Campaign Contributions

Gently Regulating Corporate Election Involvement

A recent announcement by the Federal Election Commission that it was fining the National Enquirer’s parent company was unusual in two ways.

The first had to do with which parties were targeted by the FEC and which were not. The agency imposed a penalty of $187,500 against A360 Media LLC (formerly known as American Media Inc.) for making a payment to Karen McDougal in 2016 to suppress her story about having had an affair with Donald Trump.

Watchdog group Common Cause alleged that the payment – which was facilitated by Trump’s former personal lawyer Michael Cohen– amounted to an illegal in-kind contribution to Trump’s campaign by American Media. The FEC agreed, but it chose not to sanction the beneficiary of the payment. In other words, this was another example of how Trump manages to avoid personal consequences for misconduct for which he was ultimately responsible.

The FEC action was also out of the ordinary because it entailed a penalty directed at a company. It has become so rare for the FEC to bring cases against corporations themselves (as opposed to their political action committees), that I have not been including the agency among those federal regulators from whom I collect data for Violation Tracker.

Seeing the A360 decision, I decided it was time to add the FEC, but I didn’t know how many corporate cases could be found. I knew that the heyday of prosecuting corporations for election finance violations came in the 1970s as an outgrowth of the Watergate investigations. Those cases would have to be left out, since Violation Tracker coverage begins in 2000.

I also knew that there were likely to be few cases after January 2010, when the U.S. Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision wiped away most limitations on campaign spending by corporations as well as other entities. The ban on the direct use of corporate funds for campaign contributions remained in place.

The other factor has to do with the FEC itself, which often deadlocks along partisan lines and has difficulty imposing penalties against corporations or other entities and individuals.

As I dove into the case archives on the FEC website, I focused on what the agency calls Matters Under Review and ignored its administrative fines brought against PACs and campaign committees for matters such as late filing of reports.

I ultimately found a total of 31 cases in the period since January 2000 in which a corporate entity was fined $5,000 or more for an election violation. There were only four penalties above $100,000 – including one for $1 million – and the overall average was just $77,000.

Most of these cases involved allegations that the corporation improperly reimbursed employees for their individual donations to try to get around the ban on the use of corporate funds.

It is difficult to believe that fewer than three dozen corporations broke this rule and other remaining regulations during the past two decades. Instead, the low case count is another symptom of underregulation of corporate activities with regard to elections and much more.

Note: the new FEC entries will be added to Violation Tracker later this month as part of an overall update of the database.

The Controversial Corporations Exploiting Citizens United

It has now been exactly ten years since the U.S. Supreme Court opened the floodgates for special-interest political advertising in its Citizens United ruling. To mark the occasion, the Center for Responsive Politics has published an excellent report detailing how political spending has changed over the last decade.

One significant finding is that, although Citizens United overturned the prohibition on independent political expenditures by corporations, most companies have not taken advantage of that new right directly. The biggest surges in spending have come from wealthy individuals and from Super PACs.

This is not to say that corporations have stayed on the sidelines. CRP notes that they are funneling much of their spending through trade associations and dark money groups that do not disclose their donors.

To emphasize its point about the limited role of corporations in independent expenditures, the CRP report notes that only 36 companies in the S&P 500 have contributed $25,000 or more to Super PACs since 2012. The report notes that the biggest of these spenders are oil and gas companies but otherwise does not identify them.

Karl Evers-Hillstrom, the author of the report, agreed to share the full list with me, so I could learn more about which corporations are bucking the trend and getting more directly involved with political spending.

Seven of the 36 are those oil and gas companies, including giant producers such as Chevron and ConocoPhillips as well as the big fracking player Devon Energy. The utility industry accounts for eight of the 36 and includes some of the largest contributors to air pollution and carbon emissions: American Electric Power, Duke Energy, Exelon and Southern Companies.

Only three other industries account for more than one of the corporations on the list: insurance (Anthem, Centene and MetLife), casinos (Wynn Resorts and MGM Resorts International) and telecommunications (AT&T and Charter Communications).

The remainder consists of 14 corporations from different industries such as pharmaceuticals (Merck), tobacco (Altria), retail (Walmart), banking (BB&T, now part of Truist Financial) and miscellaneous manufacturing (3M).

