Tag Archives: corporations

The Obama Administration Will Force Companies To Show How Out of Touch CEO Pay Really Is

by ITAVinceyt Posted on August 5, 2015

Mother Jones

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Soon, you will be able to see just how bad income inequality is within major US companies.

On Wednesday, the Securities and Exchange Commission finalized a long delayed rule that will force all publicly traded companies to publish a ratio between the amount it pays its CEO and the median salary at the company. The rule was finalized by a 3-2 vote. Companies will need to start revealing this information starting in 2017. “After too much delay, the Securities and Exchange Commission did the right thing today,” Jim Lardner, a spokesperson for the liberal Americans for Financial Reform, said in a statement Wednesday.

The rule comes from the Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, a law signed by President Obama in 2010 to address the Wall Street crash. Democrats slipped in this provision as a means to try to publicly shame companies that reward CEOs with overly lavish compensation, but liberals and consumer advocates had grown increasingly frustrated with the delays in getting this rule in place. Democratic senators had urged the SEC to hurry up, and earlier this summer Elizabeth Warren attacked SEC Chair Mary Jo White for being unclear about the timing on the rule (she also had other complaints against the SEC). “You have now been SEC Chair for over two years, and to date, your leadership of the Commission has been extremely disappointing,” Warren wrote in a letter to White.

Hillary Clinton joined the cause right before the SEC finally acted. In a speech two weeks ago, the Democratic front-runner specifically called out the agency for dragging its feet on this proposal. “There is no excuse for taking five years to get this done,” she said during one of her first economic speeches of the 2016 campaign. “Workers have a right to know whether executive pay at their company has gotten out of balance—and so does the public.”

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The Obama Administration Will Force Companies To Show How Out of Touch CEO Pay Really Is

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Walmart Uses 22 Shell Companies to Hide an Incredible Amount of Money in Luxembourg

by BlairArdill Posted on June 17, 2015

Mother Jones

Overseas tax evasion by American corporations has become a political hot button of late: It haunted Mitt Romney in 2012, spurred President Barack Obama last year to crack down on so-called inversions, and has since been seized upon as a 2016 campaign issue by Hillary Clinton. American companies now have an estimated $2.1 trillion in untaxed profits stashed overseas, big sums of which belong to Apple, General Electric, and Microsoft.

Walmart is also a major overseas tax dodger, according to a new report from Citizens for Tax Justice, a liberal-leaning think tank and advocacy group. The world’s largest retailer has stashed $64 billion worth of assets in Luxembourg, Europe’s smallest and most notorious tax haven. These assets—including cash and the ownership of real estate holdings around the world—are worth more than Luxembourg’s entire gross domestic product. If they were liquidated and sprinkled around, it would amount to more than $100,000 per acre in this tiny country of 1,000 square miles that lacks a single Walmart store. Walmart has so much wealth in Luxembourg, in fact, that it could pay several times over to plaster the entire country in Nexus Granite Self-Adhesive Vinyl Floor Tiles, which sell at Walmart for $8.99 per box.

In fact, most Luxembourgers can afford flooring that’s considerably more posh. A primary source of the luxe in this city-state of some 500,000 people is its corporate tax rate. Between 2010 and 2013, Walmart reported paying less than 1 percent in tax to Luxembourg on $1.3 billion in profits. Walmart also generates $1.5 billion worth of tax deductions in Luxembourg each year by making “phantom interest payments” to its home office in the United States, according to Citizens for Tax Justice. These benefits may explain why, since 2011, Walmart has transferred more than $45 billion in assets to a network of 22 shell companies in Luxembourg, the report says.

Walmart disputed the report’s findings: “This is the same union-supported group that regularly issues flawed reports on Walmart to promote their agenda rather than the facts,” the company said in a statement to USA Today. “This latest report includes incomplete, erroneous information designed to mislead readers.” But the retailing giant did not go into any further detail.

UPDATE 6:00 p.m. PST: In an email to Mother Jones, a Walmart representative detailed the company’s objections to the report:

When calculating total assets, this calculation incorrectly includes intercompany assets, primarily investment in our wholly-owned subsidiaries and intercompany loans which both eliminate on consolidation. The methodology is flawed and based upon statutory reports prior to intercompany eliminations which occur during consolidation.

As disclosed in our last form 10K (footnote 14), the Walmart International segment has total assets after intercompany eliminations of $80.5 billion, the vast majority of which are retail store buildings, fixtures, inventory and distribution facilities physically located in the countries where we serve customers.

