Corporate Social Irresponsibility

The catastrophic Exxon Valdez oil spill of 1989 gave rise to the modern corporate social responsibility movement; the current spill in the Gulf of Mexico marks its collapse.

The past two decades have been an experiment in corporate behavior modification. An array of well-intentioned organizations such as CERES promoted the idea that large companies could be made to do the right thing by getting them to sign voluntary codes of conduct and adopt other seemingly enlightened policies on environmental and social issues.

At first there was resistance, but big business soon realized the advantages of projecting an ethical image: So much so that corporate social responsibility (known widely as CSR) is now used as a selling point by many firms. Chevron, for example, has an ad campaign with the tagline “Will You Join Us” that is apparently meant to convey the idea that the oil giant is in the vanguard of efforts to save the earth.

What also made CSR appealing to corporations was the recognition that it could serve as a buffer against aggressive regulation. While CSR proponents in the non-profit sector were usually not pursuing a deregulatory agenda, the image of companies’ agreeing to act virtuously conveyed the message that strong government intervention was unnecessary. CSR thus dovetails with the efforts of corporations and their allies to undermine formal oversight of business activities. This is what General Electric was up to when it ran its Ecoimagination ads while lobbying to weaken air pollution rules governing the locomotives it makes.

Recent events put into question the meaning of a commitment to CSR. The company at the center of the Gulf oil disaster, BP, has long promoted itself as being socially responsible. A decade ago it adopted a sunburst logo, acknowledged that global warming was a problem and claimed to be going “beyond petroleum” by investing (modestly) in renewable energy sources.  What did all that social responsibility mean if the company could still, as the emerging evidence suggests, cut corners on safety in one of its riskiest activities—deepwater drilling? And how responsible is it for BP to join with rig owner Transocean and contractor Halliburton in pointing fingers at one another in an apparent attempt to diffuse liability?

BP is hardly unique in violating its self-professed “high standards.” This year has also seen the moral implosion of Toyota, another darling of the CSR world. It was only months after the Prius producer was chosen for Ethisphere’s list of “the world’s most ethical companies” that it came to light that Toyota had failed to notify regulators or the public about its defective gas pedals.

Goldman Sachs, widely despised these days for unscrupulous behavior during the financial meltdown, was a CSR pioneer in the investment banking world. In 2005 it was the first Wall Street firm to adopt a comprehensive environmental policy (after being pressured by groups such as Rainforest Action Network), and it established a think tank called the Center for Environmental Markets.

Even Massey Energy, which has remained defiant in the face of charges that a preoccupation with profit over safety led to the deaths of 29 coal miners in a recent explosion, publishes an annual CSR report.

When the members of a corporate rogues’ gallery such as this all profess to be practitioners of CSR, the concept loses much of its legitimacy. The best that can be said is that these companies may behave well in some respects while screwing up royally in others—the way that Wal-Mart is supposedly in the forefront of environmental reform while retaining its Neanderthal labor relations policies. Selective ethics, however, should be no more tolerable for corporations than it is for people.

Heaven forbid that we violate the free speech rights of CSR hypocrites, but there should be some mechanism—perhaps truth-in-image-advertising laws—to curb the ability of corporations to go on deceiving the public.

Bad Karma in the Gulf of Mexico Oil Disaster

British Petroleum is, rightfully, taking a lot of grief for the massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, but we should save some of our vituperation for Transocean Ltd., the company that leased the ill-fated Deepwater Horizon drilling rig to BP. Transocean is no innocent bystander in this matter. It presumably has some responsibility for the safety condition of the rig, which its employees helped operate (nine of them died in the April 20 explosion).

Transocean also brings some bad karma to the situation. The company, the world’s largest offshore drilling contractor, is the result of a long series of corporate mergers and acquisitions dating back decades. One of the firms that went into that mix was Sedco, which was founded in 1947 as Southeastern Drilling Company by Bill Clements, who would decades later become a conservative Republican governor of Texas.

In 1979 a Sedco rig in the Gulf of Mexico leased to a Mexican oil company experienced a blowout, resulting in what was at the time the worst oil spill the world had ever seen. As he surveyed the oil-fouled beaches of the Texas coast, Gov. Clements made the memorable remarks: “There’s no use in crying over spilled milk. Let’s don’t get excited about this thing” (Washington Post 9/11/1979).