The list thus includes some of the most controversial companies from many of the most controversial industries. Among the 36 are some firms that were involved in contentious mergers (e.g. AT&T’s acquisition of Time Warner) and policy issues (Anthem and Centene are big players in healthcare). After fighting for years over federal regulation of tobacco, Altria has moved into the contested business of vaping. Walmart was embroiled in a foreign bribery investigation.

One thing that characterizes nearly all the companies on the list is the fact that they have been implicated in significant compliance breaches. I checked the whole list against the data in Violation Tracker and found that the 36 firms account for more than $29 billion in fines and settlements.

The biggest penalty totals belong to Occidental Petroleum ($5.4 billion), American Electric Power ($4.8 billion), Merck ($3.3 billion) and Walmart ($2 billion). There are six other companies with totals of $1 billion or more. The average penalty for the 36 companies is $844 million.

What all this suggests is that, while most companies are not making full use of Citizens United, corporations that are engaged in controversial activities and have serious compliance problems can take advantage of the ruling and employ their financial resources to try to manipulate public policy in their favor. The threat to democracy thus remains.

Corporate America’s Government Bonanza

moneybagsontherun We’re taught to believe that government is a system for protecting the country, ensuring justice and helping people pursue happiness. For large corporations, on the other hand, government amounts to a big investment opportunity.

One of the most detailed assessments of the return on that investment has just been produced by the Sunlight Foundation. Not surprisingly, it turns out that the interaction big business has with the public sector is very profitable. What’s amazing is Sunlight’s estimate of the magnitude of those gains.

In its report called Fixed Fortunes, Sunlight takes great pains in estimating both what 200 of the largest and most politically active firms spend on government – in the form of campaign contributions and lobbying expenditures – and what they receive in benefits. Sunlight puts those benefits in two categories: federal business and federal support.

The first includes federal contracts as well as foreign sales enabled by the Export-Import Bank and certain transactions involving commercial banks in the wake of the financial meltdown. Federal support includes grants, loans and loan guarantees as well as other forms of assistance to banks following the meltdown.

Sunlight finds that the 200 companies spent $5.8 billion on political influence during the period from 2007 to 2012 while receiving $1.3 trillion in federal business and $3.2 trillion in federal support. This shows, Sunlight says, that for every dollar spent on influencing federal policy, these corporations received $760 in benefits. And that’s just the average. Some of the big banks got vastly more. Goldman Sachs received about $229 billion in business and support combined, more than 6,000 times what it spent on influence. For Bank of America it was more than 10,000 times. These are rates of return even the most successful hedge funds couldn’t imagine.

In some ways, Sunlight’s benefit numbers are understated, since they do not include the payoff from lobbying for corporate income tax reductions. The report includes figures from Citizens for Tax Justice showing the low effective tax rates most large companies enjoy, but Sunlight does not attempt the probably impossible task of estimating the dollar value of the tax benefits individual companies have gained from their lobbying efforts. Sunlight points out other examples of unquantifiable benefits corporations receive from Uncle Sam, such as those deriving from the artificially low rates charged to petroleum companies for drilling on federal land.

Moreover, Sunlight acknowledges that its estimates apply only at the federal level, though in its summary list of the results for the 200 companies it includes links to the state and local subsidy totals my colleagues and I at Good Jobs First have assembled in our Subsidy Tracker database.

On the other hand, one could take issue with the way in which Sunlight calculates some of the categories of federal support. For loan and loan guarantee programs, for example, it apparently uses the face value of the funding, whereas the actual cost (except in cases of default) is much lower. It would have been helpful if Sunlight had listed the totals derived from each form of assistance; it is not always clear which numbers it used in the underlying spreadsheets it makes available.

Despite these quibbles, Sunlight has performed a great service in documenting the extent to which the federal government functions as a giant ATM for corporate America. We at Good Jobs First will soon be contributing to this effort by extending Subsidy Tracker to the federal level. We’ve been gathering data on many of the same programs examined by Sunlight, plus others, and we will be including entries for all companies, both large and small.

Let’s hope that as more light is shined on the ways government benefits corporations, we can shame elected officials into remembering who it is they are supposed to be serving.

The Nonexistent Corporate Mandate

source-mitch-mcconnell-plans-to-vote-against-the-budget-deal American voters have spoken, and what they demanded is a repeal of the excise tax imposed on medical device manufacturers.

