The Corn Dust Conspiracy

About 5,000 workers are killed on the job in the United States each year. Some of these are pure accidents, while others may result from a lapse in safety procedures. Most disturbing are those caused by a failure on the part of management to rectify known hazards.

Solidly in the latter category is the wrongdoing attributed to Didion Milling. In 2017 a dust explosion at a corn mill operated by the company in Cambria, Wisconsin killed five workers and seriously injured others. Six years later, corporate officials whose actions contributed to the disaster and then concealed its causes are finally being held to account.

A federal jury recently convicted Didion’s Vice President of Operations, Derrick Clark, of conspiring to falsify documents, making false environmental compliance certifications and obstructing the Occupational Safety and Health investigation of the explosion. Shawn Mesner, former food safety superintendent at the plant, was convicted of conspiring to obstruct and mislead OSHA by falsifying sanitation records concerning the accumulation of corn dust at the mill.

In other words, Clark and Mesner were found to have covered up dangerous conditions before the explosion and then engaged in a cover-up after the fact. They did not act alone. Three other company officials previously pleaded guilty to related charges. A sixth official was acquitted.

The company was also prosecuted. Last month it pleaded guilty to falsifying records related to its Occupational Safety and Health Act and Clean Air Act obligations. Although Didion has not yet been formally sentenced, it has agreed to pay $1 million in criminal fines and $10.25 million in restitution to the victims of the accident and their families.

The Didion case exemplifies some harsh realities about U.S. workplace practices.

First, it demonstrates the willingness of some employers to put the lives of their workers at risk to boost their bottom line. It is no secret that corn dust is highly combustible and needs to be reduced through careful sanitary practices. Didion and its managers decided to sidestep these practices and instead falsify records to conceal their reckless behavior.

Second, it illustrates the myth of over-regulation. The Didion facility had been cited by OSHA for dust explosion hazards six years prior to the explosion. In 2011 it was fined all of $6,300—which it negotiated down to $3,465. It appears that Didion then began keeping false records while OSHA was kept in the dark about the increasingly dangerous conditions at the mill.

Third, it shows how the country has become blasé about both workplace hazards and the difficulties faced by an over-extended OSHA to do anything about them. I find it remarkable that the Didion accident and the subsequent revelations and legal proceedings have received so little coverage outside Wisconsin.

It is true that Didion is not a well-known company, but the story of its egregious behavior needs to be more widely told. This case also deserves more attention in that it is a rare instance in which managers were held personally liable for their efforts to subvert the regulatory system. The sentences they end up receiving will be an indicator of how serious a crime such behavior is considered to be—and how much we value the lives of workers.

The Junk Food Industry’s Drug Problem

There’s a crisis related to junk food in America, but unlike in the past, the problem is not that people are eating too much of it and harming their health. Instead, consumption levels are declining, darkening the prospects for companies that depend on selling products filled with saturated fat and sugar.

The reason for this is the arrival of Ozempic and other weight-control medications that are highly effective in controlling the urge to overeat. From a public health perspective, this is great news. These drugs have the potential to substantially reduce obesity and related medical problems such as diabetes. Use of the drugs is soaring, and analysts expect millions more to follow suit.

While pharmaceutical companies are making a killing from these high-priced drugs, the food industry is faced with reduced demand. Most vulnerable are those companies that profit from binge eating, especially the snack food sector. According to the Wall Street Journal, executives at these firms are being barraged with questions from investors about the impact on profitability and stock prices. Wall Street analysts are pointing to vulnerability for manufacturers such as Hershey, Mondelez International (which makes Oreos, among other things) and Hostess Brands (Twinkies, etc.).

Not long ago, companies such as these were riding high as Americans boosted their junk food consumption during the pandemic. Kellogg was pressed by Wall Street to split into two so that its faster growing snack business (Pringles, Cheez-It, etc.) would not be held back by the less dynamic breakfast cereal operation. The separation was recently completed, but now the new Kellanova snack company may be less appetizing for investors.

A recent report by Barclays also sees negative consequences for fast food chains, soft drink producers and even cigarette companies, given anecdotal evidence that the drugs may also suppress the urge to consume other addictive substances.

These financial warnings serve as a stark reminder of how much American packaged food producers and fast-food chains have profited from unhealthy consumption patterns that they themselves helped to bring about.

It is unclear how these industries will respond to the Ozempic revolution. In the short term, they may root for the health insurance companies currently doing whatever they can do to avoid coverage for drugs that have a list price of up to $16,000 a year. Those refusals are already being met with legal challenges.

