“The Princely CEO’s Of Corporate Larceny”: Scurrilous Corporate Thieves Are Stealing Workers’ Comp
They say there’s honor among thieves, but I say: That depends on the thieves.
Your common street thief, yes — but not those princely CEOs of corporate larceny. America’s working families have learned the elites in the top suites are rewarded for being pickpockets, swindlers, thugs, and scoundrels, routinely committing mass economic violence against the majority of America’s working people to further enrich and empower themselves.
But now comes a cabal of about two-dozen corporate chieftains pushing a vicious new campaign of physical violence against workers. The infamous anti-labor bully, Walmart, is among the leaders, but so are such prestigious chains as Macy’s and Nordstrom, along with Lowe’s, Kohl’s, and Safeway. Their goal is to gut our nation’s workers’ compensation program, freeing corporate giants to injure or even kill employees in the workplace without having to cover all (or, in many cases, any) of the lost wages, medical care, or burial expenses of those harmed.
Started more than 100 years ago, workers’ comp insurance is one of our society’s most fundamental contracts between injured employees who give up the right to sue their companies for negligence when injured on the job and employers who pay for insurance to cover a basic level of medical benefits and wages for those harmed. Administered by state governments, benefits vary, and they usually fall far short of meeting the full needs of the injured people. But the program has at least provided an important measure of help and a bit of fairness to assuage the suffering of millions.
But even that’s too much for the avaricious thieves atop these multi-billion-dollar corporations. Why pay for insuring employees when it’s much cheaper just to buy state legislators who are willing to privatize workers’ comp? This lets corporations write their own rules of compensation to slash benefits, cut safety costs — and earn thieving CEOs bigger bonuses.
But who, you might ask, would help these corporate crooks in their callous and calculating scheme to rob workers of their hard-earned benefits? Why, that would be the work of ARAWC — the Association for Responsible Alternatives to Workers’ Compensation.
When you come across a corporate lobbying group claiming to be pushing “Responsible Alternatives to Such-and-Such,” you can rightly assume that it’s really pushing something totally irresponsible, as well as malicious, shameless, self-serving and even disgusting. Mother Jones magazine reports that ARAWC is a front group funded by these hugely profitable retail chains and corporate behemoths that want to weasel out of compensating employees who suffer injuries at work. By law, corporations in nearly every state must carry workers’ comp insurance, but the ARAWC lobbying combine is pressuring legislators to allow the giants to opt out of the state benefit plans and instead substitute their own, highly restrictive set of benefits.
What a deal! But it’s a raw deal for injured workers. In Texas, which already has this write-it-yourself loophole, more than half of the corporate plans — get this — pay nothing to the families of workers who’re killed in job accidents! Similarly, under an ARAWC-written opt-out provision that a Tennessee senator sponsored this year, employers wouldn’t have to cover artificial limbs, home care or even funeral expenses of on-the-job accident victims.
Also, the Tennessee bill lets a company simply walk away from maimed workers after just three years or after paying only $300,000 in expenses. Corporations always claim to “value” their employees — and this tells us exactly how little that value is.
By the way, the CEO of ARAWC also happens to be the head of “risk management” at the mingiest of workplaces: Walmart. And that’s what this opt-out scam amounts to — corporate profiteers hoping they can manage to escape paying for risking the lives of America’s workforce. Yes, this shifty move is a scurrilous crime, but it’s a crime that pays richly for those at the top. And the money can fill the hole in their souls where their honor used to be.
By: Jim Hightower, The National Memo, April 15, 2015
“The Framers Distrusted The Corporate Form”: Toxic Law; How Corporate Power And ‘Religious Freedom’ Threaten Democracy
Corporations from Apple and Angie’s List to Walmart and Wells Fargo exercised their power last week against laws that give aid and comfort to bigots. But don’t be too quick to praise their actions.
Commendable as these corporate gestures were, they also illustrate how America is morphing from a democratic republic into a state where corporations set the political agenda, thanks to a major mistake by Democrats in Congress. What they did has resulted in Supreme Court decisions that would infuriate the framers of our Constitution.