That, more or less, is what the incoming Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said in his post-election remarks about the Republican agenda for the new Congress. Eliminating that tax, which is one of the lesser known provisions of the Affordable Care Act, is on the short list of the GOP’s legislative priorities.

I think it’s safe to say that the medical device issue, which is of great concern to companies such as Medtronic and Boston Scientific, was not uppermost in the minds of voters who pulled Republican levers on Tuesday.

It’s no surprise that the Republican members of Congress and the corporate interests that bankrolled their campaigns are engaged in another massive bait and switch. After subjecting the electorate to a torrent of ads that whipped up a frenzy of fear about Ebola and ISIS and demonized President Obama, they are now returning to the real objective: using government to serve big business.

What makes this ruse tricky to carry out is that voters provided telltale signs that they were not endorsing that self-serving agenda. The biggest clue was the overwhelming support for ballot measures on raising the minimum wage in solidly red states such as Arkansas, Nebraska and South Dakota. These measures were so popular that some business opponents gave up long before November 4, prompting the Employment Policies Institute, the mouthpiece for low-wage employers, to make the lame assertion that the votes did not mean much because its side did not really try.

Voters in Massachusetts; Oakland, California; and Trenton and Montclair in New Jersey voted in favor of requiring employers to provide paid sick days. And in Illinois, voters approved a measure favoring an amendment to the state constitution allowing an additional 3 percent tax on personal income above $1 million. That was on the same day they chose a wealthy private equity dealmaker to be their next governor.

If the GOP has any mandate, it’s certainly not one to pursue a pro-corporate agenda on employment and income distribution issues. On the contrary, there is reason to believe that much of the reason for voter rejection of Democrats was not because they are too far to the left, but rather that they are not far enough, at least on economic justice matters.

Take the issue of Obamacare, which many right-wingers foolishly believe is the greatest assault on personal liberty in the history of the republic. Ever since the legislation was being debated, the media has conflated that sort of opposition with the more appropriate criticism that the law did not go far enough in taking profit out of healthcare. Today, one does not have to be a reactionary to believe that the Affordable Care Act is seriously flawed, as evidenced in the ability of the insurance industry to go on peddling ultra-high-deductible junk plans through the exchanges.

Just as there is little room in mainstream discourse for the varieties of discontent on issues such as healthcare, the choices that people have for expressing their displeasure are limited. Many of those voting GOP were doing so simply to register dissatisfaction, not to endorse a party whose policy prescriptions are often out of cloud-cuckoo-land. If the Republicans and their corporate handlers forget this, they will be assuring that 2016 is a rerun of 2012 rather than 2010.

Congress’s Corporate Accountability Charades

In recent days we’ve seen reprises of that old stand-by from the Congressional repertoire: hearings in which members of the House and Senate express indignation at corporate misconduct. Like similar performances that have come before, these events provided some short-term gratification but in all likelihood will ultimately prove frustrating.

The designated whipping boys this week were General Motors and Caterpillar. Both are legitimate targets. GM is embroiled in one of the worst safety scandals in its history as a result of mounting evidence that for years it concealed evidence of an ignition-switch defect that has been tied to a large number of deadly accidents. Caterpillar is under the gun because of a new Senate report accusing it of using accounting gimmicks to avoid more than $2 billion in federal taxes.

At a hearing of the Senate Commerce committee, GM chief executive Mary Barra was confronted with statements such as “The public is very skeptical of GM,” “GM is not forthcoming” and “I think this goes beyond unacceptable. I believe this is criminal.”

The amazing thing is that these statements were coming from both Democrats and Republicans, who differed little in their critique of the automaker. The same can, for the most part, be said about Barra’s only slightly milder interrogation by the House Energy and Commerce investigative subcommittee. Several Republicans sought to score some political points by emphasizing GM’s previous status as a government-controlled corporation, and Tennessee Republican Marsha Blackburn asked Barra whether the company’s safety lapses were related to the federal bailout (Barra sidestepped the question). Yet they did not press too hard in that direction.

The transcripts of the two GM hearings (available via Nexis) paint a very different picture of Congress from what we usually see these days. As Rep. Peter Welch of Vermont stated in the House hearing: “I have to congratulate General Motors for doing the impossible. You’ve got Republicans and Democrats working together.”

