Dirt Diggers Digest

Unsuitable Saviors

If you go by the agenda of Koch Industries and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, big business is obsessed with cutting taxes, weakening regulation and denying the existence of global warming.

The truth is more complicated. For more than a decade, most large U.S. corporations—including the likes of Wal-Mart, Chevron and Goldman Sachs—have been ardent proponents of the principles of corporate social responsibility, or CSR. Like many of their European and Japanese counterparts, they profess to be leaders in a global movement to address the climate crisis, raise the living standards of the planet’s poorest and otherwise make the world a better place.

As London-based CSR evangelist Wayne Visser argues in his new book The Age of Responsibility, that movement is in crisis. The hypocrisy of espousing enlightened views while letting trade associations such as the Chamber lobby for Neanderthal ones is the least of it.

Despite the enormous resources and influence of the companies pushing it, CSR has done little to alleviate the larger problems it has taken on. As Visser puts it: ”At the macro level, almost every indicator of our social, environmental and ethical health is in decline.” He continues:

At worst, CSR in its most primitive form may be a smokescreen covering up systematically irresponsible behavior. At best, even the most evolved CSR practices might just be a band-aid applied to a gaping wound that is hemorrhaging the lifeblood of the economy, society and the planet.

As a long-time critic of CSR, my response to this diagnosis is: amen. However, I quickly part ways with Visser when it comes to a prescription for what to do next.

Visser spends much of his 366-page text arguing, essentially, that the antidote to failed CSR is more CSR. He never puts it quite that simply. Visser is a management consultant, after all, and he has to dress up his analysis with endless bullet points and matrices (many parts of the book read like powerpoint presentations).

At the center of all the jargon is the thesis that the world needs a new version of corporate social responsibility (actually, he prefers the phrase corporate sustainability and responsibility) which he dubs CSR 2.0.

This new approach is said to be based on five principles: Creativity, Scalability, Responsiveness, Glocality and Circularity.

Visser devotes a chapter to each of these, and the result is exasperating. His exegesis is full of platitudes and buzz words: “thinking outside the box,” “setting audacious goals,” “cross-sector partnerships,” “think global, act local,” “cradle to cradle” (rather than just cradle-to-grave) assessments of the environmental impact of products, etc.

What’s also bewildering is that Visser points to numerous companies that, he maintains, have already been putting into practice his principles that are supposedly the wave of the future. Among them are many of the usual CSR suspects: Google, Wal-Mart, The Body Shop, Nike, Patagonia and the mining giants BHP-Billiton and Anglo American.

What, then, is really new about CSR 2.0? The only thing that strikes me as novel is Visser’s call for making CSR “systemic” or “holistic”—yet this is where the entire concept of CSR, it seems to me, breaks down.

It is understandable to want to attack problems in a more comprehensive way, but it is not clear, to me at least, that large corporations are the appropriate primary vehicle for addressing the climate crisis, air and water pollution, global poverty, diseases such as AIDS/HIV, child labor and sweatshops.

For one thing, transnational corporations have played a significant role in creating or at least exacerbating some of these crises—and they may have a vested interest in perpetuating them. Even where this is not the case, why would we want to give a leadership role to institutions that are inherently undemocratic and exist primarily to enrich a small portion of the population? Corporations should certainly clean up their own act, but there is no reason to put them in charge of everything.

Much of CSR can be seen as an attempt to replace rigorous government regulation with limited voluntary initiatives that companies also use for public relations purposes. The answer is not a more ambitious form of CSR, as Visser suggests. We need less emphasis on corporate responsibility and more on corporate accountability—on corporations being held to account by government and organizations representing all of society. That’s a 2.0 that would truly make a difference.

The Forgotten Legacy of the Excess Profits Tax

Behind all the ideological posturing going on in Washington over the debt ceiling, there is a surprising amount of consensus on the wrongheaded proposition that corporations need more tax relief.

The bipartisan Gang of Six plan that has recently been at the center of attention provides for the reduction of the statutory corporate tax rate from 35 percent down to as low as 23 percent. It also calls for moving to a “competitive territorial tax system,” which, as Citizens for Tax Justice points out, would make it even easier for companies to exploit offshore tax havens. A reported new plan being discussed by President Obama and Speaker Boehner as this is being written would probably include something similar.

Corporate domination of our political discourse makes it all but impossible for national leaders to suggest that large companies, which have been enjoying abundant profits while much of the country suffers from high unemployment and other forms of economic distress, should be paying more, not less to keep the USA afloat. Behind many of the protestations against special tax breaks for the oil industry and ethanol producers are agendas that call for lowering the statutory corporate rate for all companies.

It wasn’t always this way. The United States has a history, now largely forgotten, of imposing higher taxes on corporations during times of national emergencies. Excess profits taxes were imposed at various times to put a check on profiteering during wartime.