At the time, Sedco was being run by Clements’s son, and the family controlled the company’s stock. The federal government sued Sedco over the spill, claiming that the rig was unseaworthy and its crew was not properly trained. The feds sought about $12 million in damages, but Sedco drove a hard bargain and got away with paying the government only $2 million. It paid about the same amount to settle lawsuits filed by fishermen, resorts and other Gulf businesses. Sedco was sold in 1984 to oil services giant Schlumberger, which transferred its offshore drilling operations to what was then known as Transocean Offshore in 1999.

In 2000 an eight-ton anchor that accidentally fell from a Transocean rig in the Gulf of Mexico ruptured an underwater pipeline, causing a spill of nearly 100,000 gallons of oil. In 2003 a fire broke out on a company rig off the Texas coast, killing one worker and injuring several others. As has been reported in recent days, a series of fatal accidents at company operations last year prompted the company to cancel executive bonuses.  It’s also come out that in 2005 a Transocean rig in the North Sea had been cited by the UK’s Health and Safety Executive for a problem similar to what apparently caused the Gulf accident.

Safety is not the only blemish on Transocean’s record. It is one of those companies that engaged in what is euphemistically called corporate inversion—moving one’s legal headquarters overseas to avoid U.S. taxes. Transocean first moved its registration to the Cayman Islands in 1999 and then to Switzerland in 2008. It kept its physical headquarters in Houston, though last year it moved some of its top officers to Switzerland to be able to claim that its principal executive offices were there.

In addition to skirting U.S. taxes, Transocean has allegedly tried to avoid paying its fair share in several countries where its subsidiaries operate. The company’s 10-K annual report admits that it has been assessed additional amounts by tax authorities in Brazil and that it is the subject of civil and criminal tax investigations in Norway.

In 2007 there were reports that Transocean was among a group of oil services firms being investigated for violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act in connection with alleged payoffs to customs officials in Nigeria. No charges have been filed.

An army of lawyers will be arguing over the relative responsibility of the various parties in the Gulf spill for a long time to come. But one thing is clear: Transocean, like BP, brought a dubious legacy to this tragic situation.

Using Financial Reform to Promote Deregulation

Growing public rage over Wall Street misbehavior has snapped the Senate out of its lethargy on financial reform. Amid the get-tough posturing, however, the impulse to lighten the regulatory “burden” on business has not completely disappeared.

When Senate Republicans unveiled their alternative approach to reform on April 26, buried in the document was a provision that called for less rather than more regulation. The GOP proposal would make smaller publicly traded companies exempt from a key provision of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (Sarbox, for short), the corporate accountability law enacted in 2002 in response to the accounting scandals at companies such as Enron and WorldCom.

The provision in question, Section 404, requires firms to maintain a system of internal controls to ensure the integrity of their financial statements, which must include an audited assessment of the adequacy of those measures. A breakdown in such controls is an invitation to financial fraud.

Senate Republicans would like to provide an immediate exemption to companies with a market capitalization of $150 million or less and would instruct the Securities and Exchange Commission to explore the possibility of setting the cutoff even higher. The SEC has already delayed implementation of the Section 404 requirement for smaller firms, and it convened a business-dominated advisory committee that recommended consideration of Sarbox relaxation for firms with market capitalization up to $787 million. The Commission, however, has refused to create a permanent exemption.

Truth be told, it is not just Republicans who are pushing the exemption idea. The financial reform bill that passed the House in December contains a Section 404 small-business exemption that was proposed – against the wishes of Financial Services Committee Chair Barney Frank – by Democrat John Adler along with Republican Scott Garrett, both of New Jersey. The amendment passed with the blessing of the Obama Administration, with White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel personally lobbying members of the Committee on its behalf.  Senator Dodd, however, did not include a small-business exemption in his financial reform bill.

The Sarbox small-firm carve-out may win some friends in business circles, but it entails serious risks. Chief among them is that the exemption could serve as a stepping stone to further weakening or abolition of the entire law.

This is more than a remote possibility. Republicans make no secret of their distaste for Sarbox in general and have used this as a theme in criticizing the Dodd bill. South Carolina Senator Jim DeMint called that bill “Sarbanes-Oxley on steroids,” adding: “Like Sarbanes-Oxley, it is reactionary legislation that’s more likely to hurt U.S. businesses than reform the financial system.” A recent Wall Street Journal editorial denounced Dodd’s bill as “a souped-up version of the Sarbanes-Oxley bill of 2002 – that is, a collection of ill-understood reforms whose main achievement will be to make Wall Street even more the vassal of Washington.”