There was a similar seriousness of purpose and absence of simple-minded partisanship in the Senate hearing on Caterpillar. Subcommittee chair Carl Levin, a Michigan Democrat who has done extensive work to highlight corporate tax dodging, was of course aggressive in grilling company executives about Caterpillar’s funneling of vast amounts of profit through a tiny Swiss subsidiary to take advantage of an artificially low tax rate.

Yet the company did not get much sympathy from the Republican members of the subcommittee either, though Wisconsin’s Ron Johnson did manage to interject a reference to “our uncompetitive tax system.”

The unfortunate truth is that hearings such as these end up being nothing but a charade in which members of Congress pretend for a while to be tough on an egregious case of corporate malfeasance before they go back to doing the bidding of the monied interests.

For example, New Hampshire Sen. Kelly Ayotte, who was the one calling GM’s behavior “unacceptable” and “criminal,” sought to weaken the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau last year. Nevada Sen. Dean Heller, who joined in the critical questioning of Barra, once introduced a bill to prevent the Environmental Protection Agency from introducing “job-crushing regulations.”

The problem extends to Democrats as well. Veteran Rep. John Dingell, who was awarded special deference at the House hearing, has long-standing ties to General Motors and the other big U.S. automakers, which have been among his strongest political supporters. His wife Debbie Dingell worked for GM for 30 years. When the 87-year-old Dingell announced earlier this year that he plans to retire from Congress, a GM spokesperson said: “As a champion of the auto industry, John Dingell had no peer.”

If anything, the inclination of members of Congress to do the bidding of business will only increase, now that the Supreme Court has struck down limits on total amounts wealthy individuals can give to candidates, party committees and PACs. Chief Justice John Roberts wrote: “Money in politics may at times seen repugnant to some, but so too does much of what the First Amendment vigorously protects.”

By once again equating money with speech, Roberts is ensuring that those with the most of it, including giant corporations, are the ones to which Congress, apart from brief periods of public interest grandstanding, will bow.

Corporate Sponsorship of Rick Perry’s Partisan Job Piracy

perry_cash “If you want to live free — free from overtaxation, free from overlitigation, free from overregulation … move to Texas.” That’s the pitch Texas Gov. Rick Perry just made to business executives in Maryland in the latest of his brazenly partisan job-poaching trips to states led by Democratic governors. In advance of the trip, Perry ran ads that explicitly criticized Maryland’s Martin O’Malley, claiming to business owners that “unfortunately, your governor has made Maryland the tax and fee state.”

In an earlier trip to Missouri, Perry’s meddling in another state’s policymaking was even more direct. Arriving amid a debate over a veto by Gov. Jay Nixon of a regressive tax-cut bill, Perry gave a speech in which he appealed to legislators: “Grow Missouri! Override that veto!” (The override failed.)

My colleagues and I at Good Jobs First have just published a report questioning whether Perry’s partisan job piracy is being financed in part with taxpayer dollars. Many of the dues-paying members of TexasOne, the entity paying for Perry’s trips, are municipal economic development corporations, which receive a portion of local sales tax receipts.

It turns out that an even larger share, roughly half, of TexasOne’s budget comes from the payments made by businesses. Corporations enjoying the benefits of Perry’s laissez-faire policies in Texas are bankrolling him to spread that gospel to Blue States while he tries to steal their jobs and simultaneously raises his personal political profile on the national stage.

The cozy relationship between Perry and Texas big business is nothing new. As Texans for Public Justice has shown in a long series of reports, Perry has perfected the art of crony capitalism during his dozen years in the governor’s office. Companies whose executives and investors have been among the most generous contributors to Perry’s races show up on lists of the largest state contractors and the recipients of state economic development subsidies, and they tend to get favorable treatment from regulatory agencies run by Perry appointees.

This pattern extends to the companies participating in TexasOne. For example, Shell Oil ($50,000 in annual payments to TexasOne) received a $2 million subsidy award (for its Motiva refinery joint venture) from the Perry-controlled Texas Enterprise Fund. Road-builder Williams Brothers Construction ($25,000 a year to TexasOne according to one source; $100,000 a year according to another) has received hundreds of millions of dollars in contracts from the Texas Department of Transportation.

The Public Utility Commission of Texas, whose members are appointed by the governor, awarded huge contracts to a group of companies to build transmission lines from wind farms in the western part of the state to the major population centers in central Texas. One of these contracts, worth $1.3 billion, was awarded to Oncor Electric Delivery (a $25,000 member of TexasOne).