The first excess profits tax was enacted in 1917, less than a decade after the basic corporate income tax came into being. It remained in place through the World War I, and in 1919 President Wilson recommended that it be made part of the permanent tax system. Congress demurred, but the tax was not eliminated until 1921, well after the end of the war.

Interest in an excess profits tax was revived in the 1930s.The National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933 used a form of excess profits tax to prevent evasion of the declared-value capital stock tax. Later in the decade, as war seemed imminent, a broader based excess profits tax began to be discussed. In 1940 President Roosevelt, insisting that government should ensure that “a few do not gain from the sacrifices of many,” sent a message to Congress calling for a “steeply graduated excess-profits tax.”

There was little disagreement on the need for such a tax. The debate centered, instead, on how the levy would be calculated—especially the question of what base would be used to determine the excess. The tax remained in effect through 1945. Only five years later, Congress returned to an excess profits tax to help pay for the Korean War.

Writing in the Journal of Political Economy in 1951, economist George Lent wrote that the tax had “been accepted as an essential part of a broad system for the equitable distribution of the cost of defense.” Unfortunately, that acceptance turned out to be short-lived. The excess profits tax enacted in 1950 was terminated in 1953, and despite an ongoing Cold War and then large-scale intervention in Vietnam, corporations were no longer expected to shoulder a significant portion of U.S. military costs.

During the past decade the situation has grown even worse. Despite the existence of two expensive wars and a trend toward privatization of military functions that makes the conflicts extremely profitable to the private sector, no one talks of higher corporate taxes. On the contrary, the demand for lowering those taxes has been relentless.

The justification for excess profits taxation need not be linked only to military costs and the profits of Pentagon contractors. Today we are seeing excessiveness of another kind in relation to corporate profits. Most large companies are enjoying bloated bottom lines by refusing to return their workforce back to pre-recession levels. They can do this because unemployment is high, unions are weak and those with jobs find it difficult to resist demands for intensified workloads.

Along with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, there is a war at home—a war against workers that amounts to a form of profiteering. If the leaders of this country were not in thrall to corporations, we would be talking about an excess profits tax focused on employers that keep their staffing levels artificially low.

It could very well turn out that higher, not lower taxes are what would induce companies to begin hiring again. Those companies which resist would at least be helping reduce the national deficit rather than further enriching the investor class.

Statehouse Inc.

State legislatures, once hailed by Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis as “laboratories of democracy” because of their progressive innovations, have for the past couple of decades often been hotbeds of plutocracy instead. The blame for this rests in no small part with a shadowy organization called the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC).

Thanks to a WikiLeaks-like initiative by the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD), we now know a lot more about the way that ALEC operates. CMD obtained and has just made public for the first time the full texts of more than 800 model bills and resolutions secretly approved by ALEC’s corporate and legislative members. These positions are often introduced—in many cases word-for-word—by rightwing state legislators and all too frequently become the law of the land. The trove of documents is available at a website called ALEC Exposed.

ALEC was created in 1973 by the far-sighted conservative strategist Paul Weyrich, who was also involved in the establishment of the Heritage Foundation and other institutions of the Right. Though it never became a household name, ALEC was playing an influential role in the direction of state policymaking as early as the 1980s. A 1984 article in The National Journal, noting that its leaders got “the red carpet treatment from the Reagan White House” when they met in Washington, called ALEC “the New Right group that has done the most to set the conservative agenda at the state level.”

That agenda is the same one being pushed more than a quarter-century later by the greatly expanded cohort of ALEC allies generated by the Republican landslide in last November’s elections: tax limitation, cuts in social spending, restrictions on public employee collective bargaining rights, privatization, reduced regulation of business, school vouchers, and much more.

Corporate critics first began to pay serious attention to ALEC about a decade ago. In 2002 two environmental groups—Defenders of Wildlife and the Natural Resources Defense Council—issued a report entitled Corporate America’s Trojan Horse in the States that debunked ALEC’s claim of being a non-partisan good government group and showed how it was dominated by and promoted the interests of large companies such as Chevron, Philip Morris and Enron. The legislators who made up the purported membership of ALEC were simply a conduit for policy prescriptions devised by corporate lobbyists and trade associations.

Progressive organizations set up a website called ALEC Watch to monitor the group’s activities and launched a counterpart entity called ALICE (American Legislative Issues Campaign Exchange). The latter was not a great success, but it helped give rise to today’s Progressive States Network.

Additional investigative reporting—including accounts by progressive infiltrators at ALEC events—and analyses such as a May 2010 report by the American Association for Justice called ALEC: Ghostwriting the Law for Corporate America—have revealed more about the group’s modus operandi.