Congress is not the only arena where Sarbanes-Oxley is under assault. The U.S. Supreme Court is expected to rule soon on a challenge by the rabidly anti-regulation Competitive Enterprise Institute to the legitimacy of the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board, which was created by Sarbox by regulate public accounting firms. Some legal observers believe that a high court ruling against the Board could lead to the demise of Sarbox in its entirety.

Even if this dark scenario does not come to pass, does it make sense to loosen the controls on smaller firms? Fraudulent behavior is hardly unknown among public companies of modest size. In fact, such companies have long been used as vehicles for criminal enterprises. A 1996 Business Week investigation found that “substantial elements of the small-cap market have been turned into a veritable Mob franchise, under the very noses of regulators and law enforcement.”

Lately, the focus has been on the sins of the financial giants, but that’s no reason to dilute oversight of smaller players. Now’s a time for tightening regulation across the board.

The (Investment) House Always Wins

Goldman Sachs, which has long prided itself on being one of the smartest operators on Wall Street, has apparently decided that the best way to defend itself against federal fraud charges is to plead incompetence. The firm is taking the position that it is not guilty of misleading investors in a 2007 issue of mortgage securities because it allegedly lost money – more than $90 million, it claims – on its own stake in the deal.

In fact, Goldman would have us believe that it took a bath in the overall mortgage security arena. This story line is a far cry from the one put forth a couple of years ago, when the firm was being celebrated for anticipating the collapse in the mortgage market and shielding itself – though not its clients. In a November 2007 front-page article headlined “Goldman Sachs Rakes in Profit in Credit Crisis,” the New York Times reported that the firm “continued to package risky mortgages to sell to investors” while it reduced its own holdings in such securities and bought “expensive insurance as protection against further losses.” In 2007 Goldman posted a profit of $11.6 billion (up from $9.5 billion the year before), and CEO Lloyd Blankfein took home $70 million in compensation (not counting another $45 million in value he realized upon the vesting of previously granted stock awards). Some bath.

Goldman is not the only one rewriting financial history. Many of the firm’s mainstream critics are talking as if it is unheard of for an investment bank to act contrary to the interests of its clients, as Goldman is accused of doing by failing to disclose that it allowed hedge fund operator John Paulson to choose a set of particularly toxic mortgage securities for Goldman to peddle while Paulson was betting heavily that those securities would tank.

In fact, the history of Wall Street is filled with examples in which investment houses sought to hoodwink investors. Rampant stock manipulation, conflicts of interest and other fraudulent practices exposed by the Pecora Commission prompted the regulatory reforms of the 1930s. Those reforms reduced but did not eliminate shady practices. The 1950s and early 1960s saw a series of scandals involving firms on the American Stock Exchange that in 1964 inspired Congress to impose stricter disclosure requirements for over-the-counter securities.

The corporate takeover frenzy of the 1980s brought with it a wave of insider trading scandals. The culprits in these cases involved not only independent speculators such as Ivan Boesky, but also executives at prominent investment houses, above all Michael Milken of Drexel Burnham. Also caught in the net was Robert Freeman, head of risk arbitrage at Goldman, who in 1989 pleaded guilty to criminal charges. When players such as Freeman and Milken traded on inside information, they were profiting at the expense of other investors, including their own clients, who were not privy to that information.

During the past decade, various major banks were accused of helping crooked companies deceive investors. For example, in 2004 Citigroup agreed to pay $2.7 billion to settle such charges brought in connection with WorldCom and later paid $1.7 billion to former Enron investors. In 2005 Goldman and three other banks paid $100 million to settle charges in connection with WorldCom.

In other words, the allegation that Goldman was acting contrary to the interest of its clients in the sale of synthetic collateralized debt obligations was hardly unprecedented.

What’s not getting much attention during the current scandal is that in late 2007 Goldman had found another way to profit by exploiting its clients, though in this case the clients were not investors but homeowners.