On the regulatory front, a prime example is Contran Corporation, which is currently paying $100,000 a year to TexasOne. Contran is the holding company controlled by Dallas billionaire Harold Simmons, a heavy contributor to Perry’s state races. Contran ponied up $1 million for the super PAC that backed Perry’s 2012 presidential race. Earlier, the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, whose members are also appointed by the governor, awarded a franchise for a low-level nuclear waste dump to a subsidiary of Contran called Waste Control Specialists.

In 2011, after Waste Control was granted controversial permission to store nuclear material brought in from other states, a Dallas Morning News editorial (January 11, 2011) declared: “Far too much about this process stinks of the influence that one very rich person wields as a million-dollar campaign contributor to Gov. Rick Perry.”

Major contributors to TexasOne include large corporations such as AT&T and Capital One with business interests that extend far beyond the borders of Texas. Some of these, such as Verizon, are headquartered in states targeted by Perry’s partisan job-poaching trips.

It is unclear whether these companies realize the potential problems they could face by helping to sponsor Perry’s attack on governors in states where they have a significant presence. They could alienate their political allies in those states and might also incur the wrath of their residents.

We’ve seen how consumer-oriented companies can risk losing customers if they are identified as financial backers of controversial groups or causes. Dozens of large companies ended their membership in the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) when it became identified with heated issues such as minority voter suppression and stand-your-ground gun laws.

For companies serving national markets, bankrolling high-profile and partisan interstate job piracy could also become risky business.

Corporate Power and the Second Obama Administration

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Billionaires, Blowhards and Bribery

The bond between David Koch and Scott Walker is not the only relationship between a reactionary billionaire and a rightwing politician contaminating the U.S. political scene. Attention also needs to be paid to what’s going on between Sheldon Adelson and Newt Gingrich.

Adelson — the fifth wealthiest person in the United States, with a net worth estimated by Forbes at $23 billion — has made a major bet on Gingrich. Since 2006 he has contributed $7 million to Gingrich’s fundraising entity American Solutions for Winning the Future. Through this 527 vehicle (and a regular political action committee with the same name), Gingrich is raking in loads of cash as he teases the country about whether he plans to run for President while mouthing off with a variety of reckless policy pronouncements.

The American Solutions website has a section labeled Corruption. In January a post there announced a new feature called Corrupt Report that was supposed to monitor news of misbehavior “regardless of political party.” Somehow the site has failed to cover the recent disclosure by Adelson’s company, Las Vegas Sands, that it is being investigated by both the Securities and Exchange Commission and the U.S. Justice Department for possible violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. The Nevada Gaming Control Board is also said to be looking into the matter.

The investigations presumably involved Adelson’s four casinos in Asia — three in China-controlled Macao and one in Singapore — where Las Vegas Sands has branched out from its U.S. gambling operations.

It will be interesting to see how a gambling-related bribery scandal affects the political prospects of Gingrich, who already has the burden of reconciling his “family values” rhetoric with the fact that he has been twice divorced.

Adelson’s support for Gingrich is far from his only foray into conservative politics. Like a number of other billionaires, he seems to have built his reactionary views on a foundation of anti-union animus. This began in the late 1990s, after Adelson purchased the Sands hotel and casino in Las Vegas — the former hangout of Frank Sinatra and the Rat Pack — and tore it down to make way for the gargantuan Venetian gambling emporium.

The Sands had been a unionized operation, but Adelson refused to recognize the Culinary Workers at the Venetian. When union supporters picketed in front of the casino, he tried to have them arrested, setting off a legal battle that lasted for a decade. More recently, Adelson was an outspoken foe of the Employee Free Choice Act, and today the Las Vegas Sands brags in its 10-K filing that none of the workers at its casinos are covered by collective bargaining agreements.

In 2007 Adelson founded Freedom’s Watch, an advocacy group that tried to build support for the Bush Administration’s surge strategy in Iraq, beat the drum on what it called the “Iranian Threat” and which in 2008 was being touted as the right’s answer to MoveOn.org — a claim that somehow missed the distinction between a group funded by large numbers of small contributions and one bankrolled mostly by a single multi-billionaire. Despite that money, Freedom’s Watch was a short-lived flop.

