October 2025 Archives

A New Climate Denialism?

For decades, federal and state laws have required corporations to disclose information about their activities that affect the public. ExxonMobil is now asking a federal court to allow it to ignore one of those obligations relating to the vital issue of climate change.

Exxon is suing the government of California over two laws enacted in 2023 that will require large companies to provide two forms of disclosure. S.B. 253 mandates that companies doing business in California with annual gross revenues above $1 billion disclose their greenhouse gas emissions. S.B. 261 requires that companies operating in the state with annual gross revenues over $500 million disclose climate-related financial risks and their mitigation efforts. The requirements take effect in 2026.

In its lawsuit complaint, Exxon adopts a belligerent tone, arguing that the laws compel it “to trumpet California’s preferred message even though ExxonMobil believes the speech is misleading and misguided.” At the same time, the company makes two preposterous claims.

The first is that it is unfair to base the disclosure rules on the size of corporations: “California may believe that companies that meet the statutes’ revenue thresholds are uniquely responsible for climate change; but the First Amendment categorically bars it from forcing ExxonMobil to speak in service of that misguided viewpoint.”

It is common practice to limit certain disclosure requirements to large companies. In this case it is especially appropriate, given that giant corporations such as Exxon, especially those in the fossil fuel business, clearly account for a disproportionately large share of greenhouse gas emissions. It takes quite a bit of chutzpah for Exxon to suggest it is being treated unfairly because it has an obligation that does not apply to a neighborhood coffee shop.

Also outrageous is the company’s claim that California has no right to require it to report on emissions that take place outside the state. Global warming is an international phenomenon. Greenhouse gas emissions do not stop at state or national borders.

What is troubling about Exxon’s attack on the California laws is that it suggests the company is backtracking in its stance on the climate crisis. For many years, Exxon was the leading espouser of climate denialism, going to great lengths to cover up its own role in the problem.

Eventually, Exxon stopped completely denying the existence of global warming. In its lawsuit complaint, the company states that it “understands the very real risks associated with climate change and supports continued efforts to address those risks.” Yet it alleges that under the California rules it “will be forced to describe its emissions and climate-related risks in terms the company fundamentally disagrees with.”

Exxon’s new position seems to be that, while it does not deny the existence of climate change, it denies that it bears substantial responsibility for it. That, in turn, implies that any climate mitigation efforts should not impinge significantly on its operations.

Taking this stance also allows Exxon to deny that it faces significant climate-related financial risks. In doing so the company probably feels emboldened by Trump’s insistence that climate change is a hoax and by his administration’s efforts to prop up the fossil fuel sector.

At some point, these delusions will collapse. For now, let’s hope the federal judge who hears Exxon’s case laughs the company out of court.

Banking and Genocide

Banks try to disavow responsibility for the misconduct of their clients, but that position has suffered a serious setback in a court in New York. A federal jury has just returned what is being called a landmark verdict against French banking giant BNP Paribas for complicity in the genocide committed by the regime of Omar al-Bashir in the Darfur region of Sudan.

The jury awarded $20 million in damages to three individuals, but it opened the door to further and much more costly legal action against one of the largest banks in the world on behalf of the tens of thousands of Sudanese refugees living in the United States.

BNP Paribas has been embroiled in controversy over its dealings with Sudan for the past decade. In 2015, after facing criminal charges of violating federal government economic sanctions against Sudan (as well as Iran and Cuba), the bank was sentenced to a five-year term of probation and ordered to forfeit $8.8 billion to the United States and to pay a $140 million fine.

In the new civil litigation, BNP Paribas was accused of propping up the Sudanese regime by providing letters of credit that allowed it to circumvent U.S. sanctions. Despite the bank’s previous guilty plea, its lawyers argued that there was no connection between its services and the genocide. They had the difficult task of separating admitted sanctions violations from the atrocities the sanctions were designed to stop.

The jury did not buy it, and the follow-on class actions are expected to go the same way. Bloomberg is estimating that BNP Paribas may end up paying out up to $10 billion in settlements.

BNP Paribas is not the only multinational bank that may face such costs. Among the more than 600 economic sanctions cases documented in Violation Tracker are numerous cases brought by federal and state regulators in the U.S. against other foreign banks for their activity in Sudan.

For example, in 2015 Germany’s Commerzbank agreed to forfeit $563 million, pay a $79 million fine and enter into a deferred prosecution agreement with the Justice Department for sanctions violations in Sudan and other countries.

In 2018 France’s Societe Generale paid $420 million in a case brought by the New York State Department of Financial Services (DFS).