Goldman quietly purchased a company called Litton Loan Servicing, a leading player in the business of servicing subprime (and frequently predatory) home mortgages. “Servicing” in this case means collecting payments from homeowners who frequently fall behind in payments and are at risk of foreclosure. As I wrote in 2008, Litton is “a type of collection agency dealing with those in the most vulnerable and desperate financial circumstances.” At the end of 2009, Litton was the 4th largest subprime servicer, with a portfolio of some $52 billion (National Mortgage News 4/5/2010).

Litton has frequently been charged with engaging in abusive practices, including the imposition of onerous late fees that allegedly violate the Real Estate Settlement Procedures Act. It has also been accused of being overly aggressive in pushing homeowners into foreclosure when they can’t make their payments.

Many of these complaints have ended up in court. According to the Justia database, Litton has been sued more than 300 times in federal court since the beginning of 2007. That year a federal judge in California granted class-action status to a group of plaintiffs, but the court later limited the scope of the potential damages, resulting in a settlement in which Litton agreed to pay out $500,000.

Meanwhile, individual lawsuits continue to be filed. Many of the more recent ones involve disputes over loan modifications. Complaints in this area persist even though Litton is participating in the Obama Administration’s Home Affordable Modification Program and is thus eligible for incentive payments through an extension of the Toxic Assets Relief Program.

There seems to be no end to the ways that Goldman manages to make money from toxic assets.  On Wall Street, as in Las Vegas, the house always wins.

BONUS FEATURE: Federal regulation of business leaves a lot to be desired, but it is worth knowing where to find information on those enforcement activities that are occurring. The Dirt Diggers Digest can help with our new Enforcement page, which has links to online enforcement data from a wide range of federal agencies. The page also includes links to inspection data, product recall announcements and lists of companies debarred from doing business with the federal government.

The People’s Regulator

Government regulation of business is looking pretty lame these days. After 29 workers were killed in an explosion at a Massey Energy mine in West Virginia, it came to light that the facility had accumulated more than 1,300 safety violations over the past five years but was not shut down by the Mine Safety and Health Administration – an agency labeled a “meek watchdog” in a recent New York Times headline.

It has also been revealed that Toyota managed to keep critical information about faulty gas pedals from federal regulators in an ultimately unsuccessful effort to avoid a massive recall of its vehicles. A pair of recent reports show that regulatory oversight of Citigroup was deficient both before and after the banking giant had to be bailed out by taxpayers. Again and again, it’s the same old story: aggressive corporations riding roughshod over feckless regulators.

Compare this to what recently happened when Consumer Reports issued a “don’t buy recommendation” for a Lexus sport-utility vehicle because its testing had shown a risk of rollovers. Within hours after the warning was issued, Toyota, the parent company of Lexus, announced that it would suspend sales of the GX 460. A company official stated: “We are taking the situation with the GX 460 very seriously and are determined to identify and correct the issue Consumer Reports identified.”

Toyota’s quick response was undoubtedly part of its effort to control the damage to its reputation from the sudden-acceleration controversy, but it also demonstrates the power of Consumer Reports. More than a magazine, it is a bulwark against shoddy manufacturing and dishonest practices that threaten the physical and financial well-being of the public. It is the people’s regulator.

The potency of Consumer Reports stems from its rock-solid integrity and its complete independence from the companies it is monitoring. While the magazine is often taken for granted these days, CR and its non-profit parent Consumers Union have not always been revered during their 70-plus years of existence.

The challenges Consumers Union (CU) faced in its early decades are documented in the work of Norman Silber, who wrote a dissertation on the subject in 1978 (available via the Dissertations & Theses database) which became the 1983 book Test and Protest.

CU was established in 1936 by a group of engineers, researchers, writers and editors who were unabashedly leftwing and saw their work as complementary to the growing labor movement. The organization’s mission was, Silber notes, threatening not only to manufacturers but also to the commercial media, which saw its independent product ratings as “an unfair and subversive attack upon legitimate advertising.” Many major magazines and newspapers refused to let CU advertise Consumer Reports in their pages.

CU was also an early target of the House Un-American Activities Committee, though the scrupulously non-partisan content of Consumer Reports saved the organization from serious persecution. During the anti-communist hysteria of the 1950s, Silber recounts, CU suspended its reporting on labor conditions in the industries whose products it rated. Its own staff remained unionized, though it switched from the leftist Book and Magazine Guild to the more mainstream Newspaper Guild.