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Walmart Uses 22 Shell Companies to Hide an Incredible Amount of Money in Luxembourg

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Investigators Are Coming After Apple in an Antitrust Probe—Again

by MariamBeauregar Posted on June 11, 2015

Mother Jones

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Just as Apple catapulted into the music streaming industry at its annual developer conference earlier this week, state and federal investigators, the Department of Justice, the Federal Trade Commission, and even the European Commission were poking around to see if the multibillion-dollar tech giant had violated antitrust laws.

On Tuesday, the New York Times reported that attorneys general in New York and Connecticut were examining whether Apple pressured or colluded with labels to pull listeners away from free streaming services offered by companies like Spotify and YouTube in favor of its own paid product, Apple Music. Days before its unveiling, Apple had been negotiating with music labels over terms, according to Bloomberg News; the labels were fighting for a larger cut of revenue than they currently receive from Spotify. The Verge reported in May that Apple offered to pay YouTube’s music licensing fee if Universal Music Group, the world’s largest music corporation, blocked its music from hitting the site.

In a letter to the New York attorney general, UMG denied wrongdoing and noted it had not made agreements with Apple, Sony Music Entertainment, or Warner Music Group to “impede the availability of third-party free or ad-supported music streaming services.”

But this isn’t the first time Apple has been at the center of questionable antitrust practices. Here are a few other instances in which the tech giant has been under scrutiny:

E-books: Two years ago, in what would be a landmark case in the publishing industry, a federal judge in New York found Apple guilty of conspiring with five major publishers to fix the prices of e-books in an effort to stifle competition with Amazon. Apple is currently appealing the decision.
Employment: The dark side of Silicon Valley hiring practices emerged last April, after Apple, Google, Adobe, and Intel settled a class action lawsuit with about 64,000 employees for $415 million over backdoor “no poaching” agreements to not hire each other’s employees. (The intended result was to suppress wages.) The settlement came four years after the Justice Department called on those companies to stop making those agreements in a federal antitrust complaint.
Music restrictions: In December, following a decadelong class action lawsuit, a federal jury in California ruled that Apple operated within antitrust laws when a software update prevented songs purchased outside of iTunes from playing on iPods. The Los Angeles Times reported that the decision could have cost Apple $1 billion if the company had been found guilty.

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Investigators Are Coming After Apple in an Antitrust Probe—Again

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Elizabeth Warren’s "Most Watched" Video Is Absolutely Fantastic

by GeriW74lnjka Posted on June 2, 2015

Mother Jones

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Last week, Senator Elizabeth Warren participated in a conference hosted by tech website Re/Code, where she was asked a policy question about infrastructure spending. What followed was an incredibly powerful response that touched upon the Massachusetts senator’s signature issues—student loans, misplaced Washington interests, and the systematic problems hurting middle class Americans.

“The only way we get change is when enough people in this country say ‘I’m mad as hell and I’m fed up and I’m not going to do this anymore,” Warren said. “You are not going to represent me in Washington, DC, if you are not willing to pass a meaningful infrastructure bill. If you are not willing to refinance student loan interest rates and stop dragging in billions of dollars in profits off the backs of kids who otherwise can’t afford to go to college. If you don’t say you’re going to fund the NIH and the NISF, because that is our future. We have to make these issues salient and not just wonky.”

The video is now officially Warren’s most watched video, according to her digital director. Watch below:

(h/t Vox)

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Elizabeth Warren’s "Most Watched" Video Is Absolutely Fantastic

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The Forgotten Pentagon Papers Conspirator

by LorenzaDarwin Posted on June 2, 2015

Mother Jones

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This story first appeared on the TomDispatch website.

The witness reported men being hung by the feet or the thumbs, waterboarded, given electric shocks to the genitals, and suffering from extended solitary confinement in what he said were indescribably inhumane conditions. It’s the sort of description that might have come right out of the executive summary of the Senate torture report released last December. In this case, however, the testimony was not about a “black site” somewhere in the Greater Middle East, nor was it a description from Abu Ghraib, nor in fact from this century at all.

The testimony came from Vietnam; the year was 1968; the witness was Anthony J. Russo, one of the first Americans to report on the systematic torture of enemy combatants by CIA operatives and other US agents in that long-gone war. The acts Russo described became commonplace in the news post-9/11 and he would prove to be an early example of what also became commonplace in our century: a whistleblower who found himself on the wrong side of the law and so was prosecuted for releasing the secret truth about the acts of our government.