What remained largely secret were the details of the proposed legislative language prepared by ALEC’s corporate members. Now that has changed with the arrival of ALEC Exposed.

The scope of the issues covered by ALEC’s model bills is extraordinary. CMD divides them into seven major categories ranging from worker/consumer rights to tax loopholes/budgets, each of which contains dozens of items on very specific issues.

Within the model bills on worker and consumer rights are, of course, the notorious Paycheck Protection Act (which seeks to weaken union participation in the political process) and the Prevailing Wage Repeal Act. But there’s also a bill that allows gives employers the option to pay workers with prepaid debit cards rather than cash.

There’s a model bill on “class action improvements” (designed to make it harder to certify classes), but also one on “admissibility in civil actions of nonuse of a seat belt.” In the health area, there’s a “model resolution on disease management of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease” as well as one on “taxation of moist smokeless tobacco.”

Browsing through the inventory of bills, one comes away with the unsettling feeling that Corporate America is asserting its interest in every single aspect of public policy. Given that corporations and their executives supply legislators not only with model bills but also campaign cash, those interests too often prevail.

Justice Brandeis is also known for having said: “We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.” ALEC is helping to ensure we make the “Right” choice.

Perilous Pipelines

exxonpapertowels — ExxonMobil's paper towel mobilization

At the height of the controversy last year over the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, top executives from four competing oil giants appeared before Congress and distanced themselves from their British rival.

“We would not have drilled the well the way they did,” smugly stated ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson. “It certainly appears that not all the standards that we would recommend or that we would employ were in place,” chimed in Chevron chairman John Watson.

Now that ExxonMobil is at the center of an oil pipeline spill into Montana’s flooded Yellowstone River, Tillerson should be feeling somewhat less self-satisfied. And the rest of us have another reminder that poor safety practices in the petroleum industry are far from an anomaly.

It is also a reminder that companies professing concern about the environment can end up being major offenders. In 2008 the ExxonMobil refinery in Billings served by the Silvertip pipeline that just burst received certification from the Wildlife Habit Council for its efforts to conserve ecosystems and protect wildlife in and around company operations. Some of that wildlife is now covered in crude oil.

When people hear about oil spills, they tend to think of the large offshore incidents such as the BP mess in the gulf and ExxonMobil’s 1989 disaster in Alaska’s Prince William Sound. Equally dismal is the history of onshore spills caused by ruptures in the vast network of pipelines that carry crude oil from drilling sites to refineries.

A year ago this time, the news media were transmitting images very similar the ones now coming out of Montana. In July 2010 a burst pipeline released more than 800,000 gallons of oil into the Kalamazoo River in southern Michigan.

The company involved in the Michigan accident–Enbridge Inc., operator of the world’s largest crude oil pipeline system–had been warned by federal regulators that it was not properly monitoring corrosion on the pipeline. Over the past decade, Enbridge’s pipelines have been involved in a long list of ruptures and leaks in places such as Minnesota, North Dakota, Wisconsin and Alberta.

Enbridge, which is based in Canada, has annual revenues of more than $15 billion, has not felt much pain from the fines imposed by the U.S. regulators at the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration, which are often below $100,000. However, in response to a November 2007 explosion in Clearbrook, Minnesota that took two lives, Enbridge was fined $2.4 million.

What’s even more troubling than Enbridge’s past record is that the company is seeking to greatly expand its network, with a special focus on the environmentally disastrous tar sand fields of northern Alberta. Bringing the filthy oil output of the tar sands down to the United States is also the objective of the huge Keystone XL pipeline that would pass through eastern Montana (and the Yellowstone River) on its way to Texas.

Moreover, it would traverse the Ogallala Aquifer, which, NRDC points out, serves as the primary source of drinking water for millions of Americans and provides 30 percent of the nation’s ground water used for irrigation. Keystone XL, an expansion of an existing pipeline that opened last year, is awaiting federal approval. Earlier this year the existing pipeline was shut down for about a week after a series of a dozen leaks at pumping stations.

For companies such as TransCanada, Enbridge and ExxonMobil, the sky’s the limit when it comes to what they are willing to spend on projects such as Keystone XL (its price tag is $7 billion). Yet when it comes to cleaning up their messes, things suddenly become austere. The main tools that ExxonMobil’s crews in Montana seem to be employing are glorified paper towels. If the fines for violations were more substantial, the pipeline companies might take safety more seriously.

Amazon’s Anti-Tax Crusade

When large companies complain about taxes, they are usually talking about levies they have to pay out of their own deep pockets. Amazon.com is engaged in a battle to make it easier for its customers to avoid paying their taxes – their sales tax, that is, on what they purchase from the giant online retailer.

