prompt companies “to curtail their memberships or restrict their involvement in trade associations.” That might sound like a problem to Engler, but less corporate involvement in manipulating public policy is music to my ears.

An Embarrassment of Corporate Riches

Things are rough all over. Unemployment is rising, inflation is up, foreclosures are rampant, poor countries are experiencing food riots. Today the front page of the Wall Street Journal pointed out that major agribusiness companies are facing a challenge of their own: soaring profits.

The likes of Cargill, Archer Daniels Midland and Monsanto have joined the Exxon Mobils of the world in experiencing windfall profits. Cargill, which is privately held but releases summary financial results, reported earlier this month that its net income for the quarter ending February 29 was up 86 percent over the same period last year. Monsanto beat that with an increase of more than 100 percent.

While the percentage increases are more than healthy, the absolute amounts involved—$1.1 billion in Monsanto’s latest quarter, for example—pale in comparison to the profits being raked in by the oil majors. Exxon is scheduled to announce its first quarter results tomorrow—May Day—and a gusher is expected. The company earned $11.7 billion in the fourth quarter of 2007 and more than $40 billion for the year as a whole. Only a few dozen U.S. companies have $40 billion in revenues.

The Journal also had an article today on how food and energy companies are escaping the kind of public opprobrium that followed the run-up of oil prices in the 1970s. It seems that, apart from the relatively small number of angry truckers who have been protesting fuel prices in Washington, DC, most Americans are willing to accept soaring commodity prices with little more than a grumble. According to the Journal, this is because food and energy represent a smaller share of consumer expenditures than three decades ago. But that will inevitably change as those costs continue to rise while wage and salary levels remain largely stagnant. A point may come when the energy and agribusiness giants are seen not as accidental beneficiaries but as crisis profiteers.

A Struggle Over the Rockefeller Legacy?

For a family whose economic power peaked a long time ago, the Rockefellers have been in the news a lot lately—in both good ways and bad. The negative press comes courtesy of author Steve Weinberg, whose well-received new book—Taking on the Trust: The Epic Battle of Ida Tarbell and John D. Rockefeller—looks at both the oil tycoon and the pioneering investigative journalist who exposed the unsavory aspects of his business practices.

The publicity given to Weinberg’s book reminds those who associate the Rockefeller name these days mainly with a respected foundation and a liberal U.S. Senator from West Virginia that it was long reviled because of Standard Oil’s ruthless conquest of its competitors. Long after Tarbell’s book on Standard Oil was published in 1904, the Rockefeller name was associated with the worst features of capitalism. Labor activists blamed a Rockefeller-controlled company for the infamous Ludlow Massacre of 1914, when wives and children of striking workers were killed by the Colorado state militia. In the late 1960s, the New Left condemned the Rockefeller-controlled Chase Manhattan bank for oppressing the people of Latin America.

Now it seems that the Rockefellers are trying to burnish their reputation. David Rockefeller, the 92-year-old former chairman of Chase Manhattan, just announced a gift of $100 million to his alma mater Harvard University (as if it needed the money). Neva Rockefeller Goodwin, daughter of David Rockefeller, submitted a shareholder resolution for next month’s annual meeting of Exxon Mobil (which descends from the Standard Oil Trust) calling on the company to establish a task force to examine the consequences of global warming.

And today, the Financial Times reports that members of the Rockefeller Family plan to press for corporate governance reforms at Exxon Mobil, including a requirement that the chairman of the board be independent of management. The Rockefellers, whose combined holdings in Exxon are not large enough to be disclosed by the company, are dubious agents for change at a corporation that in many ways carries on the harmful practices that made their family fabulously rich. Today’s Ida Tarbells are better suited for the job.

Federal Database of Contractor Misconduct Now One Step Closer

The effort to centralize information on federal contractors that have broken the law or violated regulations took an important step forward today when the House approved by voice vote H.R. 3033, the Contractor and Federal Spending Accountability Act. The issue now goes to the Senate, where Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) today introduced a companion measure.

The bills would require the federal government to take over a function that until now has been unofficially handled by the Project On Government Oversight. POGO’s Federal Contract Misconduct Database has been an immensely valuable pilot effort covering the 50 companies doing the most business with Uncle Sam.

First on that list in terms of contract dollars is arms maker Lockheed Martin, for which POGO has found 42 instances of misconduct—resulting in $553 million in fines and settlement costs—since 1995. Number two contractor Boeing has 24 instances and $863 million in misconduct dollars, followed by Northrop Grumman with 23 instances and $450 million. While Lockheed leads in the number of misconduct instances (followed by General Electric and Exxon Mobil and Honeywell International before Boeing and Northrop), it ranks 9^th in misconduct dollars. The winners in that category are Exxon and BP Amoco. POGO defines “misconduct” as cases in which contractors “violate laws or regulations or are the subject of misconduct allegations in their dealings with the government, individuals, or private entities.”