Determined to shine a light on what he called “the truth held prisoner,” Russo blew the whistle on American torture policy in Vietnam and on an intelligence debacle at the center of Vietnam decision-making that helped turn that war into the nightmare it was. Neither of his revelations saw the light of day in his own time or ours and while Daniel Ellsberg, his compatriot and companion in revelation, remains a major figure for his role in releasing the Pentagon Papers, Russo is a forgotten man.

That’s too bad. He shouldn’t be forgotten. His is, unfortunately, a story of our times as well as his.

The CIA Interrogation Center, Saigon
Before him sat the enemy. VC. Vietcong. He was slender, a decade older than the 28-year-old American, and cautious in his initial responses. The American offered him a cigarette. “Smoke?”

Anthony Russo liked to befriend his subjects, finding that sharing a cigarette or a beer and congenial conversation could improve an interview’s results.

This man’s all right, Russo thought—unlike the one he had interviewed when he first arrived in Saigon. That prisoner had sat before him, quivering in fear, pleading for his life. “Are you going to kill me?” the distraught man had said repeatedly, his thumbs red and bulbous from being strung up.

Torture was not something Russo had anticipated when he took the job. A civilian with a rank equivalent to major working for the RAND Corporation, he had arrived in the South Vietnamese capital on February 22, 1965, and was briefed on his mission. Russo was to meet the enemy face-to-face and figure out what made them tick. On that first day, he could hear General Richard Stilwell, chief of staff of Military Assistance Command Vietnam (MACV), barking orders from the next room: “You get every goddamn plane in the air that you can!”

Russo thought the war would be over in a few weeks, months at worst.

Instead of the limited conflict he expected, years slipped by. Bombs fell, villages were decimated, the fabric of Vietnamese life assaulted. Russo persisted with his interviews of Vietcong prisoners, witnessing the after-effects of torture in nearly every instance.

It’s hard to pinpoint just when the shift occurred in the young man who came to Southeast Asia to “promote democracy.” But as one tour of duty extended to two, contact with the enemy changed not their hearts and minds, but his. On the eve of the 1968 Tet Offensive, he returned to the United States intent on challenging the war, a chance he would get, helping his friend and RAND co-worker Daniel Ellsberg with the Pentagon Papers.

That secret history of US decision-making in Vietnam, a massive compilation of internal government memoranda and analyses, had been quietly commissioned by Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara in 1967 to assess what had gone wrong in Vietnam. Ellsberg leaked the Papers to the press in mid-1971, setting off a political firestorm and First Amendment crisis. He would be indicted on charges of espionage, conspiracy, and theft of government property, and would face a maximum penalty of 115 years in prison. Charges were also brought against Russo, who was suspected of complicity, after he refused to testify before a grand jury. He was jailed for 47 days for contempt and faced a possible sentence of 35 years in prison if convicted.

Ellsberg’s leak led to a Supreme Court decision on prior restraint, a landmark First Amendment case. Though all the charges were ultimately dropped, the leak and its aftermath had major political fallout, contributing to the demise of the presidency of Richard Nixon and forming a dramatic chapter on the path to US defeat in Vietnam.

Ellsberg became a twentieth-century hero, applauded in print and film, his name nearly synonymous with the Pentagon Papers, but Russo, the young accomplice who goaded Ellsberg to go public, has been nearly forgotten. Yet he was, according to Ellsberg, the first person to document the systematic torture of enemy combatants in Vietnam. If no one knows this, it’s because his report on the subject remains buried in the vaults of the RAND Corporation, the think tank that did research for the Pentagon in Vietnam. Similarly, while the use of unprecedented airpower against the civilian populations of Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia inspired international calls for war crimes trials in the 1970s, Russo’s exposure of the fabrication of data that propped up that air war remains but a footnote in Vietnam War historiography, unknown to all but a handful of academics.

He has remained “the other conspirator.” Ellsberg later conceded that he probably wouldn’t have thought of releasing the Papers if Russo hadn’t prodded him to “put that out” and helped copy them in a series of all-night sessions. But Russo would take a backseat to Ellsberg, who had snuck the massive set of documents out of RAND headquarters and released them to the New York Times, the Washington Post, and 18 other news organizations.