If they continue to cater to those who cannot gain access to the drugs or choose not to use them, the snack food makers will in effect follow the lead of the tobacco industry, which continued to profit from the addicted while overall smoking levels declined.

It is also possible they will choose the higher-road approach of modifying their product lines to include more nutritious offerings. Many food companies have already taken this approach. The problem is that these foods are often not significantly healthier. For example, Kellogg’s (and now Kellanova’s) Nutri-Grain bars are widely criticized for being high in sugar and low in fiber. Packaged food companies have paid out millions of dollars in class action lawsuits accusing them of making unsubstantiated health claims for their products.

The best outcome would be if large numbers of people freed of their addictions by the new drugs choose to focus their diet on fresh foods, and the worst packaged brands wither away from lack of demand.

Watching the ESG Watchmen

Investment advisors that adopt the label ESG present themselves as arbiters of corporate behavior. They claim to identify which companies are serious about environmental, social and governance goals and thus deserve to be included in high-minded portfolios.

But who watches the watchmen? Who determines when the ESG gatekeepers have gone astray? The answer turns out not to be Ron DeSantis and Republican Attorneys General who have been attacking what they see as wokeness in the business world. Instead, it is the traditional cop on the financial beat—the Securities and Exchange Commission.

The SEC recently brought charges against a subsidiary of Deutsche Bank for misleading investors by exaggerating the extent to which it actually applied ESG principles in its stock recommendations. DWS Investment Management Americas Inc. (DWS), according to the SEC, “failed to adequately implement certain provisions of its global ESG integration policy” and “failed to adopt and implement policies and procedures reasonably designed to ensure that its public statements about the ESG integrated products were accurate.”

DWS, which agreed to settle the charges by paying $25 million in penalties, was also accused of failing to develop an adequate program to make sure its mutual funds were not being used for money laundering. The accusations against DWS essentially came down to deception and negligence.

It is, of course, ironic that a firm whose mission is to monitor the behavior of other companies was found to have serious deficiencies in its own conduct. Yet the real lesson of the DWS case is that the E in ESG does not stand for “ethical.”

This becomes abundantly clear when we look at the track record of many ESG investment advisors as well as the companies that score well in ESG ratings. DWS stands out in this regard. Its parent Deutsche Bank is the ninth most heavily penalized parent company in Violation Tracker with nearly $20 billion in fines and settlements in the United States since 2000.

The bank has, for example, paid out enormous sums in multiple cases involving offenses such as manipulation of interest rate benchmarks, facilitation of fraudulent tax shelters, deception of investors in the sale of what turned out to be toxic securities, and violation of anti-money-laundering laws. The latter included a $425 million settlement with the New York Department of Financial Services of allegations its Moscow, London and New York offices participated in a mirror trading scheme that laundered $10 billion out of Russia.

Despite this record, Deutsche Bank scores pretty high in some ESG rankings. The same combination of heavy regulatory penalties and high ratings can be seen with other investment firms such as Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley as well as companies in many other industries. Even fossil fuel culprits such as Chevron and Occidental Petroleum get relatively high ESG scores.

All this is further evidence that the real problem with much of the ESG movement is not that it goes too far, but rather that it is often used as a smokescreen to hide all manner of corporate misconduct by those claiming to promote virtue.

Big Business on the Defensive

Too often, the news is filled with stories of large corporations getting away with all kinds of abuses—mistreating workers, fouling the environment, cheating consumers, undermining our privacy. This week has been different.

On the labor front, there has been more coverage of strikes than we have seen for a long while. This includes a resolved dispute involving film and TV writers, a continuing one involving actors and an escalating one involving autoworkers. These work stoppages are all receiving widespread public support.

The auto strike also brought about the first-ever visit of a sitting U.S. President to a picket line. Occupants of the White House have more typically responded to walkouts by blocking them—as Biden did with railroad workers last year—or with more extreme measures such as Reagan’s firing of the air traffic controllers in 1981.

At the same time, news outlets are giving substantial play to efforts by federal and state governments to curb the power of Big Tech. The Federal Trade Commission, along with 17 state attorneys general, just filed a sweeping complaint against Amazon.com, accusing the e-commerce giant of abusing its market power to the detriment of both consumers and small businesses that rely on its platform to sell their goods.