The framers distrusted the corporate form. And they made plain their concerns about concentrations of economic power and resulting inequality, worrying that this would doom our experiment with self-governance. Surely they would be appalled at the exercise of corporate influence last week. For the companies opposing “religious freedom” laws in Arkansas and Indiana were concerned with human rights only in the context of profit maximization, which is what economic theory says corporations are about.
Where are the corporate actions against police violence? Or unequal enforcement of the tax laws, under which workers get fully taxed and corporations literally profit off the tax laws? Or gender pay discrimination? And when have you heard of corporations objecting to secret settlements in cases adjudicated in the taxpayer-financed courts, especially when those settlements unknowingly put others at risk?
The so-called religious freedom restoration statutes in Arkansas, Indiana and 18 other states reflect a growing misunderstanding of the reasons that American law allows corporations to exist, a misunderstanding that infects a majority on our Supreme Court.
Corporations, which have ancient roots, serve valuable purposes that tend to make all of us better off. We benefit from corporations, but they must be servants, not masters.
Confining corporations to the purposes of limiting liability and creating wealth is central to protecting our liberties, as none other than Adam Smith warned 239 years ago in The Wealth of Nations, the first book to explain market economics and capitalism.
There is no fundamental right to create, own or operate any business entity that is a separate person from its owners and managers. Corporations exist only at the grace of legislators.
But in 21st-century America, corporations are increasingly acquiring the rights of people, which is the product of an unfortunate 1993 law championed by Democrats that now helps bigots assert a Constitutional right to discriminate in the public square.
Concern about corporations and concentrated power that diminishes individual liberties has become increasingly relevant since 2005, when John Glover Roberts Jr. was sworn in as chief justice of the United States.
Roberts and other justices who assert a strong philosophical allegiance to the framers’ views have been expanding corporate power in ways that would shock the consciences of the founders — especially James Madison, the primary author of our Constitution, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams.
In 2010, the Supreme Court ruled that corporations could spend unlimited sums influencing elections in the Citizens United decision. Now, as a practical matter, no one can become a Democratic or Republican nominee for president without the support of corporate America.
And, central to the Arkansas and Indiana legislation, the Supreme Court last year imbued privately held corporations with religious rights in the Hobby Lobby case.
The Roberts court invented all of these rights. Principled conservatives should denounce such decisions as “judicial activism,” yet nary a word of such criticism appears in right-wing columns and opinion magazines.
Today’s corporations have their roots in ancient trusts created to protect widows and orphans who inherited property. Hammurabi’s Code provided for an early version of trusts. Later the Romans created proto-corporations to manage public property and the assets of those appointed to oversee the far realms of the empire.
Managers of these early corporations had very limited authority, what the law calls agency, over the assets entrusted to them. Today, corporate managers have vast powers to buy, sell and deploy the assets they manage. They can do anything that is legal and demonstrates reasonable judgment.
Spending money to elect politicians (or pass anti-consumer laws) is perfectly fine under current law if it advances the profit-making interests of the company. Last week, we saw companies denounce bigotry against LGBTQ people, but of course they did so in terms of protecting their profits.
Walmart, the nation’s largest employer, opposed signing the Arkansas bill into law: “Every day in our stores, we see firsthand the benefits diversity and inclusion have on our associates, customers and communities we serve.” Apple CEO Tim Cook said, “America’s business community recognized a long time ago that discrimination, in all its forms, is bad for business.”
But creating efficient vehicles to create wealth by engaging in business does not require political powers, as none other than Supreme Court Justice William Rehnquist noted in a dissent.
Where we have gone furthest astray under the Roberts court is in last year’s Hobby Lobby decision. It imbued privately held corporations with rights under the First Amendment, which says, in part, “Congress shall create no law respecting the establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” Based on Hobby Lobby, both the Arkansas and Indiana laws were crafted to provide a defense for bigoted actions by businesses.
Yet laws requiring businesses to serve everyone, without regard to their identity, do not inhibit the free exercise of religion. A law that requires a florist or bakery to serve people in same-sex weddings as well as different-sex weddings may trouble the merchant, but it does not inhibit religious activity.
The corporate power on display in the so-called religious freedom restoration cases stems from a Supreme Court case that upheld the doctrine of laws of general applicability.
In 1990, the Supreme Court held that Oregon jobless benefits were properly denied to two Native Americans who worked at a drug rehab facility and who also, as part of their well-established religious practice, ingested peyote, a controlled substance.