The two of them would become the antiwar movement’s odd couple. Ellsberg was articulate, suave, and fashionable; Russo opted for hippie attire, long hair, and impossibly bushy sideburns, a style of dress that fit with his growing political radicalism. Russo and his attorney, Leonard Weinglass, devised a bold—some said reckless—defense strategy focused on using expert witness testimony to put the US prosecution of the war on trial. Weinglass would emerge as a star attorney on the case, even—in the opinion of some observers—eclipsing Ellsberg’s senior lawyer, Leonard Boudin. But his client kept getting into trouble: scrawling a wiseacre comment on evidence before the court, handing a prosecution witness a press release that accused him of war crimes, peppering his statements to the press with movement jargon. In the end, Russo’s leftwing antics would help marginalize him and bury the story he had to tell.

The Think Tank
It all started in a nondescript midcentury building on Main Street in sunny Santa Monica, California. There, the RAND Corporation, a quasi-private think tank with a cozy relationship with the Air Force and Washington power brokers, dreamed up study projects for the Department of Defense.

RAND, an acronym for “research and development,” was launched in 1946 as a private research arm of the Army Air Forces, whose successor, the Air Force, would remain its primary financial backer and client for years to come. The think tank’s work ranged from weapons development to advanced strategic thinking on how to wage—or avert—nuclear war. RAND theorists would set the parameters for strategic defense thinking for decades, with the likes of Herman Kahn, once dubbed the “heavyweight of the megadeath intellectuals”; Thomas Schelling, Nobel laureate in economics for his work on game theory and the originator of “tacit bargaining”; and Albert Wohlstetter, the godfather of RAND’s nuclear strategists who devised the concepts of “second strike,” “fail safe,” and what he called the “delicate balance of terror” (aka “deterrence”).

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The Forgotten Pentagon Papers Conspirator

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The Truth About How Obama Has Handled the Pacific Trade Deal

by ScarletJoy Posted on May 20, 2015

Mother Jones

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While Kevin Drum is focused on getting better, we’ve invited some of the remarkable writers and thinkers who have traded links and ideas with him from Blogosphere 1.0 to this day to contribute posts and keep the conversation going. Today we’re honored to present a post from Daniel Drezner.

One of the enduring memes of the Obama administration has been the notion that the president is a lousy politician. One of the things that Bill Clinton and George W. Bush had in common is that they knew how to schmooze. Obama, on the other hand, does not have any close friendships on the international stage, nor is he particularly tight with Republican or Democrat members of Congress. Indeed, this has been a sufficiently common lament for someone to write “A Brief History of President Obama Not Having Any Friends” last year.

So let’s stipulate that the president is a cold fish. What remains contested is whether this matters in terms of getting things done. There are DC insiders who argue that personal relationships and one-on-one politicking really do matter. These are the pundits who tend to bemoan presidential passivity and write “Why won’t Obama lead?” ledes and ask why Barack Obama doesn’t drink more whiskey with Mitch McConnell or play more golf with John Boehner. And then there are structuralists who argue that what really matters are the separation of powers written into the Constitution and the incentive of opposition parties to, you know, oppose the president’s policies.

Last week’s machinations over trade promotion authority (TPA) regarding the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) will not definitively settle this debate, but they did offer a few data points that suggest the relative merits of each side of this debate.

First, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell gave a delightfully blunt interview to the New York Times‘ John Harwood. On TPA/TPP, McConnell and most of the Senate Republicans are working with Obama, which puts him in strange territory. To explain this to Harwood, McConnell flatly debunked the notion that Obama would have accomplished more in the GOP-controlled Congress if only he’d been more sociable with Republican members of Congress:

In the caricature of how Washington works, Mr. McConnell and other congressional Republicans were supposed to bond with Mr. Obama at a so-called bourbon summit meeting, as though a soothing, generous pour would bring them together.

It has never happened—which, as far as Mr. McConnell is concerned, counts for exactly zero.

“It’s all good stuff for you all to write, but it has no effect on policy,” Mr. McConnell said. He dismissed “press talk” that social outreach could bridge the deep ideological and partisan divisions of 21st-century American politics.

“It wouldn’t make any difference,” he concluded. “Look, it’s a business.” (emphasis added)

And that sound you just heard was the combined egos of the “why can’t Obama lead” crowd visibly deflating.

McConnell’s Hyman Roth-like answer would seem to validate the structuralist position of the president’s ability to get legislation passed—at least when it comes to dealing with the opposition party.

When it comes to dealing with his own party, however, I’m not sure that the structuralists can claim victory. One could argue that Democrats are just as constrained on trade as Republicans because of their base’s public opinion, but I don’t think it’s really that simple.