The outcome of this dispute will have broad consequences for a U.S. economy in which state and local governments face ongoing revenue shortfalls and commerce increasingly takes place online.

At the center of the dispute is the question of whether web-based retailers such as Amazon have the same obligation as brick-and-mortar stores to collect sales tax from their customers. Sales taxes are essential to the finances of state governments, accounting for nearly half of all their tax revenue. Widespread corporate income tax dodging and business property tax breaks have made the sales levy all the more important.

While traditional retailers have no choice about collecting the sales tax mandated by state and local authorities, the story is more complicated when it comes to e-commerce. A 1992 U.S. Supreme Court opinion barred states from requiring catalogue and internet sellers to collect sales tax unless they had a physical presence (“nexus” in legalese) such as a distribution center in the customer’s state. The argument was that forcing merchants to keep track of varying tax rates across thousands of jurisdictions was too onerous.

That ruling, which was handed down before Amazon.com was founded, did not mean that online transactions were tax-free. Many states require residents to voluntarily report their online purchases and pay taxes directly to the government. Most people are unaware of these rules or choose to ignore them. The failure of online retailers to collect taxes thus results in revenue losses that a University of Tennessee study estimates will reach $11 billion next year.

The Supreme Court hinted that a solution to the problem should come in the form of federal legislation sanctioning sales tax collection on remote transactions along with efforts by the states to streamline and simplify their sales tax practices. Progress on these fronts has been slow.

As people spend more and more of their money in cyberspace, some states feel they cannot wait. They have been devising creative ways to establish nexus. New York led the way in 2008 with legislation, dubbed the “Amazon law,” that requires online retailers to collect taxes if they have affiliate websites in the state promoting sales on their behalf. A few other states followed suit in 2009 and 2010.

This year the issue has mushroomed. More than a dozen state legislatures have taken up the matter, and Amazon laws have been enacted in Illinois, Connecticut and California. Amazon is furious. It responds to the new laws by vowing to terminate its relationship with affiliates in the affected states and by threatening legal action.

The company’s aversion to sales tax collection is so strong that it carries over into states in which it should have a nexus obligation. As Michael Mazerov of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities points out, Amazon has put ownership of its physical facilities in the hands of subsidiaries and then claimed there was no basis for the parent company to collect taxes. When that has not worked, the company has sought special exemptions by what amounts to bribing the state with promises of job creation. Such an effort just failed in Texas, but Amazon prevailed in a drawn-out dispute in South Carolina.

In early June, South Carolina legislators reversed themselves and approved a bill that gives Amazon a five-year exemption from its sales tax collection duties. The move came after the company upped to 2,000 the number of jobs it promised to create in the state in the course of building a $125 million distribution center. Amazon had also been offered subsidies such as income tax credits and property tax breaks, but it is significant that the sales tax collection issue was the deal breaker for the company.

Despite all evidence to the contrary, Amazon claims that its opposition to collecting sales tax is not driven by a desire to gain a price advantage over its competitors. Instead, the company insists that collecting sales tax in every state would be excessively burdensome.

It would be one thing for that claim to be made by a mom-and-pop operation. But this is Amazon—the online service that not only sells its customers a vast array of merchandise but also anticipates what they may want to purchase by offering an endless stream of targeted recommendations and by listing what customers who bought a particular item also purchased.

A company that has the computing power to predict the consuming habits of each of its tens of millions of customers could easily handle a few thousand different sales tax rates.

At stake are not only Amazon’s convenience and state revenue loss. By taking a hard line on sales tax collection, Amazon is contributing to the anti-tax sentiment that is doing so much harm to the country. Everyone likes a bargain, but it should not come at the expense of revenues needed to sustain vital public services.

Corporate America’s Paid Holiday

According to the old saying, insanity can be defined as doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting different results. But what do you call corporate executives who want the country to adopt a business tax policy that has failed miserably in the past? Crazy like a fox.

Such self-serving fiscal delusion is on full display in the current push for a “repatriation holiday.” A slew of major U.S.-based corporations are proposing that they be allowed to bring home many billions of dollars in largely untaxed overseas profits and, for a limited time, pay only a fraction of the statutory rate. According to a corporate front group called Working to Invest Now in America, or WinAmerica, this is “a common sense solution that will immediately inject up to $1 trillion into our economy and provide businesses with the security and certainty they need to help get Americans back to work.”

The group should really be called ConAmerica. The corporate titans are proposing a scheme that was tried and failed miserably only a few years ago, not to mention the fact that it would reward big business for practices that already deprive the country of huge amounts of tax revenue and countless jobs.

First, a bit of background. Although the U.S. Internal Revenue Code is designed to tax corporations on their worldwide profits, it contains a provision that allows companies to defer paying domestic taxes on overseas earnings as long as they stay with a firm’s foreign affiliates.

