Regulation

Tax Dodgers and Regulatory Scofflaws

Large corporations in the United States like to portray themselves as victims of a supposedly onerous tax system and a supposedly oppressive regulatory system. Those depictions are a far cry from reality, but that does not stop business interests from seeking to weaken government power in both areas.

This year has been a bonanza. The Trump Administration and Congressional Republicans have taken aim at numerous Obama-era regulatory initiatives and now are serving up a banquet of business tax breaks.

At the same time, corporations take matters into their own hands by using every opportunity to circumvent tax obligations and regulatory safeguards. The newly released Paradise Papers are just the latest indications of how large corporations such as Apple (and wealthy individuals) use offshore havens to shield billions of dollars in profits from taxation.

The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy has published a list of more than 300 Fortune 500 companies that hold some $2.6 trillion offshore, thereby avoiding about $767 billion in federal taxes. Of these, ITEP has found indications that 29 corporations keep their holdings not only outside the United States but in tax haven countries where they pay very little in local taxes.

It should come as no surprise that quite a few of these tax dodgers also show up high on the list of regulatory scofflaws documented in Violation Tracker. In fact, one of the 29 is Bank of America, which has racked up $57 billion in fines and settlements since 2000 — far more than any other corporation. ITEP reports that B of A has $17.8 billion in unrepatriated income.

Also on the ITEP list is Citigroup, with $47 billion in unrepatriated income. It ranks 5th on the Violation Tracker list, with more than $16 billion in fines and settlements. Wells Fargo has $2.4 billion in unrepatriated income and $11 billion in penalties, but that latter figure is likely to rise as various cases relating to the bank’s bogus account scandal are resolved.

Banks are not the only overlaps between the two lists. For example, pharmaceutical company Amgen has $36 billion in unrepatriated income and $786 million in penalties.

Major regulatory violators can also be found on the larger list of corporations that are known to have large offshore holdings but do not disclose enough information to allow ITEP to determine whether those holdings are in tax havens. Chief among these are other pharmaceutical giant such as Pfizer ($197 billion offshore and $4.3 billion in penalties), Johnson & Johnson ($66 billion offshore and $2.5 billion in penalties), Merck ($63 billion offshore and $2 billion in penalties) and Eli Lilly ($28 billion offshore and $1.4 billion in penalties).

Also on the list are petroleum majors such as Exxon Mobil ($54 billion offshore and $714 million in penalties) and Chevron ($46 billion offshore and $578 million in penalties).

The mindset that prompts corporate executives to use international tax dodging techniques seems to be related to the one that encourages them to break environmental, consumer protection and other laws at home. The logical course of action would be to tighten both tax and regulatory enforcement, but those currently in charge of federal policymaking instead want to make it even easier for large corporations to make out like bandits.

Bizarro-World Worker Populism at Trump’s OSHA

The bizarro-world worker populism of Donald Trump strikes again. The White House recently nominated Scott Mugno to be the Assistant Secretary of Labor in charge of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. Mugno (photo at left) is not a worker safety advocate, occupational health scientist or a union official. Instead, he is a corporate safety executive at the shipping giant FedEx.

Data in Violation Tracker shows since 2000 FedEx has racked up $335,853 in OSHA penalties (counting only those fines of $5,000 or more designated as serious, willful or repeated). This total is the 208th largest among the 1,777 parent companies in Violation Tracker with OSHA fines.

While FedEx may not be at the very top of the OSHA penalty list, it does have some significant safety blemishes on its record. In 2014, for example, OSHA proposed a fine of $44,000 against the company for failing to properly guard a conveyor belt at its facility in Wilmington, Massachusetts. In its press release announcing the proposed penalty (which FedEx managed to get deleted), the agency noted that the company had previously been cited for the same issue at two other facilities.

Moreover, FedEx in general and Mugno in particular have tried to weaken OSHA oversight. In a 2006 presentation at a U.S. Chamber of Commerce event, Mugno argued that workers needed to take more responsibility for health and safety issues, conveniently ignoring the fact that they rarely have the autonomy to make meaningful changes in workplace conditions.

Another sign of Mugno’s orientation is the warm reception his nomination has received from business groups such as the Chamber and the American Trucking Association. At the same time, public interest groups have expressed concern. Public Citizen came out in opposition to the nomination, citing Mugno’s 2006 remarks and arguing that his “stance on laws and regulations do not mesh with leading an agency tasked with writing rules to ensure safe and healthy working conditions.” The Center for Progressive Reform posted a long list of questions that need to be put to Mugno.