There were a lot of things going on in last Tuesday’s initial failure of TPA to pass the Senate, including genuine policy differences between Obama and elements of the progressive movement. But as Reuters noted, at least part of it was Obama’s alienation of Senate Democrats:

As for Obama, he may have hurt his chances with Democrats by minimizing concerns about trade’s impact on labor, the environment and regulations, and his explicit criticism of the anti-trade stance of leading liberal Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren.

“The president was disrespectful to her,” Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown told reporters. “When he said that a number of us, not just Senator Warren, don’t know what we’re talking about…he shouldn’t have.” Brown opposes the fast-track bill.

Indeed, there has been a lot of Democrat grumbling about Obama’s rhetorical jabs at Warren and other anti-TPP Democrats, to the point where Sherrod Brown accused Obama of sexism.

Of course, twenty-four hours later, a deal had been struck for a vote on TPA in the Senate. If Edward Isaac-Dovere and Burgess Everett’s Politico recap is accurate, then Presidential Leadership (TM) played a pivotal role in the process:

The White House named names. And not 24 hours later, President Barack Obama and his aides had a deal to get fast-track back on track…

Obama aides strategically put out word to reporters of the meeting, even before senators had arrived at the White House. Shortly after the meeting ended, they released the list: the seven Democrats who’d voted for fast-track in committee, plus Sens. Heidi Heitkamp (D-N.D.), Patty Murray (D-Wash.) and Tim Kaine (D-Va.). A few hours before, every Senate Democrat except Tom Carper of Delaware had publicly rebuked his trade effort. Now the White House put on the spot the other nine who had either publicly or privately indicated they would support the underlying fast-track and Trade Adjustment Assistance package, but who voted against opening debate.

In other words, the president had more than enough votes just in the room to get the trade bill moving. According to senators who were there, the president took his time, spending 90 minutes to explain why they needed to get their act together.

Now this does sound like some Old Time-y Presidential leadership, and so maybe, when it comes to managing his own party, there is something to the “Why can’t Obama lead?” meme.

But not a lot. My colleague Greg Sargent’s take suggests that last Tuesday’s vote was more about Reid/McConnell dynamics than anything to do with Obama. And even the close of Politico‘s story:

Then again, some Senate Democrats said this all would have been resolved even without Obama—though maybe not in time for the House to take up the bill in June, keeping it on track to help Obama seal the Trans-Pacific Partnership with 12 Pacific Rim countries.

“This was going to end up there anyway,” Nelson said. “But I would say the meeting with the president accelerated the discussion.”

So, to sum up: Most of the time, the structuralists are mostly right when it comes to presidents exercising leadership in pushing legislation through Congress. But they’re not completely right. On the margins, when dealing with one’s own party, maybe presidential leadership matters just a wee bit.

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The Truth About How Obama Has Handled the Pacific Trade Deal

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Which Tech Companies Are the Greenest?

by PercySpangler Posted on May 14, 2015

Mother Jones

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This article originally appeared in Grist and is republished here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

“It’s not easy being green” is a tired cliché, but it’s still particularly true if you are a giant technology company. Even Apple, Facebook, and Google—the best of the bunch, according to a new report from Greenpeace—will have to put in serious additional effort to fully shift to clean energy, especially in terms of lobbying at the state and local level. And the industry laggards, which include Amazon and eBay, have that much further to go.

Here’s how Greenpeace categorizes the tech giants:

Greenpeace

Energy efficiency in traditional appliances keeps improving, but our demand for energy is boosted by new technologies. In particular, companies that manufacture mobile devices and provide services like email, social networking, cloud storage, and streaming video have to contend with constantly escalating demand for data storage.

At the same time, being eco-friendly is important to many of those same companies—or at least important to their public image. Google, Facebook, Yahoo, and Microsoft all dropped out of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) last year because of bad publicity around the right-wing corporatist group’s opposition to action on climate change. But tech giants will need to do a lot more than quit dirty lobbying groups, Greenpeace argues; they’ll need to actually get involved in the political sphere on behalf of clean energy solutions.

First, the good news is that some tech companies are making respectable efforts to power their operations through clean energy sources. Google has invested heavily in solar energy, and Apple announced just yesterday that it’s expanding its renewable programs to manufacturing facilities in China. But in many cases, the issue is not whether companies have good intentions but whether clean energy is available to them.

