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Date: November 07, 2024 at 13:39:28
From: pamela, [DNS_Address]
Subject: posting again from Nov 1st post |
URL: http://earthboppin.net/talkshop/national/messages/443640.html#443642 |
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Date: November 01, 2024 at 16:23:51
From: pamela
Subject: The Corporate Capture of the United States
URL: https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2012/01/05/the-
corporate-capture-of-the-united-states/
The Corporate Capture of the United States
Posted by the Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate
Governance & Financial Regulation, on Thursday, January
5, 2012
8 Comments
print this page Printemail this post E-Mail
Bailouts, Executive Compensation, Financial crisis,
Political spending, Public interest, Social contract
More from: Robert Monks
Editor’s Note: Robert Monks is the founder of Lens
Governance Advisors, a law firm that advises on
corporate governance in the settlement of shareholder
litigation.
American corporations today are like the great
European
monarchies of yore: They have the power to control the
rules under which they function and to direct the
allocation of public resources. This is not a
prediction
of what’s to come; this is a simple statement of the
present state of affairs. Corporations have effectively
captured the United States: its judiciary, its
political
system, and its national wealth, without assuming any
of
the responsibilities of dominion. Evidence is
everywhere.
The “smoking gun” is CEO pay. Compensation is an
expression of concentrated power — of enterprise power
concentrated in the chief executive officer and of
national power concentrated in corporations. Median US
CEO pay for 2010 was up 35 percent in the midst of a
lingering recession, while CEO pay over the last decade
has doubled as a percentage of pre-tax corporate
income.
Yet there has been no justification for current levels
of CEO pay based on economic value added.
When Lee Raymond retired as CEO of ExxonMobil at the
end
of 2005, after six years at the helm of the merged firm
and another six as head of Exxon before that, he walked
away with more than a quarter billion dollars in
realizable equity. In his final year alone, Raymond
received in excess of $70 million in total compensation
— an hourly wage of about $34,500 calculated at 40
hours
a week for 50 weeks. No metric can justify such a raid
on the corporate treasury and shareholder equity, but
Raymond is only a particularly egregious and early
example of what has since become common practice.
Little
wonder that the driving concern of banks receiving TARP
“bailout” money was to pay it back so as to escape any
restriction on executive pay.
Retirement risk has been transferred to employees.
During the same period that CEOs were doubling their
own
compensation, the “best” CEOs of the “best” companies
abrogated the century-old commitment by employers to
provide pensions to their workers. IBM has been the
corporate leader in abolishing a “real” pension system
for its employees. The 2006 elimination of on-going
defined benefit plans will “save [IBM] as much as $3
billion through the next few years and provide it with
a
more ‘predictable cost structure’,” TK said at the
time.
Translation: The worker bees are on their own.
This is the essence of “capture” – CEOs are enriched,
while all other corporate constituencies, including
government, are left with liabilities. A relatively few
autocrats have taken control over the policies and
wealth allocation of the United States.
The financial power of American corporations now
controls every stage of politics — legislative,
executive, and ultimately judicial. With its January
2010 decision in the Citizens United case, the Supreme
Court removed all legal restraints on the extent of
corporate financial involvement in politics, a
grotesque
decision that can have only one effect: maximizing
corporate – not national — value. Today’s CEOs have
been
granted the power to direct political payments and
organize PAC programs to achieve objectives entirely in
their own self-interest, and they have been quick to
use
it.
More than $300 million was “invested” by corporations
in
the 2008 Presidential elections. The totals will be
vastly higher in 2012 when the full impact of Citizens
United is expressed, and the distribution will be
politically agnostic. As Bill Moyers recently noted,
President Obama “has raised more money from banks,
hedge
funds and private equity managers than any Republican
candidate.” [1]
Capture has been further implemented through the
extensive lobbying power of corporations. Abraham
Lincoln’s warning about “corporations enthroned” and
Dwight Eisenhower’s about the “unwarranted influence by
the military/industrial complex” have been fully
realized in our own time. Reported lobbying
expenditures
have risen annually, to $3.5 billion in 2010. Half of
the Senators and 42 percent of House members who left
Congress between 1998 and 2004 became lobbyists, as did
310 former appointees of George W. Bush and 283 of Bill
Clinton.
Capture has focused on particular industries. Two
powerful Democratic administrations have not been able
even to propose a system of “single payer” health
insurance. Meanwhile, business interests have assured
that whatever program of “universal coverage” emerges
will lock in the interests of the insurance and the
pharmaceutical industries.
History has yet to sort out whether the second Iraq War
served any national objectives beyond military and
industrial ones, but the suspicion that oil interests
played a critical role in the rush to battle is
enhanced
by Vice President Cheney’s refusal to reveal the names
of the participants in his energy transition committee.