In 2014 Bank of Tokyo Mitsubishi UFJ paid $315 million to the DFS to resolve allegations of misleading regulators regarding its transactions with Sudan and other sanctioned entities.

In 2012 Britain’s Standard Chartered agreed to forfeit $227 million to the Justice Department for violations relating to Sudan and other sanctioned countries.

These banks and other financial institutions with similar penalties may not have had the same degree of involvement with Sudan as did BNP Paribas, but the fact that they were involved at all and faced criminal or civil charges would seem to make them possible targets for class action lawsuits.

The Sudan cases should serve as a reminder to major banks and other corporations that there will be a price to pay if they fail to comply with human rights norms in the pursuit of profit.

Exxon’s Bogus Shareholder Democracy

When thinking of the leading proponents of democracy, ExxonMobil is not a name that comes to mind. Yet the oil giant is using the rhetoric of democracy to promote a plan that will actually consolidate power in the hands of Exxon’s management.

The plan involves automatic voting by retail investors, a practice that was recently given a green light by the Trump Administration’s corporate-friendly Securities and Exchange Commission. It would work as follows: a company could ask individual investors to opt into a system by which their shares would be voted in support of management’s position on issues that come up at annual meetings.

Shareholders who do not wish to cast a vote can already assign that power to management through the proxy card they are sent in advance of each annual meeting. Many, however, neither vote nor send in the proxy. Exxon is apparently assuming that a significant number of investors would be willing to give management full control of their rights indefinitely.

Exxon leaves little doubt that its aim is to weaken shareholder activist groups, which have their own methods of collecting proxies to vote on policy issues that they themselves frequently submit for consideration at annual meetings. On its webpage about automatic voting, Exxon mentions by name a leading progressive shareholder group, As You Sow, complaining that it has a service that allows investors who support its principles turn over their votes. The company writes: “Our retail shareholders, who overwhelmingly support our board, have not had the benefit of such a service and, as a result, have for far too long been underrepresented at shareholder meetings.”

After taking another potshot at the activist groups, Exxon states: “Retail investors deserve to be heard. They didn’t buy our stock to sit on the sidelines. They bought it because they want strong shareholder returns, and they deserve a say in the company they own and the future they are funding.”

This is some shameless doubletalk. Exxon first makes a sweeping assumption about the opinions of shareholders who do not submit proxies. Then it tries to depict an arrangement in which people essentially give up their voting rights as a form of empowerment.

Exxon’s suggestion that it simply wants to do what the likes of As You Sow are doing ignores a fundamental difference. The activist groups are trying to hold the company accountable through votes on resolutions which are not binding and mainly serve to shine a light on retrograde corporate practices. Management, with its vast resources, wants to exploit the fact that many individual shareholders are not focused on the issues that come up in proxy resolutions. It seeks to take advantage of that indifference to make it easier for the company to defeat resolutions and to go on employing practices that harm workers, consumers, and communities.

It is also worth noting that shareholder activism is under attack. Earlier this year, Texas passed legislation that would effectively ban voting services such as the one used by As You Sow. A federal judge has issued a temporary injunction blocking enforcement of the law while the matter proceeds to trial.

At the same time, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton announced that his office has launched an investigation of the two leading proxy advisory services that advise institutional investors about shareholder resolutions.

Rightwing politicians and corporate executives are both seeking to restrain the efforts of activists to make companies more accountable. There is nothing democratic about that.

The Ellisons Prosper by Aligning with Trump

Numerous rich people are getting richer thanks to their connections to Donald Trump, but perhaps no one has gained as much as Larry Ellison and his son David. They control what is becoming one of the largest media empires the country has ever seen—and one that could very well serve as a multi-platform MAGA megaphone.

What is often overlooked is that the rise of the Ellisons was also made possible by a family fortune built to a significant extent on federal government contracts and that many of those contracts had a performance record that was something less than spotless.

Until recently, Larry Ellison was known mainly as the co-founder of the software producer Oracle Corporation. He was chief executive of Oracle from 1977 to 2014, and at age 81 he retains the titles of chairman and chief technology officer.

As Oracle grew over that period, so did Ellison’s lavish compensation package. That pay plus his large stake in the company have made him one of the wealthiest people in the world. The latest Forbes 400 list ranked him second, with a net worth of $276 billion.

Oracle does not disclose exactly how much of its revenue comes from government contracts, but USASpending shows that it takes in over $1 billion a year just for its federal healthcare-related services, much of that coming from the Department of Veterans Affairs. Oracle is one of four companies that received a $9 billion multi-year contract from the Pentagon for the Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability.