The Center, by the way, has just introduced a Crimes Against Workers Database that compiles information on state-level criminal actions against companies and their executives implicated in serious workplace accidents. (I’m pleased to report that the database includes links to Violation Tracker data, and I plan to reciprocate.)

It was to be expected that Trump, who repeatedly bashed the EPA during the presidential campaign, would have named a climate change denier and regulation hater like Scott Pruitt to head that agency. Yet Trump did not carry on a similar tirade against OSHA, perhaps realizing that many of his blue-collar supporters were all too aware of workplace hazards that needed the agency’s oversight.

If Trump were any kind of real populist, he could have named a true worker safety advocate to OSHA without breaking any campaign promises. Instead, he brought in a business apologist who will pursue the Chamber agenda and raise the risk level for millions of American workers. The Trump corporate takeover marches on.

Unfettered Corporate Power

Once upon a time, there was a debate on how best to check the power of giant corporations. Starting in the Progressive Era and resuming in the 1970s with the arrival of agencies such as the EPA and OSHA, some emphasized the role of government through regulation. Others focused on the role of the courts, especially through the kind of class action lawsuits pioneered by lawyers such as Harold Kohn in the 1960s.

When regulators were seen as too aggressive, business apologists pushed back by arguing that corporate misconduct should be addressed through litigation. When class actions grew more effective, those apologists started lobbying for tort reform and arguing that regulatory agencies (especially those dominated by industry) were the better forum.

This year, amid a supposed populist upsurge, that debate is dying out. The Republican-controlled Congress and the White House are undermining both regulation and litigation. Virtually all legislative “accomplishments” since Inauguration Day have consisted of Congressional Review Act maneuvers to roll back business regulations. Now, with the Senate’s move to kill the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s restriction on forced arbitration, Congress has used the same device to reduce the ability of consumers to seek redress through the courts — what Sen. Elizabeth Warren aptly described as “a giant wet kiss to Wall Street.”

The result of these moves is that big business is increasingly being allowed to operate with no effective controls at all. This unilateral disarmament is taking place when corporate misconduct is rampant. Among the companies that will benefit from the arbitration move are the likes of Wells Fargo and Equifax, whose willingness to mistreat customers has been truly astounding.

We should be careful, however, not to overstate the effectiveness of damage awards in class action lawsuits in changing corporate behavior. It’s unfortunately true that large corporations have come to regard substantial monetary settlements as an acceptable cost of doing business.

That’s true both of private litigation and cases brought by regulatory agencies and the Justice Department. As shown in Violation Tracker, 40 corporations have paid $1 billion or more in fines and settlements. Seven of those have paid $10 billion or more, including all the giant national banks: Bank of America ($57 billion), JPMorgan Chase ($29 billion), Citigroup ($16 billion) and Wells Fargo ($11 billion).

These amounts have involved scores of different cases dating back to 2000. In other words, the banks are repeat violators that are willing to pay out large sums in order to continue doing business more or less as usual. More class action lawsuits are unlikely to change this dynamic.

I believe that banks and other large corporations should continue to face heavy financial penalties for their misconduct, but it has become clear that these penalties alone are not going to put an end to the corporate crime wave. It’s time to go beyond damages in addressing the damage caused by these companies.

Getting Tough on the Corporations Behind the Opioid Crisis

The withdrawal of Tom Marino’s nomination as national drug czar is a reminder of the power of whistle-blowing and aggressive investigative reporting, while the fact that he was named in the first place is a reminder of the hollowness of the Trump’s Administration’s commitments to draining the swamp and to seriously addressing the opioid epidemic.

Yet there is much more to be done beyond denying a high-profile job to the Congressman who did the pharmaceutical industry’s bidding in weakening the Drug Enforcement Administration’s ability to thwart illicit distribution of prescription painkillers.

The first step, of course, is for Congress to undo the damage caused by Marino’s bill, which Democrats and Republicans alike allowed to be enacted with little scrutiny. Also needed are reforms to the revolving door system, which the excellent reporting by the Washington Post and 60 Minutes and the revelations of DEA whistle-blower Joseph Rannazzisi (photo) showed to play a key role in the story as former DEA officials working for the drug industry or its law firms helped to draft and promote the legislation.