Simultaneously, the inability to force public
disclosure
of those participants offers a window into how
thoroughly the energy industry controls its own agenda,
destiny, and information flow. Not only has the
industry
succeeded in achieving and maintaining special
regulatory and tax treatment; in multiple other ways,
it
functions virtually as an independent state.
Capture has placed the most powerful CEOs above the
reach of the law and beyond its effective enforcement.
Extensive evidence of Wall Street’s critical
involvement
in the financial crisis notwithstanding, not a single
senior Wall Street executive has lost his job, and pay
levels have been rigorously maintained even when, as
noted earlier, TARP payments had to be refinanced in
order to remove any possible restrictions.
While several financial firms have paid civil penalties
for their abuses, the amounts involved bear little
relation to the malfeasance. US District Judge Jed S.
Rakoff recently — and rightly — rejected the $285-
million settlement agreed to between Citigroup Inc. and
the Securities and Exchange Commission as “neither
fair,
nor reasonable, nor adequate, not in the public
interest.”
Worse, such fines as have been imposed on the financial
industry are basically being paid by the government
itself. At the same time that various regulatory
agencies boast of record setting penalties assessed
against banks, the Federal Reserve pays banks interest
on money that is not being lent, resulting in an
“interest margin” realized by U.S. banks in the first
six months of this year of $211 billion — more than
ample funding for any penalties suffered.
Finally, capture has been perpetuated through the
removal of property “off shore,” where it is neither
regulated nor taxed. The social contract between
Americans and their corporations was supposed to go
roughly as follows: In exchange for limited liability
and other privileges, corporations were to be held to a
set of obligations that legitimatized the powers they
were given. But modern corporations have assumed the
right to relocate to different jurisdictions, almost at
will, irrespective of where they really do business,
and
thus avoid the constraints of those obligations.
As Nicholas Shaxson writes in Treasure Islands, “The
privileges have been preserved and enhanced, but the
obligations have withered.” Meanwhile, the U.S.
Treasury
is estimated to be losing $100 billion annually from
off-shore tax abuses.
Government cannot and will not hold corporations to
account. That much is now obvious. Indeed, the dawning
realization of this truth is what has informed the
Occupy movement, but only the owners of corporations
can
create the accountability that will ultimately unwind
the knot of government capture.
The essence of the problem is quite straightforward: a
failed system of corporate governance. So is the cause:
the unwillingness of trustee owners of America’s
corporations to assert their responsibility, legal
duty,
and civic obligation to monitor and oversee the
corporations they invest in. Fiduciary institutions own
80 percent of the outstanding shares of corporate
America and thus bear at least 80 percent of the
responsibility for present circumstances as well as 80
percent of the onus for saving the system itself. And
the largest institutional investors — the Bill and
Melinda Gates Foundation, Harvard University, and
others
— must take the lead because (a) they should and (b)
all
other courses have failed.
Urban park by urban park, campus by campus, the
Occupiers are bearing sometimes inchoate witness to
America’s capture by corporate interests. Now, men and
women of conscience need to reoccupy the boardrooms of
America’s corporations. The boardroom is where the
takeover began, and it’s where capture can finally be
undone and a government of, by, and for the people, not
the corporations, restored to the land.
Endnotes
[1] Moyers, Bill, Our Politicians are Money Laundered
in
the Trafficking of Power and Policy, 3 November 2011.
(go back)
Bailouts, Executive Compensation, Financial crisis,
Political spending, Public interest, Social contract
More from: Robert Monks
View entire thread
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Re: The Corporate Capture of the United States pamela
01-Nov-2024 16:32:17 (0)
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Date: November 07, 2024 at 14:15:54
From: eaamon, [DNS_Address]
Subject: Re: posting again from Nov 1st post |
URL: ELMO's net worth |
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ya! if Elon Musk gets a position in the presidents office he could sell all
his stock and pay ZERO dollars in taxes.
earn 290 billion and pay no taxes on it, the Trump way!
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[443867] [443866] |
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443867 |
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Date: November 07, 2024 at 14:52:32
From: pamela, [DNS_Address]
Subject: Re: posting again from Nov 1st post |
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Musk, Trump and the others, all losers, dreamers,
wankers, liars, phonies, sock puppets, all sold out to
the MIC -
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443866 |
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Date: November 07, 2024 at 14:49:45
From: pamela, [DNS_Address]
Subject: Re: posting again from Nov 1st post |
URL: https://www.npr.org/2024/11/05/nx-s1-5175799/the-influence-of-super-pacs-and-dark-money-on-this-years-campaigns |
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The influence of super PACs and dark money on this
year’s campaigns
November 5, 20244:24 PM ET
Heard on All Things Considered
By
Connor Donevan
,
Mary Louise Kelly
,
Courtney Dorning
Billions of dollars have been spent on the 2024
election — and that cash hasn’t just come from everyday
Americans.
MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
This election, like the one before it and the one
before that and the one before that, will be the most
expensive election in U.S. history. OpenSecrets is a
nonpartisan group that tracks election spending. It
estimates the 2024 federal election cycle will cost
nearly $16 billion. It was around 15 billion back in
2020. Well, Daniel Weiner is director of the Brennan
Center for Justice's elections and government program.
He tracks the influence of money in elections. And I
talked to him about what role money has played in this
presidential election. Hey there, Daniel.
DANIEL WEINER: Hey there. It's a pleasure to be with
you.
KELLY: So go to that number I just cited - $16 billion
spent in this federal election cycle. What pops into
your head?
WEINER: What pops into my head is that's a lot of
money, but I am most interested on where that money is
coming from. There is a big difference between $16
billion coming from millions of Americans in small
increments versus just a significant portion of it
coming from a handful of billionaires. What we have
seen is that the trend is towards more and more of that
money coming from the very wealthiest donors.
KELLY: And tease out for me why. What has changed in
this election cycle?
WEINER: A couple of things have changed. So the
largest, overarching trend is that, since a decision
called Citizens United in 2010 swept away a lot of
limits on campaign fundraising and spending, more and
more groups like super PACs, which can raise and spend
unlimited amounts of money, have played a prominent
role in U.S. elections. In the meantime, the laws that
remained on the books, which were supposed to, for
instance, keep those super PACs from collaborating with
candidates, have gone largely unenforced.
So you have a situation now, for instance, with former
President Trump's campaign, where he has actually
outsourced quite a bit of that campaign to super PACs
funded by folks like Elon Musk. Kamala Harris also has
a lot of billionaire backers, although she is following
a more traditional model, where, still, the
organization taking the lead is her traditional
campaign committee because that has had very successful
fundraising on its own.
KELLY: To the question of what all this money buys -
we've mentioned Donald Trump and Elon Musk. Trump says,
if elected, he would name Musk to a new efficiency czar
position. How unusual is that?
WEINER: Well, I think it's important to not overstate
how unusual it is because you have to remember, we have
a long tradition in this country of major donors
getting things like ambassadorships...
KELLY: Right.
WEINER: ...Right? - which both parties have done. What
is unusual is the potential for a donor to take a role
that would have so much direct oversight over matters
in which the donor has a direct financial interest.
Remember, Musk is a major government contractor. His
companies like SpaceX have billions of dollars of
federal contracts.
KELLY: Talk to me about what you were seeing on the
Democratic side. I'm remembering that, back when she
was a senator, Kamala Harris was prone to speaking out
against corporate cash and political action committees.
She spoke out against so-called dark money, anonymous
contributions. In this presidential campaign, she has
not seemed that bothered about benefiting from outside
money. What do you...
WEINER: Well...
KELLY: ...See when you look at that?
WEINER: I see that Kamala Harris and Donald Trump are
fighting a very close election. And in the climate that
we have, I don't think either side is going to leave
anything on the field. More and more, on both sides,
the super PACs supporting them are relying on donations
from dark-money groups that do not disclose their
donors - that are basically funneled through the super
PAC. What's fascinating...
KELLY: But you don't see hypocrisy there in a political
candidate who was happy to call out dark money until it
was directly benefiting her presidential campaign?
WEINER: I would say that I think that there is going to
be a willingness to use any legal lever possible across
the board. I just don't think it's realistic, until you
change the rules, that either side is going to
unilaterally disarm.
KELLY: Can you ever get money out of politics? Or when
I talk to you four years from now, are we likely to be
saying once again, this has just been the most
expensive election in U.S. history?
WEINER: Well, and interestingly, this may not be the
most expensive election in U.S. history - this election
we thought was going to break all records and now may
be on track to actually clock in about where 2020
clocked in. But then you have to factor in inflation.
So here's what I want to say. I think getting money out
of politics is the wrong question. The question is,
where does the money come from?
So what I would like to see - and although the Supreme
Court has made this harder, it is not impossible - I
would like to see an election where there are more
small donations and where, you know, most of the money
- at least most of the big money - is transparent. In
the medium term, that is what I think we could achieve.
And, you know, I do think it's significant that,
however Kamala Harris is raising money now, she has
made those sorts of reforms a central promise of her
campaign.
KELLY: Daniel Weiner, director of the Brennan Center
for Justice's Elections and Government Program. Thanks
so much.
WEINER: It was a pleasure. Thank you.
(SOUNDBITE OF ELMIENE SONG, "MARKING MY TIME
(BADBADNOTGOOD EDIT)")
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