Adelson also became active in Israel, where he started a conservative newspaper and became a leading backer of rightwing politicians, especially Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. He has also been an apologist for the repressive Chinese government, which allowed him to build his lucrative casinos in Macao.

At times Adelson has been called the Right’s answer to George Soros. The difference is that Adelson’s political views serve his financial self-interest, especially when it comes to paying taxes. According to a 2008 profile of the gambling magnate in The New Yorker, Adelson once said to an associate: “Why is it fair that I should be paying a higher percentage of taxes than anyone else?”

It’s amazing that Adelson, whose only higher education came from a stint at the tuition-free City College of New York, can forget that progressive taxation (or what’s left of it) is what pays for the public institutions and infrastructure that help people like him succeed.

Even more dismaying than billionaires’ deluding themselves into thinking that they are completely self-made is the fact that they can now use large amounts of their undertaxed wealth to promote policies that make life ever more harsh for the rest of us.

Public-Private Power Grab

As unemployment rates remain stubbornly high around the country, the Republican winners of November’s gubernatorial races face a dilemma: How do they respond to the clamor for more job creation while holding true to their opposition to government activism. The answer, apparently, is to go with a gimmick.

In at least four states, the gimmick consists of proposing that the state agency responsible for business recruitment—and other functions such as awarding subsidies that come under the rubric of economic development—be handed over to the private sector. Governors in Wisconsin, Ohio, Iowa and Arizona are calling on legislators to approve the dismantling of commerce or development agencies and the transfer of their responsibilities—and their funding—to public-private partnerships (PPPs).

It turns out that economic development privatization is nothing new. My colleagues and I at Good Jobs First have completed an analysis of the subject, which we’ve just published in a report titled Public-Private Power Grab.

We found that the idea is far from new but it is not a common or standard practice. Economic development PPPs date back more than 20 years, but only seven states currently allow private entities to control their business recruitment functions: Florida, Indiana, Michigan, Rhode Island, Utah, Virginia and Wyoming. Several other states previously employed PPPs but abandoned them because of performance problems.

Most of the seven states that currently make use of economic development PPPs have experienced a variety of performance problems. These include the following:

Misuse of taxpayer funds
Excessive executive bonuses
Questionable subsidy awards by the subset of PPPs that have a role in that process
Conflicts of interest in subsidy awards
Questionable claims by the PPP about its effectiveness
Resistance to accountability

Two of the features of the PPPs that promote corruption are that, in addition to public funding, they accept contributions from corporations and that their boards are often chosen by the governor will little or no legislative oversight. What this means is that the PPPs may end up favoring those contributors in making subsidy awards, and those awards are likely to go to the governor’s major corporate campaign donors.

Such sleazy practices have been seen most clearly in Texas, where the state’s Emerging Technology Fund is run by a public-private partnership controlled by Gov. Rick Perry and has a tendency to give its subsidy awards to Perry’s donors. According to an investigation by the Dallas Morning News, those donors have collected more than $16 million from the fund.

In 2006 the St. Petersburg Times published a 6,000-word investigation on Enterprise Florida, finding a pattern of conflicts of interest among the PPP’s board. In a follow-up editorial, the newspaper wrote that Enterprise Florida “has shown itself to be a public-private venture only in the sense that the public pays and the private receives. Despite critical audits, legislative questions and gubernatorial promises of reform, the group has proved to be virtually immune to the normal checks and balances.”

Aside from corruption, the PPPs tend to be characterized by incompetence or poor judgment. For example, the Michigan Economic Development Corporation (MEDC) found itself in hot water last year when it was revealed it had approved a $9 million subsidy to a company headed by a convicted embezzler and scam artist.

The Indiana Economic Development Corporation, which is often cited as a model by today’s privatization proponents, lost much of its luster last year after a TV station found that many of the jobs IEDC had taken credit for creating did not in fact exist. A former Indiana budget official recently told a reporter that “most of the numbers [IEDC] gave us were either not true or could not be substantiated,” adding that he considered IEDC “a political organization that really only served to make it seem like the governor was doing something about the economy.”