The FTC complaint arrives as the trial proceeds in a Justice Department lawsuit against Google for monopolizing the online search market. Both cases challenge the core business models of the companies. Even if break-ups of the tech giants are unlikely, adverse court rulings could require them to make fundamental structural changes in the way they operate.

Significant changes, while perhaps not as drastic, could also result from the current labor disputes. It appears that the new contract won by the Writers Guild of America will put limits on the industry’s control of content created with the help of artificial intelligence. United Autoworkers members are seeking to dismantle tiered wage structures and reduce the basic workweek while the industry is making the transition to electric vehicles.

Other fundamental challenges to corporations can be seen in the environmental area. Not long ago, a group of young people in Montana prevailed in their lawsuit arguing that the state’s failure to consider climate change when approving fossil fuel projects was a violation of a provision in the Montana constitution guaranteeing residents the right to a clean and healthy environment. This is just one of numerous efforts to use the courts to address the climate crisis. Large companies are also facing the prospect of new greenhouse gas disclosure requirements—one passed by the California legislature and another pending in the European Union.

Corporations are not giving into these challenges without a fight. They are trying to limit their concessions to unions, aggressively arguing their positions in the court cases, taking steps to sway public opinion and employing legions of lobbyists to promote their point of view to legislators and policymakers.

Yet, for the moment, it is a pleasure to see Big Business on the defensive.

Corporations Are Not Saving the Planet After All

It used to be that you had to go to the websites of groups such as Greenpeace to learn how large corporations are failing to live up to their promises to help solve the climate crisis. Now that fact can be found on the front page of the Wall Street Journal.

The business-friendly newspaper just published an article detailing the ways in which the decarbonization efforts of the world’s largest companies are fizzling out. A big part of the problem is that most companies never developed meaningful climate transition plans and instead relied on dubious carbon offsets instead. The Journal quotes the environmental non-profit CDP as saying that of the nearly 19,000 companies using its disclosure platform, fewer than 100 have credible plans.

Some companies don’t bother to develop any plans—or they keep them to themselves. The Journal cites data showing the percentages of larger publicly traded companies that do not disclose specific plans to meet long-term climate targets. Among those in the coal, oilfield services, and midstream oil sectors the portion is 100 percent. Among integrated oil companies, 93 percent fail to do so.

Big Oil’s detrimental role in dealing with the climate was highlighted in another recent Journal article. It’s well known that Exxon Mobil worked for years to downplay the harmful effects of greenhouse gas emissions. In 2006 the company finally acknowledged those dangers, but the Journal found that within the company the policy did not really change. The newspaper was given access to internal company documents that had been collected by the New York Attorney General but never made public.

These documents, the Journal says, show that Rex Tillerson, who had just taken over as CEO at the time, continued to work behind the scenes to play down the severity of climate change. Exxon executives and scientists were apparently encouraged to go on questioning the mainstream consensus on climate harm.

In other words, it appeared that Exxon, rather than fully abandoning its overt climate denialism, replaced it with a more low-key version while simultaneously reaping the benefits of greenwashing.

Apart from its malignant impact on the climate problem, the fossil fuel industry also continues to be a major source of conventional pollution. We are reminded of this fact by a new report from the Center for American Progress which looks at the long-standing boondoggle surrounding the system by which the industry is allowed to drill on public lands and offshore.

Making extensive use of data from Violation Tracker, the report shows that the top 20 leasing companies are responsible for more than 2,000 environmental violations in their overall operations over the past two decades. Exxon Mobil leads the list with 442 such penalties, while BP has paid out the most—over $30 billion—largely due to its role in the 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico.

CAP’s report recommends that proposed new standards issued by the federal Bureau of Land Management for companies seeking leases be strengthened to include language specifying what defines a bad actor, adding: “Such bad actors should not be eligible for new leases or permits until they have resolved all outstanding issues and demonstrated that they are capable of changing their practices. Further, leases of companies found not to be a qualified or responsible lessee should be subject to cancellation.”

Tougher standards such as these will help to get the message through to the fossil fuel giants that they need to change their ways once and for all.

Corporations and National Security

Most of the cases handled by the Justice Department’s National Security Division involve individuals accused of providing support to foreign terrorist organizations, or more recently, domestic far-right extremists linked to groups such as the Proud Boys.

Yet the division has another mission: prosecuting corporations which violate international economic sanctions or which fail to prevent sensitive technology from being transferred to unfriendly foreign countries. It is beefing up this work, especially the latter part.