Oracle has gone on receiving contracts despite the fact that in 2011 it had to pay $199 million to settle Justice Department allegations that the company failed to meet its contractual obligations to provide the General Services Administration with current, accurate and complete information about its commercial sales practices, including discounts offered to other customers, and that Oracle knowingly made false statements to GSA about its sales practices and discounts.

Oracle’s record has also been tainted by foreign bribery allegations. In 2022 it paid $23 million to the Securities and Exchange Commission to resolve allegations that it violated the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act when subsidiaries in Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, and India created and used slush funds to bribe foreign officials. A decade earlier, Oracle had paid $2 million to settle a similar case involving improper payments in India.

These cases apparently were not an issue earlier this year when the Federal Communications Commission approved the acquisition of Paramount Global (CBS, Paramount Pictures, etc.) by Skydance Media, owned by the Ellisons. What was decisive, instead, was Paramount’s decision to enter into an extravagant settlement to resolve a baseless lawsuit filed by Trump against 60 Minutes. Once the merger was completed, the influence of the Ellisons could be seen in the decision to name right-leaning Bari Weiss as editor-in-chief of CBS News.

Now the combined Skydance Paramount is reported to be part of an effort to take over Warner Bros. Discovery, owner of CNN, HBO, the Warner Bros. studio, and much more. At the same time, the Ellisons are involved in the deal Trump has been putting together to transfer ownership of TikTok’s U.S. operations to an American consortium.

It is difficult to imagine that the Ellisons would be enjoying all this good fortune if they had not aligned themselves closely with Trump over the past year. In Trump’s America, all the past sins of a corporation can be forgotten as long as tribute is paid to the occupant of the White House.

The FTC Bucks the MAGA Anti-Regulatory Crusade

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is in limbo. The Environmental Protection Agency has been turned into a fossil fuel cheerleader. The Securities and Exchange Commission has drastically scaled back its enforcement activity. The Federal Communications Commission is focused on using its powers to attack perceived enemies of the Trump Administration.

Across the federal bureaucracy, agencies seem to be reshaping themselves in accordance with Donald Trump’s belief that regulation of business is evil. And now with the shutdown, those agencies are barely operating at all.

Yet there is one agency that bucked the trend and continued its mission of exercising oversight of corporate behavior: the Federal Trade Commission. Until the shutdown caused it, too, to suspend operations, the FTC has been engaged in conventional and even aggressive enforcement activity.

Most notably, the FTC recently announced the resolution of a case against Amazon.com for using deceptive methods to enroll consumers in its Prime service and then making it difficult for them to unsubscribe. As part of the resolution, Amazon was required to pay a civil penalty of $1 billion and provide $1.5 billion in refunds while also changing its practices.

The only other Trump 2.0 penalty that comes close in size was the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation’s settlement in April requiring Discover Bank (now owned by Capital One) to pay $1.2 billion in restitution and a $150 million civil penalty to resolve allegations its overcharged credit card fees. The FDIC has announced no significant penalties since then.

In the period since Trump took office, the FTC has announced more than a dozen other resolved enforcement actions. After the Amazon case, the largest was a $100 million judgment against a company called Assurance IQ for the deceptive marketing of substandard health insurance plans. Among the other companies that have paid penalties to the FTC this year are Walmart, Walt Disney, and Match.com.

Other significant cases are still under way. In September, the FTC sued Live Nation and Ticketmaster for engaging in improper arrangements with ticket brokers that ended up costing consumers billions of dollars in inflated prices. In April, the agency sued Uber for deceptive billing and cancellation practices.

Along with consumer protection action, the FTC has been pursuing its responsibilities as an antitrust regulator. The agency has continued to pursue a lawsuit, originally filed in 2020 in conjunction with state attorneys general, that accuses Meta Platforms of using anti-competitive mergers to gain monopoly power in certain segments of social media.

The FTC recently sued Zillow and Redfin for entering into an agreement the agency says improperly reduced competition in the market for rental housing online advertising.

There have also been some dubious actions on the part of the FTC, especially an investigation of the advocacy group Media Matters for supposedly engaging in an illegal boycott of X. In August a federal judge issued a preliminary injunction in favor of Media Matters, which argued that the case was politically motivated.

Also politically motivated was the Administration’s improper firing of the FTC’s Democratic commissioners.

On the whole, however, the FTC has not abandoned the aggressive enforcement posture it adopted during the Biden Administration under the leadership of chair Lina Khan. Hopefully, its approach will have some influence on those federal agencies carrying out MAGA-style anti-regulatory crusades.