Here are a few key quotes from the Greenpeace report:

Apple continues to lead the charge in powering its corner of the internet with renewable energy even as it continues to rapidly expand. All three of its data center expansions announced in the past year will be powered with renewable energy.
Google continues to match Apple in deploying renewable energy with its expansion in some markets, but its march toward 100 percent renewable energy is increasingly under threat by monopoly utilities for several data centers including those in North and South Carolina, Georgia, Singapore and Taiwan.

And here are some challenges the report lays out:

Amazon’s adoption of a 100 percent renewable energy goal, while potentially significant, lacks basic transparency and, unlike similar commitments from Apple, Facebook or Google, does not yet appear to be guiding Amazon’s investment decisions toward renewable energy and away from coal.
The rapid rise of streaming video is driving significant growth in our online footprint, and in power-hungry data centers and network infrastructure needed to deliver it.
Microsoft has slipped further behind Apple and Google in the race to build a green internet, as its cloud footprint continues to undergo massive growth in an attempt to catch up with Amazon, but has not kept pace with Apple and Google in terms of its supply of renewable electricity.

The underlying problem in many cases is that dirty energy-dependent utility monopolies are providing the electricity for massive, and growing, data centers. If these utilities use coal or natural gas, then by extension so do the tech companies with data centers in their service areas. Meeting data-storage demand without burning more fossil fuels will not be easy. Greenpeace writes:

Big data’s massive growth is expected to continue with the emergence of cheap smartphones: nearly 80 percent of the planet’s adult population will be connected to the internet by 2020, and the total number of devices connected to the internet will be roughly twice the global population by 2018. Internet traffic from mobile devices increased 69 percent in 2014 alone with the rapid increase of video streaming to mobile devices, and mobile traffic will exceed what is delivered over wired connections by 2018.

There are different ways to increase renewable energy supply at data centers. The first, of course, is simply to generate clean power on site with solar panels or wind turbines. Apple is already doing this and other companies are following its lead. But data centers require so much energy that they won’t generally be able to cover most of their needs that way. Other free-market approaches include power purchase agreements, in which the tech companies can make a deal with a clean energy supplier, and “green tariffs,” in which they agree to buy 100 percent clean power from the local utility at a price premium.

To get all their energy from renewables, though, will require tech companies to engage in policy debates. Greenpeace writes:

In many markets, companies’ ability to power with renewable energy will remain severely limited without policy changes. Even in more liberalized markets, it behooves companies to advocate for policies that will green the broader grid, narrowing the ground that they need to cover to power with 100 percent renewable energy. Companies can and must become advocates with the regulators and policymakers who ultimately have the power to change markets in ways that will allow companies to achieve their renewable energy goals. State policymakers covet data center investments, offering significant tax incentives to companies to lure them into their borders. Companies could compel a similar race to the top on renewable energy.

There were a few instances last year of tech companies lobbying for clean energy policies—Google submitted comments in favor of the EPA’s Clean Power Plan, and several major tech firms signed the “Corporate Renewable Energy Buyers’ Principles” calling on state regulators and utilities to expand access to renewable energy.

Greenpeace argues that tech companies particularly need to get engaged in state and local politics, forming an effective counterweight to the fossil fuel and right-wing interest group money that has swayed state legislative races and outcomes in recent years. Last year, Facebook and Microsoft submitted comments to the Iowa Utilities Board in favor of distributed electricity generation, but that was a relatively isolated event. That sort of activism needs to become routine.

In North Carolina, for example, Greenpeace notes that it’s illegal to buy renewable energy from a third party instead of buying whatever dirty energy is offered by state monopoly Duke Energy. The same state legislature that is offering tax incentives to attract data centers is considering changing that law. Tech companies should tell North Carolina that doing so is a precondition to getting any data centers located there, Greenpeace argues. Similarly, Virginia has a harsh cap on third-party clean power purchases, and the State Corporation Commission is due to review that rule this year.

You can be sure that the utilities, the Koch brothers, Art Pope, and Americans for Prosperity will be involved in these fights. If clean energy supporters are not, they will be over before they have begun. To really be green, tech companies need to put their muscle into this fight.

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Which Tech Companies Are the Greenest?

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Everything You Hate About Washington Confirmed by One Simple Job Change

by Karissa9237 Posted on May 13, 2015

Mother Jones

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Five months after deputy Secretary of Energy Daniel Poneman resigned in October 2014 and left the department’s Forrestal Building in Washington, he started a new job 11 miles away as president of a troubled corporation that he had championed while serving in government.