The division just appointed its first Chief Counsel for Corporate Enforcement and Deputy Counsel for Corporate Enforcement. In making the announcement, Assistant Attorney General Matthew Olsen suggested that a tougher stance is being taken: “We have watched with concern as investigations of corporate misconduct increasingly reveal violations of laws that protect the United States. Enforcing the laws that deny our adversaries the benefits of America’s innovation economy and protect technologies that will define the future is core to the National Security Division’s mission.” Olsen is in effect saying that some corporations are national security risks—or perhaps more accurately, national economic security risks.

These appointments are consistent with the announcement earlier this year that the National Security Division was joining with the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) and other agencies to form the Disruptive Technology Task Force. Its mission is “to target illicit actors, strengthen supply chains and protect critical technological assets from being acquired or used by nation-state adversaries.”

Until now, the division’s corporate prosecutions have been limited. In Violation Tracker we document 17 cases that have been brought against companies over the past decade. Most of these are foreign-based companies. For example, in in 2017 a penalty of $430 million was imposed on the Chinese telecommunications company ZTE for illegally shipping U.S.-origin technology items to Iran.

BIS, which brings civil rather than criminal actions, has a much bigger caseload. Violation Tracker documents over 600 export control cases brought by the agency since 2000.  It has also gone after foreign companies such as ZTE but its case list includes numerous domestic companies, including Boeing, General Electric and Northrop Grumman. Earlier this year, it penalized Seagate Technology LLC $300 million for illegal sales of computer disk drives to China’s Huawei Technologies. (Seagate’s parent is technically incorporated in Ireland for tax reasons, but its operational headquarters are in California and it is effectively an American company.)

A focus on domestic companies is also seen in the caseload of another federal export control agency: the State Department Directorate of Defense Trade Controls. Violation Tracker shows there have been around four dozen cases brought against companies by DDTC since 2000, nearly all of them U.S.-based. RTX Corporation (formerly Raytheon Technologies) and its subsidiaries account for the largest share of the penalties.

Given the willingness of U.S.-based transnationals to share technology with customers in countries such as China over the past few decades, the DOJ’s new focus on economic security may be too late to undo much of the damage. Yet if prosecutors are going to address the problem nonetheless, they should follow the lead of other agencies and go after domestic as well as foreign culprits.

The Other Wage Theft

When we hear references to wage theft, there is a tendency to think of low-paid workers being cheated by fly-by-night employers. That is only part of the story.

Wage and hour violations affecting better-paid white-collar workers are also common, and the employers involved are often household names. Their abuses typically consist of practices such as denying overtime pay to low-level supervisors by erroneously classifying them as managers.

The federal law governing workplace pay practices, the Fair Labor Standards Act, provides exemptions for bona fide executive, administrative and professional employees, who are typically paid a salary. Yet in order for the exemption to apply, the person must be paid above a certain level.

Unfortunately, that threshold has not been adequately updated and is today only $35,000 annually. As a result, many first-line supervisors and similar employees with quite modest salaries end up working many extra hours without additional compensation.

A new proposal from the U.S. Labor Department would alleviate the situation by raising the threshold to about $55,000 a year. Yet this would not completely solve the problem.

Some employers will flout the new standard the way they did with the old one. In fact, the higher threshold will probably tempt even more companies to cheat. Along with the new threshold, the Labor Department needs to put more emphasis on enforcement, especially at larger corporations.

In 2018 I wrote a report called Grand Theft Paycheck that analyzed the prevalence of wage theft in big business by looking both at DOL enforcement actions and private collective action lawsuits brought on behalf of groups of workers. The latter accounted for most of the penalties collected from large corporations.

During the past five years I have continued to document wage theft cases for Violation Tracker, and the trend continues. Here are some of the significant settlements since 2018 involving white-collar and professional workers:

Humana agreed to pay $11 million to settle allegations that it improperly treated nurses as exempt from overtime.

Wells Fargo agreed to pay over $10 million to settle allegations that it failed to pay home mortgage consultants proper commissions and incentive payments.

CVS Health agreed to pay over $10 million to resolve a lawsuit alleging it did not properly compensate pharmacists for time spent on company-mandated training.

Computer Sciences Corporation agreed to pay over $9 million for failing to pay overtime to system administrators.

Pharmaceutical company Baxalta agreed to pay over $4 million for failing to pay overtime to technicians.

Santander Bank agreed to pay over $4 million to settle litigation alleging it did not pay proper overtime compensation to branch operations managers.