Justice Antonin Scalia, who claims to follow the original intent of the Constitution’s drafters, wrote the opinion. He held that “the right of free exercise does not relieve an individual of the obligation to comply with a ‘valid and neutral law of general applicability’” such as denying jobless benefits to drug users.
Scalia cited an 1879 Supreme Court ruling in a test case known as Reynolds in which a Brigham Young associate asserted that federal laws against polygamy interfered with the “free exercise” of the Mormon brand of Christianity.
In that case, as Scalia noted, the high court had rejected the claim that criminal laws against polygamy could not be constitutionally applied to those whose religion commanded the practice. “To permit this would be to make the professed doctrines of religious belief superior to the law of the land, and in effect to permit every citizen to become a law unto himself,” the conservative justice wrote.
Two years later, Congress undid that sound decision with passage of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, a sloppily crafted bill introduced by then-Rep. Chuck Schumer (D- NY), and championed in the Senate by another Democrat, the late Ted Kennedy (D-MA).
It was this law, undoing Scalia’s sound Supreme Court decision, which enabled corporations to exercise their power for a particular cause that is in their interest, namely ending bigotry. Such actions may be laudable, yet still dangerous.
Corporations are valuable and useful vehicles for creating wealth. But they are not and never should be political and religious actors. As artificial “persons,” they should not be imbued with political or religious rights.
We need to keep corporations in their place. Otherwise, next time, their profit maximization may work against your liberties.
By: David Cay Johnston, The National Memo, April 4, 2015
“The Conscience Of A Corporation”: A Deeply Held Relationship With Five Members Of The Supreme Court
So here is Walmart, insisting that “our core basic belief of respect for the individual” is at odds with an Arkansas bill that would allow religious-based discrimination. And here is Marriott, slamming as “idiocy” similar measures in other states. And somewhere in there is the family-run pizzeria, asserting that Indiana’s new law allows them to deny wedding day pies to people whose choice of spouses they don’t approve of.
These businesses sell Chinese-made consumer goods, hotel rooms, and rounded dough burdened with pepperoni and extra cheese. Since when did they start spouting off about the deeply held convictions guiding their corporate consciences?
You can blame last year’s Supreme Court decision in the Hobby Lobby case for unleashing a herd of ponies that have gone off in quite unpredicted directions. There, in a partisan 5-to-4 ruling straight from Republican fever nests, the court gave certain corporations the right to challenge laws that they claim violate their religious beliefs. In that case, it was about contraception in the health care package.
Let’s pause to consider this new entity — a moneymaking organization no different from a lone human being who feels conscience-bound to live a certain way because of a deeply held relationship with God. Let’s pause, because five members of the Supreme Court would not.
One justice, the irrepressible Ruth Bader Ginsburg, warned of the consequences of giving corporations a soul: “The court, I fear, has ventured into a minefield.”
Ginsburg predicted that the court’s “expansive notion of corporate personhood” would invite profit-making companies to start using religion as an excuse to ignore laws they didn’t like. And indeed, states packed with right-wing legislators who see phantom persecution behind every new episode of “Modern Family” have clamored to give companies a spiritual opt-out clause.
So it is in Indiana. State lawmakers were also told to look before taking a big leap into spiritual exemptions for business. In a letter in February, legal scholars warned of corporations’ citing religious justification for “taking the law into their own hands.”
But, lo, look what happened on the way to forcing religion into the marketplace: The corporations — Apple, Nike, Yelp, Gap, PayPal, Big Pharma companies like Eli Lilly and the nine largest companies with headquarters in Indiana — have rebelled. They are saying: No, don’t give us the power to discriminate. We’d rather remain soulless purveyors of product to the widest possible customer base. Which is, I suppose, how capitalism is supposed to work. Bless the free market.
Indiana’s law is “not just pure idiocy from a business perspective,” said Marriott’s president, Arne Sorenson, but “the notion that you can tell businesses somehow that they are free to discriminate against people based on who they are is madness.”
Not March Madness, the culmination of which is what Indiana thought we’d all be celebrating in the Hoosier State this weekend. But political lunacy, of the type that’s been on display ever since the Republican Party hitched itself to the crazies who dominate its media wing.