That may sound reasonable to some, but what corporate giants designate as overseas profits actually includes disguised domestic earnings. That’s because corporate tax dodging frequently takes the form of accounting gimmicks that shift reported earnings to subsidiaries in tax haven countries like the Cayman Islands and Bermuda.

This is done in a variety of ways. A company may transfer ownership of valuable patents and trademarks to a tax haven subsidiary, which then collects royalties from other parts of the company. Earnings stripping is a similar ploy that involves bogus interest payments. And then there’s the big daddy of multinational tax schemes: transfer pricing. This is the practice of exchanging goods and services among parts of a corporation at rates that have little relation to real costs.

The objective of all these tricks is to maximize reported income in countries that subject profits to minimum taxation—or none at all. Thanks to the deferral rule, a lot less is paid to Uncle Sam. It is estimated that transfer pricing costs the U.S. Treasury more than $28 billion a year.

Having engaged in this brazen tax dodging, corporations now want the right to bring the profits back home and get another tax break through the repatriation holiday. Their complaints about the need from relief from U.S. tax rates sound a lot like those of the proverbial murder who kills his parents and then pleads for sympathy as an orphan.

What makes the chutzpah quotient of the repatriation holiday advocates even higher is that they are promoting the idea in the face of documented evidence of its ineffectiveness. In 2004 a similar big business campaign succeeded in getting Congress to enact a repatriation holiday that brought the statutory tax rate on the returning profits down to 5.25 percent for the following year only. The plan was dressed up as the Homeland Investment Act, which was part of the American Jobs Creation Act.

The 2005 tax holiday was hailed as a success by corporate apologists for repatriating some $312 billion in profits for more than 800 large companies led by pharmaceutical giants Pfizer, Merck and Eli Lilly.

What they don’t emphasize is that the plan was a dismal failure in its stated purpose of generating jobs and investment in the United States. This should not have come as a complete surprise, since Congress allowed companies to use the repatriated profits for other purposes such as acquisitions and repayment of debt. Another factor was the old problem of the fungibility of money.

According to an analysis produced for the National Bureau of Economic Research, the 2005 repatriation holiday did not lead to an increase in domestic investment, domestic employment or R&D spending. The biggest impact, the report found, was an increase in stock buybacks by corporations, which was not one of the intended purposes of the legislation.

In other words, the tax holiday was a scam. Instead of stimulating job growth, it served as yet another way for large corporations to continue shrinking their contribution to the costs of running the U.S. government that serves them so well. In fact, some of the companies that benefited most from the holiday—such as Merck—carried out large-scale layoffs of U.S. workers during the time they were bringing those profits home.

Six years later, the same misleading claims are being made for repeating the practice that did so little good. What makes this especially frustrating is that it is taking place not long after Barack Obama made the issue of deferred taxes an issue in his presidential election campaign and then sought to increase taxation of foreign profits during his first year in office. Those plans have been forgotten, and now the repatriation holiday proponents are riding high, despite estimates that the scheme would result in a loss of $78 billion in federal revenues over the next decade.

Fortunately, not everyone is being taken in by WinAmerica. Along with stalwart critics such as Citizens for Tax Justice—which calls the idea “amnesty for corporate tax dodgers”—the repatriation holiday is being attacked by newer groups such as US Uncut, whose main target is WinAmerica ringleader Apple Inc.

One of US Uncut’s slogans is “Tax Dodging. Is there an app for that?” Actually, no app is necessary as long as Congress goes on buying the tax-break snake oil of Corporate America.

Toxic Legacies

Bunker-Hill_smelter — Bunker Hill smelter circa 1984

In his novel Bleak House, Charles Dickens invented the interminable lawsuit Jarndyce and Jarndyce to satirize the dysfunctional British court system. A real-life Jarndyce case just settled in U.S. federal court illustrates the glacial pace at which hazardous waste cleanup disputes get resolved and undermines the arguments of those who want to weaken environmental enforcement.

Hecla Mining Company has agreed to pay $263 million plus interest to resolve a lawsuit dating back 20 years. In 1991 Hecla and other mining companies were sued by the Coeur d’Alene Tribe over damages to natural resources in Idaho’s Silver Valley caused by some 100 million tons of toxic mining waste released into local waterways over the decades. A smelter used by the companies caused massive lead emissions that contaminated soil and showed up at high levels in the bloodstream of local children. The federal government joined the case in 1996.

The lawsuit was filed after years of efforts by the mining companies to evade responsibility for cleaning up one of the country’s most polluted areas, which was designed the Bunker Hill Superfund site in 1983. The federal government began spending several hundred million dollars on the cleanup—costs that the lawsuit was meant to recoup. (The eventual cost would surpass $2 billion.)