Facebook agreed to pay $1.65 million to resolve a lawsuit claiming it improperly classified its client solutions managers as exempt from overtime pay.

All these cases were brought by plaintiffs’ lawyers, who provide an important service (while collecting a portion of the proceeds). It would be preferable, however, to see the Labor Department pursue more of these cases as well as the ones involving small businesses.

Wage theft comes in multiple forms. Regulators should be investigating them all.

Negotiating with Crooks

The pharmaceutical industry is indignant that the Biden Administration is actually moving ahead with plans to implement the provision of the Inflation Reduction Act that allows Medicare to negotiate drug prices. Responding to an announcement of the first ten medications that will be targeted, the trade association PhRMA complained about a “rushed process,” even though the law was passed a year ago and the negotiated prices will not become effective until 2026.

The industry is not just complaining—it is fighting the law in court and doing everything possible to retain its longstanding power to set prices at astronomical levels. The price-gouging is just part of the problem. Drugmakers also have an abysmal compliance record in their dealings with government healthcare programs.

Take the eleven companies which produce the medications included in the first round of negotiations: AbbVie, Amgen, AstraZeneca, Boehringer Ingelheim, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Eli Lilly, Johnson & Johnson, Merck, Novartis, Novo Nordisk and Pfizer.

Over the past two decades, these companies and their subsidiaries have been penalized in more than 100 cases brought under the False Claims Act (FCA) or related laws relating to government contracting. As shown in Violation Tracker, they have paid a total of more than $5 billion in fines and settlements for overcharging federal agencies and others forms of fraud.

Six of the companies—AbbVie, AstraZeneca, Johnson & Johnson, Merck, Novartis and Pfizer–have each been involved in ten or more FCA cases, paying out enormous sums in penalties.

Pfizer, for example, has paid $1.15 billion in fines and settlements linked to 16 different FCA cases. The biggest of these was a $784 million payment by Pfizer and its subsidiary Wyeth to resolve allegations that Wyeth knowingly reported to the government false and fraudulent prices on two of its proton pump inhibitor drugs.

Novartis has paid $926 million to resolve a dozen different FCA cases. Among these is a $642 million settlement of allegations that included the payment of illegal kickbacks to doctors to get them to prescribe its products.

Merck has also been involved in a dozen FCA cases, paying total penalties of $796 million. The bulk of the total came from a $650 million settlement of allegations that included both illegal kickbacks and failure to offer Medicaid the same rebates it was offering hospital systems.

Johnson & Johnson’s $556 million FCA penalty total comes from four kickback cases as well as several involving the submission of inflated wholesale prices used in setting the rates for Medicaid reimbursements.

Among AstraZeneca’s FCA cases is a $354 million settlement of civil and criminal charges that the company provided large quantities of free samples of a prostate cancer drug to urologists, knowing that many of them were giving the medication to patients as free samples and then billing Medicare and Medicaid.

Seventeen of the 21 FCA cases involving AbbVie and its subsidiaries concerned allegations of falsified drug price reporting to federal and state agencies.

What all this shows is that when federal negotiators sit down at the bargaining table, they will be facing a group of companies that for years have not only been charging high prices but have allegedly also used a variety of illegal means to extract even more revenue from taxpayer-financed healthcare programs.

Rather than expressing indignation, Big Pharma should be displaying penitence for its fleecing of the public for so long.

Targeting the Price Fixers

The Justice Department and the Federal Trade Commission have been promoting the adoption of new guidelines that would give them a greater ability to block anti-competitive mergers. Now DOJ may also be taking a tougher stance with regard to the other main branch of antitrust enforcement: prosecuting price-fixing conspiracies that harm consumers.

DOJ’s Antitrust Division has just announced the resolution of a case brought against generic drug giant Teva Pharmaceuticals and a smaller Indian producer called Glenmark Pharmaceuticals for conspiring to fix the price of pravastatin, a cholesterol medication. Teva was also charged with anti-competitive behavior with regard to two other drugs. Teva was compelled to pay a criminal penalty of $225 million and to donate drugs worth $50 million to humanitarian organizations. Glenmark was penalized $30 million.

Along with the fines, which in Teva’s case is well above the norm in DOJ Antitrust Division actions, the agency imposed a novel penalty: requiring the two companies to divest their pravastatin business line. And although the criminal charges were softened by allowing Teva and Glenmark to enter into deferred prosecution agreements, the DOJ included a blunt warning that “both companies will face prosecution if they violate the terms of the agreements, and if convicted, would likely face mandatory debarment from federal health care programs.”