CU did nothing to dilute its assessment of business practices. During the late 1950s it was especially critical of the tobacco industry for engaging in misleading advertising and for selling a dangerous product. CU also took on the dairy industry over the issue of milk contamination caused by radioactive fallout. And it began arguing for improved auto safety starting well before Ralph Nader appeared on the scene. In the 1970s CU successfully pressured federal regulators to improve standards for microwave ovens to address radiation leakage.

CU also did not flinch when the recipients of poor product ratings decided to take the organization to court. It fought companies such as Bose audio and Suzuki Motor up to the Supreme Court to protect its right to offer candid assessments.

This is not to say that CU is completely above reproach. Critics have charged over the years that the organization’s preoccupation with product testing comes at the expense of broader consumer advocacy (this is what Nader said when he quit CU’s board in 1975). And in 2007 the organization suffered a black eye when it botched its testing of infant car seats and had to issue an unprecedented apology. Nonetheless, its overall track record, up through its reprimand of Lexus, is pretty impressive.

A private organization without formal enforcement powers is no substitute for government regulatory agencies, but CU does have something to teach those agencies – above all, that a watchdog can be truly effective only when it is completely uninfluenced by the companies it is monitoring.

It also helps to be able to issue definitive pronouncements about corporate misbehavior. CU’s statement about the dangers of the GX 460 was not tentative and was not subject to time-consuming appeals.

Once official regulators show as much spunk as the likes of Consumers Union, corporations may finally start to clean up their act.

Corporate Overkill

There is so much corporate misbehavior taking place around us that it is possible to lose one’s sense of outrage. But every so often a company comes along that is so brazen in its misdeeds that it quickly restores our indignation.

Massey Energy is one of those companies. Evidence is piling up suggesting that corporate negligence and an obsession with productivity above all else were responsible for the horrendous explosion at the Upper Big Branch mine in West Virginia that killed at least 25 workers.

This is not the first time Massey has been accused of such behavior. In 2008 a Massey subsidiary had to pay a record $4.2 million to settle federal criminal and civil charges of willful violation of mandatory safety standards in connection with a 2006 mine fire that caused the deaths of two workers in West Virginia.

Lax safety standards are far from Massey’s only sin. The unsafe conditions are made possible in part by the fact that Massey has managed to deprive nearly all its miners of union representation. That includes the workers at Upper Big Branch, who were pressured by management to vote against the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) during organizing drives in 1995 and 1997. As of the end of 2009, only 76 out of the company’s 5,851 employees were members of the UMWA.

Massey CEO Don Blankenship (photo) flaunts his anti-union animus. It’s how he made his corporate bones. Back in 1984 Blankenship, then the head of a Massey subsidiary, convinced top management to end its practice of adhering to the industry-wide collective bargaining agreements that the major coal operators negotiated with the UMWA. After the union called a strike, the company prolonged the dispute by employing harsh tactics. The walkout, marked by violence on both sides, lasted 15 months.

In the years that followed, Massey phased out its unionized operations, got rid of union members when it took over new mines and fought hard against UMWA organizing drives. Without union work rules, Massey has had an easier time cutting corners on safety.

Massey has shown a similar disregard for the well-being of the communities in which it operates. The company’s environmental record is abysmal. In 2000 a poorly designed waste dam at a Massey facility in Martin County, Kentucky collapsed, releasing some 250 million gallons of toxic sludge. The spill, larger than the infamous Buffalo Creek flood of 1972, contaminated 100 miles of rivers and streams and forced the governor to declare a 10-county state of emergency.

This and a series of smaller spills in 2001 caused such resentment that the UMWA and environmental groups—not normally the closest of allies—came together to denounce the company. In 2002 UMWA President Cecil Roberts was arrested at a demonstration protesting the spills.

In 2008 Massey had to pay a record $20 million civil penalty to resolve federal charges that its operations in West Virginia and Kentucky had violated the Clean Water Act more than 4,000 times.

And to top it off, Blankenship is a global warming denier.

Massey is one of those corporations that has apparently concluded that it is far more profitable to defy the law and pay the price. What it gains from flouting safety standards, labor protections and environmental safeguards far outweighs even those record penalties that have been imposed. At the same time, Massey’s track record is so bad that it seems to be impervious to additional public disgrace.