The corporate defendants made that recovery process as difficult and time-consuming as possible. One company, Gulf Resources and Chemical, went bankrupt in the 1990s, leaving little in the way of assets. Another, Asarco, also filed for bankruptcy in 2005 in an apparent attempt to sidestep huge environmental liabilities around the country, but the U.S. Justice Department was later able to get the company that took it over, Grupo Mexico, to pay $1.8 billion for cleanup costs at more than 80 toxic sites in 19 states, including $436 million for the Bunker Hill site.

The new Hecla settlement is welcome news, but the fact that it has taken nearly three decades from designation of the Bunker Hill site to this financial resolution indicates there is something seriously wrong with the Superfund system (and the courts).

Ironically, the Bunker Hill story is in many ways a best-case scenario in that the federal government was able—eventually—to recover a substantial portion of its cleanup costs. In numerous cases, responsible corporate parties no longer exist or don’t have adequate assets.

Congress anticipated this problem when it established the Superfund program in 1980. It created a trust fund for the program that received revenues generated by excise taxes on two highly polluting industries—petroleum and chemicals—as well as a corporate environmental income tax. The sources boosted the trust fund balance to nearly $4 billion by end of 1996.

The authority for these “polluter pays” taxes expired in 1995, and the balance began to dwindle, reaching zero in 2004. In recent years, Congress has kept the fund alive through modest appropriations, but these are subject to political whims.

Last year the Obama Administration called for reinstatement of the Superfund tax, giving a boost to the lonely efforts of Oregon Rep. Earl Blumenauer and New Jersey Senator Frank Lautenberg. However, given the current composition of Congress, that proposal seems to be going nowhere.

Unfortunately, the choice is not simply between a Superfund program financed by polluting industries and one funded by the general public. If some conservative groups had their way, the Superfund program would be eliminated outright or weakened by transferring responsibility to the states.

Think how that would have played out in Idaho, where state officials kept their distance from the Bunker Hill case until the last minute, when they signed on to get a cut of the money from Hecla. For years, those officials (along with members of the state’s Congressional delegation) vilified the Environmental Protection Agency for aggressively pursuing the Bunker Hill cleanup while they said little about the companies that caused the mess.

That anti-EPA attitude is, alas, all too common today among corporate apologists both in Washington and in many states. The Superfund program, for all its limitations, remains one of our main tools for dealing with the legacy of corporate environmental irresponsibility. It needs to be on as firm a footing as possible.

Fighting Unions in Bizarro World

bob-king — UAW President Bob King (left)

Some right-wingers in Congress appear to be envious of their state counterparts who have been attacking labor rights in legislatures across the country.

They were given an opportunity to engage in some union-bashing of their own at a recent hearing of the House subcommittee on Health, Employment, Labor and Pensions, known as HELP.

The Right is already up in arms about a National Labor Relations Board complaint charging Boeing with shifting work from its unionized operations in Washington State to union-unfriendly South Carolina to retaliate against worker activism. Now HELP chair Phil Roe of Tennessee is accusing the Board of making it easier for unions to use corporate campaign tactics against employers.

Roe and other panel Republicans seem to be living in a parallel universe in which large numbers of companies are forced to their knees by ruthless corporate campaigns, and workers suffer from intimidation not from anti-union employers but from labor thugs who will stop at nothing in their organizing efforts.

The depiction of this bizarro world was aided by the choice of witnesses at the hearing. There were, of course, no union representatives. Instead, the panel included the president of a janitorial company in Indiana that had been targeted by the Service Employees International Union; a contractor from New Mexico representing the anti-union Associated Builders and Contractors; and a partner in the law firm of Morgan, Lewis & Bockius, which is infamous for its work in opposition to organizing drives.

The only shred of legitimacy came from the one other witness—Catherine Fisk, a law professor from the University of California-Irvine—whose testimony documented the legal justification for the tactics that make up corporate campaigns. But she was mainly ignored by the subcommittee Republicans, who spent most of their time lavishing praise on the two business owners, especially the janitorial executive, David Bego, who has self-published a book about his struggle with the SEIU entitled THE DEVIL AT MY DOORSTEP.

Excerpts from the book on the web begin as follows: “It was a nasty, ugly, three-year, million-dollar war I did not ask for, but had to win. Otherwise, the business I loved would be infiltrated by a scheming labor union determined to undermine employee privacy rights and destroy my version of the American Dream.” Bego also pursued his dream by campaigning aggressively against the Employee Free Choice Act.

Attacks on corporate campaigns have surfaced before in Congress from time to time. These go nowhere, because any restrictions would inevitably violate the First Amendment and the National Labor Relations Act. The real counter-offensive comes in the courts, where large companies such as Smithfield Foods, Wackenhut and Cintas have filed racketeering lawsuits to harass unions engaged in such campaigns.