Forcing a company to leave a business in which it has engaged in misconduct can be a more effective punishment than monetary penalties, which large corporations can usually absorb with little difficulty. This is an especially appropriate approach in prosecuting companies that have shown themselves to be repeat offenders.

Among the more than 240 companies shown in Violation Tracker to have faced criminal charges brought by the Antitrust Division since 2000, there are about half a dozen which have been penalized more than once. One of those is the Swiss bank UBS, which in 2011 paid $160 million to resolve allegations of engaging in anti-competitive practices in the municipal bond market but was offered a non-prosecution agreement. The following year, UBS was accused of manipulating the LIBOR interest rate benchmark and paid penalties totaling $500 million. While a subsidiary had to plead guilty, the parent company was offered another non-prosecution agreement.

Antitrust enforcers should leave the use of financial penalties to private litigation. As I showed in a report called Conspiring Against Competition published earlier this year, class action lawsuits brought by the victims of price fixing have yielded $55 billion since 2000, more than twice as much as the penalties collected by federal regulators.

Among the most frequently sued companies were Teva and its subsidiaries, which paid out a total of $1.4 billion in 19 different class actions. Most of these involved an indirect form of price fixing in which companies collude to delay the introduction of lower-cost generic alternatives to expensive brand-name drugs.

Government regulators should use their power not just to put a dent in an egregious price-fixer’s bottom line but to force the company out of a market in which it failed to follow the rules.  

Is ESG Worth Defending?

The varied environmental, social and governance efforts that go under the name ESG are facing increasing attacks from the Right. Attorneys general in red states have sought to prevent public pension funds from doing business with investment managers promoting sustainability. Public officials such as Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis bash what they call woke corporations to score cheap political points. Groups that successfully dismantled affirmative action in higher education are now targeting diversity programs in the business world.

In the face of this opposition, some large corporations are backing away from ESG-type initiatives or at least are keeping quieter about them. References to ESG are reported to be disappearing from the earnings calls companies have with analysts and investors. Some companies are exiting from alliances created to accelerate the movement toward net-zero greenhouse gas emissions.

The ease with which conservative ideologues have brought about this retreat is a sign of the shortcomings of ESG. Although companies have presented these as high-minded initiatives, they are often little more than public relations ploys.

Much of ESG originated in greenwashing—the attempt by large companies facing pressure over their environmental impact to give the impression they were changing their ways. Eventually, some large companies went from placating critics to presenting themselves as the vanguard in bringing about change. For example, in the 2000s oil giant Chevron launched an advertising campaign with the tagline Will You Join Us urging the public to emulate its supposed green behavior.

Companies followed the same pattern on other issues, depicting themselves as proponents of reform after being pressured by progressive shareholder activist groups such as the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility and As You Sow.

Along with being an attempt to undercut activism, ESG amounted to an effort to weaken government regulation. Proponents did this by promoting voluntary initiatives in lieu of legal mandates. Companies could decide which environmental and social goals to pursue and how to do so. They could also decide how to measure success.

Although there were later efforts to standardize practices and metrics, ESG remained largely under the control of corporations seeking to use it to paint themselves in the best possible light.

Seeing ESG under attack presents a dilemma for those of us who have long pressured corporations to change their behavior. We have no sympathy for those rightwing ideologues who are targeting ESG as part of an agenda that includes preservation of the fossil fuel industry and reversing progress in racial equity. Yet it is difficult to rush to the defense of what was often little more than corporate p.r.

The challenge is to separate the valid issues ESG purports to promote—sustainability, racial justice, fair labor practices, consumer protection, etc.—from the self-interested companies and investment managers pursuing their own agenda.

One way to start is to replace the term ESG with corporate accountability. This reinforces the idea that big business is the problem, not the solution with regard to many of the challenges facing the world today.

Another step is to change the way we assess corporate behavior. Evaluations of companies should be based on independently verifiable data rather than self-reporting and on compliance with government regulation rather than voluntary initiatives. When judged by these metrics, as the data in Violation Tracker make clear, most large corporations can hardly be considered paragons of social responsibility. Some are close to being criminal enterprises.

But most important is to remember that those working from outside the executive suite—environmental groups, labor unions, public interest advocates, corporate accountability activists—are the real agents of change in the business world.

Whether or not ESG survives the rightwing assault, the movement to bring about true corporate accountability will continue.