If the scourge of opioids is to end, there will have to be much stronger enforcement of the Controlled Substances Act (CSA), the law that forms the basis of U.S. drug control policy. For a long time, it appeared the problem was that the CSA was being enforced too strictly, at least when it was applied to drug users and low-level drug sellers.

Starting about a decade ago, federal officials and prosecutors began to pay attention to the pernicious role played by the supposedly legitimate drug industry. In 2007, Purdue Pharma’s Purdue Frederick Inc. unit and several of its executives pleaded guilty to criminal charges of misleading the public about the addictive nature of its OxyContin pain medication and paid more than $634 million in penalties. That case was brought by the office of the U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Virginia in cooperation with the Food and Drug Administration, not the DEA.

During the following years, the DEA began to bring its own enforcement actions under the CSA or referred cases to the Justice Department for prosecution. According to data I have collected for Violation Tracker (some of which has not yet been posted on the site), there have been about 80 CSA actions against drug companies, distributors or healthcare providers since 2008.

The penalties collected in the cases total about $605 million. The biggest amounts were imposed on the distributor McKesson ($176 million in three cases); CVS ($130 million in nine cases); Walgreens ($80 million); and a second big distributor, Cardinal Health ($68 million in three cases).

It’s notable that the penalties in these 80 cases combined amount to less than that imposed on Purdue alone. Moreover, all of the cases were brought as civil rather than criminal actions. I found one corporate CSA criminal cases but it was not brought against a healthcare company or retailer but rather against United Parcel Service, in connection with its role in delivering shipments from illegal online pharmacies. And in that case UPS was offered a non-prosecution agreement that essentially nullified the criminal charge.

Given the size of the industry and the profitability of the companies involved, all these cases amounted to little more than a slap on the wrist. The gravity of the opioid crisis requires stronger action against the companies involved, as well as their executives and, in cases like the Sackler Family behind Purdue Pharma, their individual owners.

A Strange Way of Helping Workers

The Trump Administration would have us believe it is all about helping workers. Yet it has a strange way of showing it. Policies that directly assist workers are under attack, and all the emphasis is on initiatives that purportedly aid workers indirectly by boosting their employers.

That dubious approach is on full display now in a tax proposal that is being sold as pro-worker even though its main effect will be to make the rich even richer with the trickle-down hope they decide to use some of their additional wealth to create jobs and boost wages.

The same goes with regulation, a topic Trump is expected to return to in a speech next week. The dismantling of safeguards vital to the well-being of workers and consumers is packaged as the key to unleashing Corporate America’s job-creation mojo.

To a great extent these arguments are nothing more than chicanery. If there is any shred of sincerity, it is based on the idea that corporations, with fewer tax and regulatory burdens, will act in a socially beneficial way.

Corporations themselves, including ones that have lately been critical of the Trump Administration on issues such as race relations and climate change, help to promote the notion of business civic virtue. In fact, they and their apologists don’t restrain themselves in claiming the moral high ground.

A prime example of this appears in a recent issue of Fortune, which contains the magazine’s latest list of what it calls Change the World companies. These are the corporations whose operations supposedly have the greatest positive social impact.

Perhaps I have a jaded view, but I was astounded to see many of the companies on the list. Not only are they not paragons of virtue — in some cases they are leading corporate miscreants.

Take No. 1 on the list: JPMorgan Chase. In Violation Tracker the bank shows up with more than $29 billion in fines and settlements since 2000, making it the second most penalized company in the United States (after Bank of America). A big part of its total comes from toxic securities cases and mortgage abuses in the period leading to the financial meltdown, but there is much more. For example, it had to pay $1.7 billion to resolve a deferred prosecution criminal case relating to its role as the banker for Bernard Madoff’s Ponzi scheme; $550 million for its role in a conspiracy to manipulate the foreign exchange market; $329 million for illegal credit card practices; and so on.

No. 9 on the Fortune list is Johnson & Johnson, which long cultivated a lily-white image as a producer of baby powder and other wholesome items, but in recent years has gotten itself embroiled in a series of scandals. Its Violation Tracker tally comes mainly from a 2013 civil and criminal case in which it had to pay $2.2 billion to resolve allegations of promoting three prescription drugs for uses not approved by the Food and Drug Administration.