But let’s not get too far ahead of ourselves. Walmart, which effectively killed the Arkansas bill a few days ago, remains locked in poverty wage mode, despite its recent boast of raising pay to at least $9 an hour. Apple, and most tech companies now strutting across the moral stage, continues to do business with countries where a person can be executed for being gay.
Their outrage is selective, and calculated: In corporate America, the branding conceit of the moment includes just the right dash of social activism. A little environmental nudge from your cereal, a talk about race from your barista — it’s mostly harmless.
Chick-fil-A learned a lesson in its journey from behind the grease counter and back over gay marriage. After condemning same-sex marriage and becoming a culture-war battleground, the corporate leaders of a company that professes to run on biblical principles now say they will stick with chicken talk. Everyone is welcome.
Good call. Nothing in the secular world keeps Chick-fil-A’s founders from free worship in private. For that matter, nothing in the secular world deprives any business owner of a lawful spiritual pursuit outside of the public square. Their profits will rise or fall because of consumer demand, rather than which side of a biblical exhortation the chicken-eater may be on.
All of this, the free market in tandem with the First Amendment, has worked pretty well in a clamorous democracy such as ours. It’s only when activist judges — thy names are Clarence Thomas, Antonin Scalia, Samuel Alito, Anthony Kennedy and John Roberts — have tried to broaden the intent of the founders that we’ve gotten into trouble.
In 2010, those five judges created the notion of corporate personhood — giving companies the unfettered right to dominate elections. After all, Exxon is just a citizen like you and me. And in 2014, those five judges gave corporations a soul, a further expansion of business entity as a citizen. Well, they tried to. As the saying goes, a corporation will never truly be a citizen until you can execute one in Texas.
By: Timothy Egan, Contributing Op-Ed Writer, The New York Times, April 3, 2015
“Your Dollars At Work — For The Rich”: We’re Not Talking Trickle Here, We’re Talking Cascading To Privatize Everything
Conservative pundits and politicians routinely divide our U.S. economy into two totally distinct spheres. We have the noble private sector over here, they tell us, and the bumbling, bloated public sector over there.
In reality, of course, we have just one economy, with the private and public sectors inextricably entangled. Each year, in fact, hundreds of billions of tax dollars end up flowing directly into the private sector.
The federal government alone, a new Congressional Budget Office report calculates, annually spends $500 billion — that’s half a trillion dollars — to purchase goods and services from private companies. State and local governments spend many billions more on top of that.
We’re not talking trickle here — we’re talking cascade, as our elected leaders rush to privatize services that public employees previously provided.This massive privatization of everything from prisons to public schools hasn’t done much of anything to make the United States a better place to live.
On the other hand, this privatization has paid off quite handsomely for America’s most affluent. They’re collecting ever more generous paychecks, courtesy of the tax dollars the rest of us are paying.
In Washington, D.C., for instance, top officials of the private companies that run many of the city’s charter schools are taking in double or triple what traditional public schools take in, or even more.
The CEO at one company that runs five of these charters, The Washington Post recently reported, pulled in $1.3 million in 2013. That’s nearly five times the pay that went to the top public official responsible for the District of Columbia’s 100-plus traditional public schools.
America’s taxpayer-funded military contractors would, of course, consider that chump change. The CEO at Lockheed Martin, for one, personally pocketed over $25 million in 2013.
So do you like this idea of executives in power suits raking in multiple millions of your tax dollars?
Rhode Island state senator William Conley sure doesn’t. He and four of his colleagues have just introduced legislation that would stop the stuffing of tax dollars into the pockets of wildly overpaid corporate executives.
Conley’s bill directs Rhode Island to start “giving preference in the awarding of state contracts” to business enterprises whose highest-paid execs receive no more than 25 times the pay of their median — most typical — workers.
Back in the middle of the 20th century, only a handful of top corporate executives ever made more than 25 times the pay of the average worker. Today, by contrast, only a handful of top execs make less than 100 times median pay.
If Conley’s bill becomes law, the ramifications could be huge.
That’s because we may soon know, for the first time ever, the exact ratio between CEO and median worker pay at every major American corporation that trades on Wall Street.