Faced with an outlaw company such as Massey, perhaps it is time for us to resurrect the idea of a corporate death penalty, otherwise known as charter revocation. If corporations are to have rights, they should also have responsibilities—and should face serious consequences when they violate those responsibilities in an egregious way.

Profit, Baby, Profit

President Obama’s drill-baby-drill (but not quite everywhere) gambit does not only link him to an environmentally backward policy. It also will force his Administration to defend one of the most dysfunctional federal programs in modern history: the Interior Department’s offshore oil and gas leasing system.

Interior’s Minerals Management Service (MMS) is supposed to collect royalties from companies drilling in offshore public waters. After new activity was restricted in the wake of the devastating spill off the coast of Santa Barbara, California in 1969, the oil industry sought to make its leases more profitable by pressing for reductions in these payments.

In the mid-1990s, when energy prices were low, Big Oil got Congress to expand the “royalty relief” provisions that were already in the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act of 1953. Royalties were supposed to return to higher rates when prices rebounded, but things got complicated. First, it came to light that MMS had failed to write those provisions into some 1,000 deepwater leases it signed in 1998 and 1999, putting into question its ability to collect billions of dollars in back royalties.

While this was being sorted out, one of the drilling companies – Kerr-McGee (now part of Anadarko Petroleum) – filed suit challenging the right of MMS to impose the higher royalties on any leases. The company’s self-serving arguments found a sympathetic ear in federal court. Last fall the Supreme Court declined to review an appellate ruling in favor of the company, thus allowing Anadarko to avoid paying more than $350 million in back royalties. For the industry as a whole, the Court blocked the Interior Department from trying to collect on a bill that the Government Accountability Office once estimated could run as high as $53 billion.

Then there’s the small matter of the wild parties and gifts that industry representatives lavished on MMS employees in charge of the agency’s royalty-in-kind program. In September 2008 Interior Department Inspector General Earl Devaney (now in charge of the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board) issued three reports describing gross misconduct at MMS, including cases in which agency employees were literally in bed with the industry. Devaney concluded that the royalty program was mired in “a culture of ethical failure.”

Not all MMS employees were bought off. Some agency auditors came forward and charged that they had been pressured by their superiors to terminate investigations of royalty underpayments.

Once the Obama Administration took office, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar took steps to clean up MMS. Last September he announced plans to terminate the royalty-in-kind program, whose staffers had been at the center of the sex and gifts scandal.

For a while it was unclear whether Salazar would tighten up the remaining royalty programs. In fact, he told the editorial board of the Houston Chronicle last fall that in some cases he thought drilling companies should pay even lower royalty rates. He changed his tune this year, and the Administration is seeking modest increases in royalties and fees.

Yet the entire offshore leasing program still amounts to a giant boondoggle. Thanks to the federal courts, artificially low royalty rates are now effectively an entitlement for the drilling industry. Research conducted by the Interior Department itself suggested that the incentives result in little additional oil production. Not to mention the environmental risks.

And now, thanks to a dubious calculation that making concessions on offshore drilling will help prospects for a climate bill, the Obama Administration is bringing about a major expansion of a program that is disastrous even if there are no spills. Profit, baby, profit.

A “Poster Child for Corporate Malfeasance”

One of the cardinal criticisms of large corporations is that they put profits before people. That tendency has been on full display in the recent behavior of transnational mining giant Rio Tinto, which has shown little regard for the well-being not only of its unionized workers but also of a group of executives who found themselves on trial for their lives in China.

The China story began last July, when four company executives — including Stern Hu, a Chinese-born Australian citizen — were arrested and initially charged with bribery and stealing state secrets, the latter offense carrying a potential death penalty. The charges, which most Western observers saw as trumped up, were made during a time of increasing tension between Rio and the Chinese government, one of the company’s largest customers, especially for iron ore.

Earlier in the year, debt-ridden Rio had announced plans to sell an 18 percent stake in itself to Chinalco, the state-backed Chinese aluminum company, for about $20 billion. Faced with strong shareholder and political opposition, Rio abandoned the deal in June 2009. The arrests may have been retaliation by the Chinese for being denied easier access to Australia’s natural riches.