Apart from the Boeing-NLRB controversy, which has little to do with corporate campaigns, it is curious that a new foray against this union tool would occur now. Unfortunately, there has not been an explosion of aggressive organizing drives, and union density in the private sector is dwindling.

But perhaps Rep. Roe is concerned about what may be coming next in his home state. Roe’s district is not far from Chattanooga, where Volkswagen recently opened a $1 billion auto assembly plant. The workers there currently have no union protection, but that could change. The United Auto Workers has announced a new effort to organize the foreign auto plants clustered in the southeast, and the union’s new president Bob King vows it will be much more vigorous than past initiatives.

The UAW has not indicated which producer will be targeted first, but VW is probably a leading candidate. The German company recently shook up the auto world by revealing that it will keep its labor costs in Chattanooga far below not only those of its Detroit rivals but also those of U.S. plants run by Japanese competitors such as Toyota and Honda. With wage and benefit offerings at rock-bottom level, VW workers might very well be receptive to what the UAW has to offer.

A successful union organizing drive in eastern Tennessee would be a nightmare for the likes of Phil Roe. Fortunately, there is probably little he can do to prevent that possibility.

Corporate Taxes and Corporate Power

In his 2009 utopian novel Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us, Ralph Nader conjures up a scenario in which a group of enlightened retired U.S. billionaires spark a populist uprising against excessive corporate power. One of the prime issues in the revolt is widespread tax dodging by big business, aided by the various forms of corporate welfare inserted in the tax code by compliant members of Congress.

Among the real-life characters in Nader’s fantasy is Bob McIntyre (misspelled as MacIntyre), head of Citizens for Tax Justice. For more than 30 years, CTJ has been shining a light on the inequities in the U.S. tax system. During the 1980s CTJ issued a series of reports that documented the disastrous consequences of the Reagan business tax cuts and paved the way for the Tax Reform Act of 1986. That law closed many of the loopholes and cracked down on tax shelters, reversing the precipitous decline in corporate tax payments—until George W. Bush came along.

Alas, Nader’s vision has not come to pass, though a funhouse-mirror version of it can be seen in the pseudo-populist Tea Party movement instigated by some very different billionaires, the rightwing Koch Brothers. Yet McIntyre and CTJ are still on the scene and re-fighting the battles of the 1980s. Now, as then, CTJ stands out for naming names—listing the specific large corporations that pay little or no federal income taxes.

CTJ has just released a preview of its new study of corporate tax avoidance that identifies a dozen major companies—including the likes of General Electric, DuPont and Wells Fargo—that together paid less than nothing in federal income taxes over the past three years. The dirty dozen had total U.S. pretax profits of $171 billion for the period but had a combined effective tax rate of negative 1.5 percent.

Had these companies paid the full 35 percent statutory corporate rate, CTJ notes, their combined tax bill would have been about $60 billion. Instead, they got $2.5 billion from Uncle Sam. The $62 billion difference exacerbated the country’s budget deficits and national debt.

It would be comforting to imagine that brazen corporate tax avoidance is leading us to a replay of the backlash of 1986, with changes to the tax code that force big business to pay something closer to its fair share of the costs of running a government that treats it so well.

Unfortunately, that now seems as unlikely as Nader’s rebellion of the billionaires—and the reason is not just the intransigence of Republicans. The Obama Administration has adopted the bizarre position that any revenue gains from the elimination of business tax subsidies should be used to fund new reductions in the statutory corporate tax rate, which virtually no large companies pay.

In other words, the debate over corporate tax reform within the Washington establishment is between the Obama Administration’s “revenue-neutral” approach and the desire of the Republicans to shrink corporate tax liability to a point at which it can be given the Grover Norquist drowning-in-the-bathtub treatment. Corporate taxes account for less than 9 percent of federal revenues, so we have already moved far in that direction.

CTJ, to its credit, is calling for a revenue-positive approach to corporate tax reform to help alleviate the country’s fiscal problems, as are other progressive groups such as the new US Uncut movement. But there are more fundamental reasons to make business pay more.

The windfall profits produced by tax dodging also serve to enhance the overall power of large corporations and make it easier for them to engage in anti-social behavior. It is telling that CTJ’s list of major tax avoiders includes several companies—including Boeing and Verizon—that are leading foes of unions and several others—including Exxon Mobil and American Electric Power—that are key environmental villains.

A fatter bottom line for such companies means they have more money to fight stricter regulation and consumer protection, more money to undermine labor organizing drives, more money for dubious mergers and acquisitions that reduce competition, more for lavish executive compensation packages, and of course, more for lobbying and public relations efforts to make sure that overall public policy continues to serve the needs of corporations above all else.