Five years ago, legislation that mandates this disclosure passed Congress and made it into law. Intense corporate lobbying has been stalling its enforcement, but the stall may soon end. The federal Securities and Exchange Commission finally appears ready to issue the regulations needed to enforce full pay ratio disclosure.
CEO-worker pay comparisons for individual companies will likely start hitting the headlines the year after next. With these new stats, taxpayers will be able to see exactly which corporations feeding at the public trough are doing the most to make America more unequal.
With this information, average taxpayers could then do a great deal. They could, for starters, follow Senator Conley’s lead in Rhode Island and urge their lawmakers to reward — with our tax dollars — only those corporations that pay their workers fairly.
By: Sam Pizzigati, Columnist, OtherWords; Associate Fellow, Institute for Policy Studies: The National Memo, March 25, 2015
“Crime-For-Profit Syndicates”: Why Are We Taxpayers Subsidizing Corporate Crime?
“Do the crime, do the time,” the old saying goes. Unless, of course, the criminals are corporate executives. In those cases, the culprits are practically always given a “Get out of jail free” card.
Even the corporate crimes that produce horrible injuries, illnesses, death, massive pollution, consumer ripoffs, etc. are routinely settled by fines and payoffs from the corporate treasury, with no punishment of the honchos who oversee what amount to crime-for-profit syndicates. The only bit of justice in these money settlements is that some of them have become quite large, with multibillion-dollar “punitive damages” meant to deter the perpetrators from doing it again. Yet the same bad corporate actors seem to keep at it.
What’s going on here is a game of winkin’ ‘n’ noddin’, in which corporate criminals know that those headline-grabbing assessments for damages they’ve caused have a secret escape hatch built into them. Congress has generously written the law so corporations can deduct much of their punitive payments from their income taxes! As Senator Pat Leahy points out, “This tax loophole allows corporations to wreak havoc and then write it off as a cost of doing business.”
For example, oil giant BP certainly wreaked havoc with its careless oil rig explosion in 2010, killing 11 workers, deeply contaminating the Gulf of Mexico and devastating the livelihoods of millions of people along the Gulf coast. So, BP was socked with a punishing payout topping $42 billion. But — shhhh — 80 percent of that was eligible for a tax deduction, a little fact that’s been effectively covered up by the bosses and politicians.
This crazy quirk in America’s laws to deter corporate crime forces victims to help subsidize criminals. Follow the bouncing ball here: First, a court orders a corporation to pay punitive damages to a victim of its criminal acts; second, the corporate offender pays up, and then merrily subtracts a big chunk of that payment from its income tax, effectively taking money out of our public treasury; third, while the criminal is counting its tax break, the victim is notified that the punitive damage money he or she received from the corporation will be taxed as “regular income;” fourth, that means a big chunk of the victim’s payment goes into the treasury to replenish the public money the corporate villain subtracted.
This is nothing but shameful pandering by government officials to rich and powerful criminals. It’s bad enough that corporate-financed lawmakers legalize such encouragement of criminality, but corporate-coddling judges are playing the same disgraceful game — drastically reducing the amounts that juries order corporations to pay. In a Montana case, for example, a jury awarded $240 million in punitive damages to the families of three people, including two teenagers, killed in a car crash. The deaths were blamed on a steering defect that South Korean automaker Hyundai was found to have known about and “recklessly” ignored for more than a decade. But a district judge has since supplanted the jury’s ruling with her own. While declaring that Hyundai’s “reprehensibility” certainly warrants a sizeable punishment, she cut the corporation’s punitive payment down to $73 million.
Hello — that’s not punishment to a $79-billion-a-year car giant, it’s pocket change. Why would Hyundai executives quit putting corporate profits over people’s lives if that’s their “punishment”?
Plus, we taxpayers and the victims’ families are still lined up to subsidize whatever “punishment” Hyundai ultimately pays. With subsidies and wrist-slaps, the corporate criminal whirligig will continue to spin, making a mockery of justice. Fortunately, Senator Leahy has had the good sense to introduce legislation to lock down this escape hatch for thieves, killers and other executive-suite villains. For more information on the moral outrage of ordinary taxpayers being forced to subsidize corporate criminals, contact U.S. PIRG at http://www.uspirg.org.
By: Jim Hightower, The National Memo, March 11, 2015
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