Although Rio claimed to be standing by its employees, the case did not curb the company’s appetite for doing business with the deep-pocketed Chinese. Rio continued to negotiate with Beijing on large-scale iron ore sales. It seems never to have occurred to the company to terminate those talks until its people were freed. In fact, only weeks after the arrests, Rio’s chief executive Tom Albanese was, as Canada’s Globe and Mail put it on August 21, “trying to repair his company’s troubled relationship with China.”

Before long, Rio was negotiating with Chinalco about participating in a copper and gold mining project in Mongolia. One thing apparently led to another. In March 2010 — after its still-imprisoned employees had been officially indicted and were about to go on trial — Rio announced that it and Chinalco would jointly develop an iron ore project in the West African country of Guinea.

When that trial began a couple of weeks later, the Rio managers admitted guilt, but not to the more serious charge of stealing trade secrets. Instead, they said they had engaged in bribery — but as recipients rather than payers. While the four defendants may have been guilty of some impropriety, it is likely that the admissions were a calculated move to gain a lighter sentence in a proceeding whose outcome was predetermined. And that was the case in large part because their employer decided that its business dealings were more important than demanding justice for its employees.

Rio is no more interested in justice when it comes to its operations outside China. It has been accused of human rights violations in countries such as Indonesia and Papua New Guinea. And it has a track record of exploiting mineworkers in poor countries such as Namibia and South Africa while busting unions in places such as Australia. Recently, Rio showed its anti-union colors again in the United States.

On January 31 its U.S. Borax subsidiary locked out more than 500 workers at its borate mine in Kern County, California. The workers, members of Local 30 of the International Longshore & Warehouse Union had the audacity of voting against company demands for extensive contract concessions. The company wasted no time busing in replacement workers.

In a press release blaming the union for the lockout, U.S. Borax complained that ILWU members earned much more than workers at the company’s main competitor Eti Maden. The release conveniently fails to mention that Eti Maden’s operations are in Turkey.

Also missing from the company’s statement is the fact that the biggest driver of demand for boron – a material used in products ranging from glass wool to LCD screens – is the Chinese market. If U.S. Borax busts the ILWU in a way that keeps down boron prices, then the ultimate beneficiary may be Rio Tinto’s friends in China.

It is no surprise that mining industry critic Danny Kennedy once wrote that Rio Tinto “could be a poster child for corporate malfeasance.”

Throw the Bums Out — of the Boardroom

The financial reform bill just released by Senate Banking Committee Chairman Chris Dodd is facing a great deal of criticism for being too weak. Let me pile on by focusing on one of the less noticed parts of the bill: the provision dealing with the composition of financial institution boards of directors.

Among the many reasons for the financial debacle of the past few years was the failure of board members at the big commercial and investment banks to exercise any kind of meaningful oversight while the executives of those companies were applying the business principles of Charles Ponzi. This was a replay of what happened during the Enron and other corporate scandals of the early 2000s.

One of the key causes of feckless boards is the phenomenon of interlocking directorates — the tendency of large and powerful corporations to share directors. This happens when the chief executive of a big company or bank sits on the board of another corporate leviathan, or when retired business executives join multiple boards. In these cases the outside director can usually be counted on to endorse the strategies put forth by top management and to be generous when it comes to setting executive compensation policies. And perhaps be willfully ignorant when management is cooking the books.

According to the recent report from its bankruptcy examiner, that was the case when Lehman Brothers was engaged in its Repo 105 scam to hide the fact that its balance sheet was becoming overwhelmed by toxic assets. Prior to its collapse in 2008, the chair of the audit committee of Lehman’s board was the retired chief executive of Halliburton.

Tucked in Dodd’s 1,336-page bill is a short section (no. 164) that addresses the board issue by proposing a modification in what is known as the Depository Institutions Management Interlocks Act (DIMIA), an obscure law from 1978 that prohibits someone from sitting on the boards of more than one bank, depending on the size and location of the institutions. Dodd wants to apply DIMIA to the large nonbank financial companies that would be subject to additional regulation under his bill. In doing so he would bar the Federal Reserve from allowing any interlocks between those nonbank financial companies and large bank holding companies.

There’s nothing wrong with that, but it does not begin to address the corporate governance lapses that helped bring about the Wall Street meltdown. Those lapses showed that existing rules on corporate boards, such as those contained in the 2002 Sarbanes-Oxley Act, are not up to the task.