Over five and a half years—during public hearings in Congress and in private discussions with lawmakers and White House officials—Poneman, as the Energy Department’s chief operating officer, approved or advocated giving hundreds of millions of dollars in contracts and other assistance to the United States Enrichment Corporation (USEC), which processes uranium and sells nuclear fuel to private and government utilities, according to interviews with those who attended these sessions. Now, as head of that company, Poneman is making about $1.5 million this year and will pocket up to $2 million next year, according to reports filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission—a big jump from the $178,000 he earned annually as a government official.

Members of Congress have denounced Poneman’s lucrative move from government job to the private sector, and good-government advocates see this as a classic example of Washington’s so-called revolving door. It’s common for federal officials to shift from government to industry, but Poneman’s journey has drawn unusually harsh and bipartisan scrutiny. It has also brought new attention to the Energy Department’s ongoing efforts to bail out a private firm that has highly paid executives and still experiences huge losses.

In March, Reps. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) and Cynthia Lummis (R-Wyo.) wrote to Centrus—the new name USEC adopted after it declared bankruptcy in 2014—stating that Poneman’s new job raised questions about whether he had complied with rules requiring that federal officials looking for private employment report their contacts with potential employers and recuse themselves from related decision making. They noted that Poneman had been “substantially involved in business arrangements between the DOE and Centrus” when he was at the department.

Centrus spokesman Jeremy Derryberry confirmed in an email that Poneman “addressed” issues at the Energy Department that affected USEC, but he said Poneman did so to protect national security and to “advance the best interest of the American public.” A DOE lawyer told House lawmakers in an April 30 letter that there is no “indication” that Poneman violated the department’s ethics rules.

In interviews, Poneman and other Centrus officials maintain that there is nothing inappropriate about his new job and that the company did not recruit him for its top position until several weeks after he left the Energy Department. “This thing came quite unexpectedly,” Poneman says. He notes that he had already arranged a fellowship at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, and he says that he will follow ethics laws that restrict his future dealings with the Energy Department.

“He’s now running a company whose business is deeply intermingled with his work as a public official,” says Michael Smallberg, an analyst with the Project on Government Oversight, a government watchdog group. “At the very least it creates a perception that he was too cozy with a company that he should have been overseeing at an arms-length distance.”

The USEC tale is a tangled one. Congress created USEC as a government-owned corporation in 1992, when the United States was one of the world’s largest suppliers of enriched uranium fuel to utilities throughout the world. But the government eventually wanted to get out of the uranium business, and when USEC was finally privatized in 1998, investors bought it for $1.9 billion.

After privatization, the company struggled to turn a profit. In 2001, it closed the first of the two uranium enrichment plants it had inherited from the government. (It shut down the second in 2013.) Meanwhile, its efforts to build a new enrichment plant stalled due to technical challenges and soaring costs.

The struggles resulted in serious financial difficulties for the firm. In 2008, the company first applied to the Energy Department for a loan guarantee for its new enrichment plant, but Obama administration officials did not approve it because of USEC’s poor financial condition and uncertainty about the technology.

But DOE officials, including Poneman, found another, controversial way of bolstering the firm: They offered the firm $45 million to conduct advanced research on its centrifuges, which can make fuel for power reactors, and they gave it several hundred million dollars under a no-bid contract to clean up waste at a Cold War-era uranium enrichment plant USEC had operated in Piketon, Ohio, until May 2001.

USEC received this contract even though three years earlier, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) had accused the company of providing inadequate data on its previous cleanup work at Piketon. The report described concerns within the DOE that USEC might not be operating “in a cost-effective manner.” In a written response at the time, the company defended its record and attributed the reporting gaps to confusion over what data it was required to submit.

But the DOE didn’t have all the money needed for its USEC rescue plan in its budget, so it found a creative way of obtaining the funds—which auditors later said was illegal. In an August 2009 memo (first published by Ohio blogger Geoffrey Sea) addressed to Poneman and then-Energy Secretary Steven Chu, the DOE proposed giving USEC thousands of tons of high-quality depleted uranium for free. The firm could then enrich it and sell it at a profit.

The department transferred uranium to the firm valued at $194.3 million, according to a September 2011 GAO report. The report concluded that the transfer had “violated federal fiscal law,” which barred such transactions.

DOE officials said they disagreed and the deal went through, allowing USEC to keep its staff employed. According to a current government official who said he saw the internal DOE memorandum detailing the uranium transfer, it bore Poneman’s signature as the final approving authority.