Among the companies on the top tier of the Fortune list are some with terrible employment records, including Walmart, which has long fought efforts of its U.S. workers to form unions and bargain for better pay, and Apple, which grew rich from the toil of the underpaid overseas workers producing its overpriced devices.

The Fortune lists contains some smaller and less notorious companies, but the presence of those leading corporate culprits taints the whole project.

A similar taint can be found in the Trump tax and deregulatory initiatives. If you want to help workers, help them directly — don’t give away the store to their employers.

Identifying Repeat Corporate Offenders

When a new corporate scandal arises, there is a tendency on the part of many observers to treat it as a complete surprise — as something that could not have been anticipated.

The truth is that large companies are rarely first time offenders. If you look into their background, you are likely to see evidence of past behavior that presaged the recent misconduct.

It is now easier than ever to research that track record thanks to a major expansion of Violation Tracker my colleagues and I just rolled out. We posted an additional ten years of data, extending coverage back to 2000 and in the process nearly doubling the size of the database to 300,000 entries. Together, these account for $394 billion in fines and settlements — 95 percent of which was assessed against 2,800 large parent companies and their subsidiaries.

Take the example of Equifax, which is at the center of a growing scandal over its apparent negligence in protecting personal information and its delay in reporting a major hack. Violation Tracker shows that early this year the company was fined $2.5 million by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau for using deceptive means to lure people into purchasing costly credit-protection services. The company was also ordered to provide $3.8 million in restitution to affected customers. Over the previous two decades, Equifax was fined three times by the Federal Trade Commission.

The announcement by the CFPB last year that it was fining Wells Fargo $100 million for creating bogus customer accounts — a scandal that has subsequently mushroomed — was far from the first time the bank had gotten into trouble for questionable practices. Violation Tracker documents prior penalties totaling some $11 billion going back to 2000 for offense such as mortgage abuses, toxic securities abuses, and discriminatory practices.

Sometimes the prior offense is indistinguishable from the current one. In 2005, a decade before it was revealed to be engaged in a massive scheme to deceive regulators about emissions levels, Volkswagen was compelled to pay a fine of $1.1 million and spend $26 million on a recall to settle allegations that it failed to correct a defective pollution-control sensor.

Of the 2,800 companies in the Violation Tracker universe, more than 80 were penalized for something or other by federal agencies or the Justice Department every year from 2000 through 2016. The company that has the dubious distinction of leading by this measure is oil giant BP, which has paid out an average of some $1.6 billion in fines and settlements each year during the 17-year period.

No other company comes close. In second place is Verizon Communications, whose average annual penalty was $72 million, followed by FirstEnergy ($71 million), Valero Energy ($58 million), Marathon Petroleum ($54 million), Alcoa ($43 million), Exxon Mobil ($42 million), Koch Industries ($39 million) and Chevron ($34 million).

While they may not have gotten penalized every single year, there are hundreds of other parent companies that have been penalized in multiple years, and in many cases multiple times in a given year. In other words, just about every large company is a recidivist.

Who knows: maybe regulators and prosecutors will start consulting Violation Tracker to identify prior bad acts and take them into account when deciding how to penalize companies for their current sins.

Federal Watchdog Agencies Still On Guard

Donald Trump likes to give the impression that he has made great strides in dismantling regulation. While there is no doubt that his administration and Republican allies in Congress are targeting many important safeguards for consumers and workers, the good news is that those protections in many respects are still alive and well.

This conclusion emerges from the data I have been collecting for an update of Violation Tracker that will be posted later this month. As a preview of that update, here are some examples of federal agencies that are still vigorously pursuing their mission of protecting the public.

Federal Trade Commission. In June the FTC, with the help of the Justice Department, prevailed in litigation against Dish Network over millions of illegal sales calls made to consumers in violation of Do Not Call regulations. The satellite TV provider was hit with $280 million in penalties.

Drug Enforcement Administration. The DEA is a regulatory entity as well as a law enforcement agency. In July it announced that Mallinckrodt, one of the largest manufacturers of generic oxycodone, had agreed to pay $35 million to settle allegations that it violated the Controlled Substances Act by failing to detect and report suspicious bulk orders of the drug.

Federal Reserve. The Fed continues to take action against both domestic and foreign banks that fail to exercise adequate controls over their foreign exchange trading, in the wake of a series of scandals about manipulation of that market. The Fed imposed a fine of $136 million on Germany’s Deutsche Bank and $246 million on France’s BNP Paribas.

Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Last month the beleaguered CFPB ordered American Express to pay $95 million in redress to cardholders in Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands for discriminatory practices against certain consumers with Spanish-language preferences.

Securities and Exchange Commission. In May the SEC announced that Barclays Capital would pay $97 million in reimbursements to customers who had been overcharged on mutual fund fees.

Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. The EEOC announced that the Texas Roadhouse restaurant chain would pay $12 million to settle allegations that it discriminated against older employees by denying them front-of-the-house positions such as hosts, servers and bartenders.

Justice Department Antitrust Division. The DOJ announced that Nichicon Corporation would pay $42 million to resolve criminal price-fixing charges involving electrolytic capacitors.

Federal agencies are also finishing up cases dating back to the financial meltdown. For example, in July the Federal Housing Finance Agency said that it had reached a settlement under which the Royal Bank of Scotland will pay $5.5 billion to settle litigation relating to the sale of toxic securities to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. And the National Credit Union Administration said that UBS would pay $445 million to resolve a similar case.

It remains to be seen whether federal watchdogs can continue to pursue these kinds of cases, but for now they are not letting talk of deregulation prevent them from doing their job.

Note: The new version of Violation Tracker will also include an additional ten years of coverage back to 2000.

Capital Punishment or Capital Reward?

When Betsy DeVos was nominated to head the Department of Education, the main concern was what harm a “choice” crusader would bring to K-12 public schools. Recently we’ve seen that she can also cause damage with regard to post-secondary education.

DeVos announced plans to delay the implementation of rules on for-profit colleges that the Obama Administration fought long and hard to bring into being. Calling the plan unfair, DeVos said she wants to redo the rulemaking process from scratch – a clear sign that she wants to weaken or eliminate the restrictions. That’s the premise of a lawsuit just filed against DeVos by the attorneys general of 18 states and the District of Columbia.

The Obama campaign against predatory colleges was one of the most consequential initiatives of the administration on corporate misconduct. In addition to the rules – one of which is designed to bar federal loans at schools whose graduates don’t earn enough to pay off their debt and another that would make it easier to erase debt incurred at bogus institutions – the Obama Education Department and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau brought enforcement actions that helped bring about the demise of flagrant abusers such as Corinthian Colleges and ITT Educational Services.

And this came after the Obama Administration pushed Congress to get commercial banks out of the student loan business.

Taken together, the Obama era measures against predatory for-profit education represent one of the rare instances in which government action targeted not just an illegitimate practice or a miscreant company but an entire industry. The message was not simply that for-profit colleges needed to be reformed but rather that they should not continue to exist. It was capital punishment for capital.

It comes as no surprise that the billionaire DeVos, who has had personal involvement with dubious business ventures, is seeking to undo the crackdown on for-profit colleges. And it is yet another example of how the Trump Administration is working against the interests of those lower-income voters who put him in office.

The same dynamic can be seen in the healthcare arena. The Republican “solution” to the problems of the Affordable Care Act is to make it easier for insurance companies to offer bare-bones junk insurance while dismantling Medicaid, both in its traditional form and its expansion under the ACA. The latest version of the Senate bill is willing to retain the hated taxes on high-income earners as long as the assault on the socialistic Medicaid program moves forward.

It appears that the right’s desire to protect the interests of corporations – including the most predatory – is even greater than its wish to redistribute income upward. Thus the one thing that Republicans have made sure to do with their stranglehold on the federal government has been to roll back as many business regulations as possible.

It remains to be seen how long Trump and Congressional Republicans can get away with telling their working class supporters that predatory corporations are the ones that deserve relief.

The Insurance Industry’s No-Lose Situation

Many voices are speaking out about the Republican effort to undo the Affordable Care Act, but one party diligently refrains from public comment: the insurance industry. While the industry is undoubtedly exerting its influence in the closed-door negotiations to restructure the wildly unpopular GOP bill, it is not airing those views more widely.

It doesn’t have to, because the healthcare debate between the two major parties is largely a disagreement on how best to serve the needs of Aetna, Anthem and the other big players.

The ACA, of course, was built on the premise that government should expand coverage largely by providing subsidies to help the uninsured purchase plans from private companies. When those companies became dissatisfied with the composition of their new client base and starting jacking up premiums in response, ACA supporters were put in the position of advocating for new insurer financial incentives.