And we certainly can’t count on big financial institutions themselves to choose the best board members or even to exclude those whose track record should disqualify them. Citigroup made a big show last year of revamping its board, but the person it chose to chair that body was Jerry Grundhofer, who, in addition to being the former CEO of U.S. Bancorp, had served as a director of Lehman Brothers during its last ignominious year.

Another bailed out institution, Bank of America, also chose some new directors last year. Its choices included two former regulatory officials – Susan Bies of the Federal Reserve and Donald Powell of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation – whose agencies did little to detect or prevent the crisis. B of A also brought on Robert Scully, a former executive of Wall Street giant Morgan Stanley.

In the wake of the Enron scandal, groups such as the AFL-CIO called on companies on whose boards Enron’s outside directors also served to ease them out when they came up for reelection. In 2005 board members at Enron and at WorldCom had to pay millions of dollars of their own money to settle lawsuits brought by investors in the two companies brought down by fraud.

So far, those who served on the boards of the large banks have avoided a similar fate. It would be good to see them face litigation and public disapprobation, but at least they should be barred from continuing to serve on the boards of institutions where future financial crises may occur. Strengthening the rules against interlocks in a meaningful way would also help diminish cronyism in the boardroom.

Big Money requires the kind of strong external regulation that financial reform could conceivably bring about. That regulation should also make sure that institutions also have a decent first line of internal regulation in the form of truly independent and diligent board members.

Attacking the Wrong Earmarks

Congress is once again talking tough about budget earmarks. House Democratic leaders announced that they are banning earmarks designed to benefit for-profit entities, while House Republicans upped the ante by calling for the abolition of the practice across the board.

Even if this latest in a long line of anti-earmark initiatives takes hold, it will have limited impact on the channeling of taxpayer dollars to favored interests. The earmark database compiled by Taxpayers for Common Sense indicates that in the current fiscal year they amount to only $16 billion. And many of the 11,860 individual items cannot be linked to a specific recipient, making targeted bans meaningless.

Even the largest items linked to individual corporations—such as $19.5 million to Boeing for “Maui Space Surveillance System Operations and Research” in Hawaii; $12 million to BAE Systems for “Mk 45 Mod 5 Gun Depot Overhauls” in Kentucky; and $9.6 million to Northrop Grumman for “B-2 Advanced Tactical Data Link” in California—are drops in the bucket of $1 trillion in overall federal discretionary spending and a military budget of $530 billion.

It’s amusing to watch the posturing about these small amounts at a time when Congress may be about to endorse what can be seen as perhaps the largest earmark ever: the healthcare subsidies that will pass from lower-income Americans to private insurers in a public-option-less system. A new report from the Congressional Budget Office estimates that premium and cost-sharing subsidies under the current (pre-reconciliation) Senate version of the bill would cost $337 billion over the next decade. The TARP bailout was bigger, but in that case the taxpayers are recouping much of the outlay.

Healthcare is not the only example of how reform gets built on corporate handouts. The climate bill that passed the House last June (and got stalled in the Senate) would have essentially given away many of the emission allowances for the cap and trade system rather than requiring corporate polluters to pay in full for their greenhouse gas output.

Corporate subsidies are also at the heart of the job-creation initiatives making their way through Congress. Most Democrats have embraced the Republican notion that the best way to increase employment is to decrease business taxes. The same goes for federal efforts to promote renewable energy. At the center of the green jobs initiatives in the Recovery Act were corporate tax breaks such as the $2.3 billion Advanced Energy Manufacturing Tax Credit, which the Obama Administration would like to expand by $5 billion. The Administration also wants to give $8 billion in loan guarantees to the Southern Company to build a nuke in Georgia.

In addition to the direct contracts and tax breaks, corporate America is also in effect being subsidized by the unwillingness of much of Congress to tighten regulation of business, even in cases of reckless behavior. The delay and dilution that have characterized financial reform are worth billions to the banks. The moves to exempt sectors such as payday lenders from federal oversight is an enormous boon to those businesses.

Healthcare reform, climate-crisis mitigation, job creation, renewable energy development and financial reform are all laudable goals, but it is frustrating that they are all being pursued in ways that often reward the same large corporations that created many of the problems these initiatives are meant to address. And it is mind-boggling that the critics of this business-friendly agenda repeatedly denounce it as socialistic.

Democrats should spend less time posturing on earmarks and more time trying to figure out how they can fix what’s wrong with the country without giving away the store to big business.