When challenged about their poor record, the chief executives of the PPPs tend to complain about the criticism rather than addressing their substance. In the wake of a series of scandals in 2010 about the MEDC’s handling of tax credit awards, the entity’s executive committee issued an open letter of complaint to the media and the legislature. Rather than addressing MEDC’s shortcomings, the letter made the dubious claim that the controversy might prompt companies to shun the state. “Political in-fighting is a clear warning to business that a state lacks a cohesive climate for economic development,” the letter stated, “and a clear signal to invest elsewhere.”

Not surprisingly, our report concludes that economic development PPPs are a bad idea. Unfortunately, advocates of privatization in this area and others have a tendency to ignore evidence and persist in their misguided belief that the private sector can always do everything better.

Introducing Subsidy Tracker

Over the past decade, the National Institute on Money in State Politics has built its Follow the Money database into an impressive resource for showing the influence of large corporations on state electoral campaigns. I have long wanted to create a comparable tool to track the flow of money in roughly the opposite direction: economic development subsidy awards from states to big business.

I am happy to announce that my colleagues and I at Good Jobs First have just introduced such a resource. Subsidy Tracker is the first national search engine for determining where a company has gotten economic development subsidies around the country. The database stitches together information from scores of different disclosure sources, many of them obscure reports and webpages. The subsidy programs covered include corporate income tax credits, property tax abatements, enterprise zone tax breaks, cash grants, reimbursement of worker training costs, and others.

In its initial form, the database contains information on more than 43,000 subsidy awards from 124 subsidy programs in 27 states; the number will soon jump to more than 64,000 in 34 states and will continue growing.

Here are some ways Subsidy Tracker can be used:

To find companies that have received subsidies in many places. Currently, for instance, Wal-Mart shows up 69 times, trailed by Target at 45.
To find companies that have gotten some very large individual subsidies. General Electric received a tax credit worth up to $115 million in Ohio in 2009.
To find bad actors that have received subsidies. Super-polluter and climate denier Exxon shows up 23 times in Louisiana alone. The anti-union T-Mobile shows up eight times so far. Wall Street villain Goldman Sachs has received more than $124 million in tax credits and grants in Utah and New Jersey.
To find good actors that have received subsidies. Flambeau River Papers, included on the American Rights at Work 2010 list of employers that “practice labor-management cooperation while creating pioneering solutions to the environmental challenges of the 21st century” shows up in Subsidy Tracker as having received a grant of $249,000 from Wisconsin in 2008.
To find companies that have received subsidies in states where they have made substantial campaign contributions. Agribusiness giant Archer Daniels Midland, which according to Follow the Money made more than $546,000 in campaign contributions in Illinois since 2003 (including those of its executives and employees), has received more than $87 million in enterprise zone tax credits in the state during the same period.
To find companies that profess extreme laissez-faire views and then take subsidies. Koch Industries, whose owners bankroll the Tea Party movement, received two tax credits worth a total of more than $10 million from Oklahoma in the past year.

I’m sure researchers, journalists and others will think of many more ways to use the database. Each entry in Subsidy Tracker contains a link back to the original online source (except a limited number of cases in which the data we obtained is not posted on the web). Search results can be downloaded to a spreadsheet. For more on the data and how the site works, see the User Guide.

Good Jobs First introduced Subsidy Tracker along with two other resources: a report called Show Us the Subsidies, which evaluates the subsidy disclosure practices of the 50 states and the District of Columbia; and Accountable USA, a set of pages that review each state’s subsidy policies, describe large and controversial subsidy deals and provide other provocative information.

We hope all these tools help shine a light on the many excessive and ineffective subsidies that are going to large companies at a time when states and localities can ill afford the loss of what is estimated at $60 billion a year in public revenue.

Subsidy Tracker is a work in progress. In this first phase, we have focused on data sources that we discovered in preparing Show Us the Subsidies and Accountable USA. In the months ahead, we plan to go deeper by using freedom of information requests to obtain data not currently disclosed in any form.

I hope that Dirt Diggers Digest readers will find Subsidy Tracker to be a useful tool in your research. I look forward to your comments and suggestions.

Resources

Subsidy Tracker main page

Subsidy Tracker User Guide

Inventory of data sources currently in Subsidy Tracker

Table of online disclosure links for major subsidy programs (not all data yet in Subsidy Tracker)

Accountable USA main page

Index of companies whose subsidy deals are profiled in Accountable USA

Show Us the Subsidies report and state appendices

Good Jobs First case studies of companies and industries that are major subsidy recipients