Meanwhile, the Republicans are seeking to help the industry by rolling back Medicaid expansion and allowing it to return to the pre-Obamacare practice of selling bare-bones junk insurance, which would be the only kind that many people could afford after subsidies are decimated.

This is probably a no-lose situation for the insurers: either they get paid more to provide decent coverage or they are freed to sell highly profitable lousy plans.

All those legislators catering to insurers one way or the other are forgetting that healthcare reform was made necessary by the ruthless behavior of that same industry. If those companies had not been denying coverage whenever possible, it would not have been necessary for the ACA to set minimum standards. And if those firms had not been raising premiums relentlessly, it would not have been necessary for the ACA to take steps — which turned out to be inadequate — to try to restrain costs.

The industry’s unethical practices are not limited to the individual marketplace. The big insurers have also exploited the decision by policymakers to give them a foothold in the big federally funded programs: Medicaid and Medicare.

As Senate Republicans were cooking up their repeal and replace bill, the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Los Angeles joined two cases against one of the industry’s giants, UnitedHealth Group. The whistleblower suits accuse the company of systematically overcharging the federal government for services provided under the Medicare Advantage Program.

The complaints in the cases allege that UnitedHealth routinely scoured millions of medical records, searching for data it could use to make patients seem sicker than they actually were and thus justify bigger payments for the company, which was also accused of failing to correct invalid diagnoses made by providers. Either way, the complaints argue, UnitedHealth was bilking Medicare Advantage, which was created on the assumption that bringing the private sector into a government program would cut costs.

Such assumptions continue to afflict federal health policy as a whole. Too many members of Congress continue to worship the market in the face of all the evidence that the private insurance industry cannot be the foundation of a humane healthcare system.

Exporting Hazards or Globalizing Regulation?

Americans may have initially felt a bit smug upon learning that the combustible material responsible for the Grenfell Tower disaster in London is largely banned in the United States. Perhaps our regulatory system is not as deficient as we thought.

That moral superiority went out the window when it came to light that the deadly cladding was purchased from an American-based company. Some of the outrage being exhibited toward public officials in Britain should also be aimed at Arconic, a company created from the break-up of the aluminum giant Alcoa. Arconic has announced that it will suspend sales of the cladding, known as Reynobond PE, for high-rises, but that does little good for the scores of people killed in the Grenfell fire or the thousands of others who have been forced to leave other apartment houses now found to contain the material.

Although most of the attention is on Arconic’s cladding and its role in spreading the conflagration, it turns out that fire itself was caused by another American product, a refrigerator made by Whirlpool under its Hotpoint brand. The appliance had a back made out of flammable plastic rather than the metal typically used in models sold in the United States. The London Fire Brigade had long lobbied, to no avail, to require new appliances to have fire-resistant backing.

The sale of banned products in offshore markets is, unfortunately, a longstanding practice among U.S-based multinational corporations. What’s unusual in this case is that the offshore market is a wealthy country such as Britain, whereas the dumping is normally done in poor countries.

As Russell Mokhiber points out in his 1988 book Corporate Crime and Violence, one of the earliest examples was that of the now defunct company A.H. Robins, which in the 1970s sold thousands of its Dalkon Shield intrauterine contraceptive devices in 42 countries even after it became apparent that thousands of U.S. women were experiencing severe and sometimes deadly ailments linked to the IUDs.

In 1972 the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency prohibited most uses of the insecticide DDT, yet American producers continued to sell in foreign markets for years until most other countries adopted their own bans.

U.S. companies also continued to export dangerous products such as asbestos, flammable children’s pajamas and lead-based house paint after being barred from selling them in domestic markets.

These practices illustrate the perverse way that most large companies regard the regulation of their business. They are not willing to admit that restrictions are legitimate — even when imposed in the wake or injuries and deaths — and will adhere to them only to the extent absolutely necessary. If they can continue to sell products they have been told are harmful to some customers, they will do so.

This mindset seems to result from both a knee-jerk ideological opposition to all regulation and an amoral pursuit of profits. The persistence of corporate crime suggests that attempting to reform big business from within — the dubious promise of corporate social responsibility — is far from adequate. Just as markets have superseded borders, so must regulation be globalized.