H.R. 3033 would mandate the creation of a public database that would reveal whether any recipient of a federal contract or grant had, within the past five years: been involved in any civil, criminal or administrative proceeding resulting in a finding of fault of $5,000 or more; had a federal contract or grant terminated because of default; or been suspended or debarred from doing business with the federal government. This would enable federal agencies to weed out bad actors before awarding future contracts.

If it passes, the contractor database would represent the second instance in recent years in which a disclosure initiative pioneered by a non-profit became an official federal program. The recently launched USA Spending database of federal contracts and grants, mandated by bipartisan legislation sponsored by Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) and Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.), was directly modeled on the FedSpending database that had been created by OMB Watch.

CEOs Who Never Pick Up the Tab

I was intrigued by a post that just appeared in Footnoted.org about some companies whose recent proxy statements disclose they are reimbursing top officers for the cost of having their cars washed. We have all heard about the expensive perks large corporations shower on their executives: country club memberships, use of corporate jets, personal financial advisors, etc.—all in addition to munificent salaries and bonuses. Yet are companies also taking care of mundane everyday expenses as well?

In theory, it shouldn’t be possible to learn these details, since even under the more rigorous disclosure rules imposed by the SEC in 2006, companies are not required to list perks worth less than $10,000. Nonetheless, I decided to follow Footnoted’s lead and search the database of recent proxy statement to look for other kinds of personal services being provided to executives. Here’s an assortment of what I found.

SLM Corp.—the student loan company also known as Sallie Mae—reports that it not only provided a townhouse for president C.E. Andrews but also paid for “real estate taxes, homeowner’s insurance, neighborhood association fees, repairs and improvements, utilities, lawn and housekeeping services, and pest control.”

Harris & Harris Group—a business development company focusing on nanotechnology—pays for both a health-club membership and a personal trainer for chief executive Charles E. Harris.

BioLase Technology—a producer of dental lasers—paid the laundry expenses of Keith Bateman while he was executive vice president of the company.

Military contractor Raytheon and numerous other companies pay for security systems at the homes of their top executives.

Home Depot pays for the home internet services used by their top executives and picks up the tab when they send funeral flowers.

Beermaker Anheuser-Busch has a company barber shop for top executives and provides free beer “for personal use and entertaining.”

The costs of these perks are trivial in comparison to the cash compensation the executives receive and are barely a blip in the overall finances of the companies. But they illustrate the regal manner in which the corporate elite are treated. How can a CEO who doesn’t have to pay many of his or her own personal expenses—including in some cases the cost of six pack—understand the situation of those who get nothing for free?

Taking the Sweat Out of University Logo Apparel

If you will excuse a bit of parental pride, I would like to report that my son Thomas, a sophomore at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, has been involved in a protest aimed at getting UNC to participate in a program that protects the rights of workers who sew university logo apparel. On Friday, students held a demonstration on campus, while a smaller group is in the fifth day of a sit-in at the building containing the office of Chancellor James Moeser, the target of the pressure campaign. Carolina Blue clothing is among the most popular “brands” of university apparel.

The UNC actions are part of the latest wave of recent campus actions in support of the Designated Supplier Program (DSP), an initiative of the Worker Rights Consortium and United Students Against Sweatshops. Recent actions have taken place at schools such as Penn State University, the University of Montana, Appalachian State University and the University of Houston. While all the protests have been non-violent, more than 30 students were arrested last week at Penn State.

The DSP, launched in 2005, is an attempt to fight sweatshop conditions by getting universities to demand that licensee companies distributing their logo apparel make use of supplier factories that have been independently verified to pay a living wage and respect the right of workers to organize. Currently, more than 30 schools have signed on to DSP (including the entire University of California system), while officials at other institutions have resisted.

Apparel companies such as Nike, Champion (owned by Hanesbrands) and Russell Athletic (owned by Berkshire Hathaway) are among the big players in the $3 billion university logo market. Nike, the target of intensive protests during the 1990s over its use of sweatshop suppliers, has cleaned up its act, though the company itself has acknowledged that its suppliers do not always comply with its standards. Since monitoring its large number of plants—located in 36 countries—is impossible, the alternative is to direct business to a smaller group of factories known to treat their workers decently—hence, DSP. That way, students can ensure that the sweat in university apparel comes from wearers, not producers.

Note: The Worker Rights Consortium has an online database of factories around the world that produce university logo apparel.