Restoring corporate tax payments to more appropriate levels will not by itself reform big business, but it would make it easier for the rest of us to accomplish that without waiting for a group of retired billionaires to come to the rescue.

Targeting Target

The news of a union organizing drive at a group of Target Corporation stores in the New York City area raises the tantalizing possibility that the master of cheap chic may finally be knocked off its pedestal.

For years, Target has used its stylish image to obscure the fact that many of its employment and other practices are not significantly different from those of its scandal-ridden rival, Wal-Mart. It’s even managed to get itself included on a list of the “world’s most ethical corporations.”

Target’s stores, like those of Wal-Mart’s U.S. operations, are entirely non-union, and the company intends to keep them that way. The New York Times account of the organizing drive has Jim Rowader, Target’s vice president for labor relations, spouting the usual corporate rhetoric about how a union (the UFCW) would undermine the supposed trust that the company has built up with its workers. BNA’s Labor Relations Week (subscription-only) reports that Target is subjecting workers to captive meetings “conducted by store management in an attempt to dissuade workers from seeking union representation.”

Since no representation elections have been held yet, it is unclear whether Target will follow the lead of Wal-Mart in eliminating the jobs of those who dare to vote in favor of a union.

Target does not have a reputation quite as abhorrent as that of Wal-Mart when it comes to other employment practices, but neither is its record untarnished. It has been accused of subjecting its largely part-time workforce to the same abuses—inadequate wages, restrictions on health coverage, overtime violations, etc.—seen among other big-box retailers. Though not as often as Wal-Mart, Target has shown up on lists prepared by state governments of the employers with the most workers or their dependents receiving taxpayer-funded healthcare benefits. Target has fought against living wage campaigns, most notably in Chicago in 2006, when it threatened to cancel plans for two new stores in the city unless Mayor Richard Daley vetoed a wage ordinance (which he did).

Target has also faced accusations relating to the treatment of minority applicants and employees. In 2007 the company paid a total of more than $1.2 million to settle cases brought by the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission involving alleged racial discrimination in hiring in Wisconsin and a racially hostile environment in Pennsylvania.

There have been controversies involving the treatment of workers by Target suppliers and contractors, as well. In 2002 Target was one of a group of retailers that together paid $20 million to settle class-action lawsuits charging them with permitting sweatshop conditions at factories run by their suppliers in Saipan, part of the U.S. Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands in the Pacific. A 2006 report by SOMO, a Dutch research center on transnational corporations, documented other instances in which Target garment suppliers were reported to be abusing workers and the retailer did little in response.

Target has a history of hiring janitorial contractors for its U.S. stores that tend to engage in rampant wage theft. In 2004 one such contractor, Global Building Services, paid $1.9 million to settle an overtime-violation case brought by the federal government on behalf of immigrant workers. In 2009 another Target cleaning contractor, Prestige Maintenance USA, settled an overtime lawsuit for up to $3.8 million.

Labor practices are not the only area in which Target’s accountability record falls short. Earlier this year, the company had to pay $22.5 million to settle civil charges that its operations throughout California had violated laws relating to the dumping of hazardous wastes. Target has had a good record on gay rights, though last year the company found itself at the center of a controversy after it was revealed to have contributed to a business PAC which in turn contributed to a gubernatorial candidate in Minnesota who campaigned against gay marriage (among other reactionary positions). Target later apologized.

And then there’s the matter of subsidies. Like Wal-Mart, Target has extracted lucrative tax breaks and other forms of financial assistance from many of the communities where it has built stores or distribution centers. One of its more audacious efforts was a proposal for a $1.7 billion mixed-use project in the Minneapolis suburb of Brooklyn Park, for which Target wanted more than $20 million in property tax abatements and a public contribution of $60 million for infrastructure costs. Despite seeking all this taxpayer assistance, Target demanded a waiver from the city’s living-wage policy for many contract and part-time workers who would be employed at the site.

Perhaps the best thing that can be said about Target, aside from its style, is that it is much smaller than Wal-Mart. Its total revenues are only about one-sixth of the worldwide sales (and less than one-quarter of U.S. sales) of the Bentonville behemoth. Target’s workforce of 355,000, all in the United States, is dwarfed by Wal-Mart’s domestic headcount of 1.4 million and another 700,000 abroad. Target thus has a much smaller impact on overall labor practices and the global supply chain.

What impact it does have is not salubrious. Now that it is facing some union pressure, let’s hope Target breaks from Wal-Mart and decides that it is makes sense to treat its workers with as much respect as its customers.

NOTE: Speaking of subsidies, the Subsidy Tracker database I created for Good Jobs First has just been expanded and now has more than 65,000 entries covering 154 subsidy programs in 37 states.