This uranium deal only helped USEC for a short time. The March 2011 earthquake and tsunami that devastated the Fukushima nuclear power plant in Japan triggered a global slide in reactor fuel prices that hit the struggling company hard. By the end of the year, USEC had racked up hundreds of millions of dollars in losses.

At a June 2011 meeting of National Security Council deputies, Poneman made a PowerPoint-style presentation in which he argued that the partly finished USEC plant for making nuclear fuel needed government assistance so it could produce tritium for nuclear weapons and fuel for the Navy’s nuclear fleet. One slide, which was reviewed by the Center for Public Integrity, put forward several alternatives, one of which was the approval of the stalled $2 billion loan guarantee—despite “significant obstacles,” including the “poor financial condition of USEC, the potential for substantial cost overruns for the project and technology uncertainty.”

From Poneman’s perspective, there was no real alternative to keeping USEC alive, according to two former White House officials who attended interagency meetings with him. “He was a strong advocate of having a domestic enrichment company, and of course there is only one firm that provides that, and that is USEC,” one of the former officials said.

In December 2011, USEC abruptly announced it would shut down the country’s sole operating enrichment plant, located in Paducah, Kentucky, which provided fuel for the Pentagon’s tritium supply. That set off alarm bells at the Energy Department and the Pentagon, the former White House officials said.

It took several months, but by May 2012, a plan was devised to keep USEC propped up and Paducah running. This time the DOE agreed to pay up to $280 million over the next two years in a complicated deal (which again included uranium transfers) to continue financing USEC’s centrifuge research.

The new deal brought more cash to USEC and allowed it to keep the Paducah plant in operation for another year. But once again, the Energy Department’s unorthodox financing of USEC’s programs drew criticism from the GAO. The watchdog agency said that the uranium involved in the deal was worth $300 million, yet the Energy Department insisted it had no value at all.

According to a former congressional staffer, speaking on condition he not be named, Poneman was “instrumental in leading the push” for this additional USEC help on Capitol Hill.

Getting federal funds can cost money, as most corporations know. And USEC, which is now owned in part by Toshiba and Babcock & Wilcox, spent a total of $11 million to lobby the federal government during Poneman’s tenure at DOE, despite being in precarious financial shape, according to lobbying disclosures filed with the Senate.

The filings note that 59 lobbyists pressed the company’s arguments on Capitol Hill and at the White House, the Department of Energy, and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. and elsewhere in Washington. In 2014 alone, Centrus spent more than $1.6 million on lobbying, including advocacy by 25 former congressional and administration staffers from both parties.

During a House Energy and Commerce Committee hearing in September, 2012, Poneman said that he supported keeping the company alive partly because of the government’s need for tritium, a key component of nuclear weapons that decays rapidly and must be replenished.

“But are you going to give them money, even if they’re going bankrupt?” then-Rep. Edward Markey (D-Mass.) asked Poneman. Markey noted that the company had received a billion dollars in federal support over almost two decades, yet it was then worth only $62 million and at risk of defaulting on its debts.

“To me,” Poneman began, before changing his terminology. “To us, Congressman, the question is not a specific company and its status. The question is the capability for the nation. We will do what we need to, to make sure that we still have the deterrent that we need to defend America.”

“Well, I just disagree with that 100 percent,” Markey replied. “We should find a way, indigenous, of doing it, enriching the uranium needed to make tritium but not by subsidizing companies that are going bankrupt. It’s just—it’s just wrong.”

Markey’s concerns were prophetic; USEC declared bankruptcy in early 2014 and in its reorganization was renamed Centrus. And Poneman intensified his efforts. At a White House budget meeting on March 31, he argued that the “USEC situation is acute” and that the company needed federal money promptly to continue development of new uranium enrichment machines, according to notes taken by a participant. Several officials at the meeting were dubious about the company’s management and searched for an alternative to giving it more federal cash. “Poneman always believed that” handing USEC more taxpayer money was “the right path,” says a former administration official, who requested anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.

Even bankruptcy didn’t end the flow of federal largesse. In the last-minute spending bill that passed and was signed by President Obama on December 14 of last year, the company got additional tens of millions of dollars for its centrifuge development work, and since then its contract has been extended. Under the department’s proposed 2016 budget, it would get about $100 million more.

The federal ethics rules don’t restrict Poneman from giving his new employer strategic advice about whom to contact at the DOE and which levers it should pull to win a $2 billion loan guarantee the company has been seeking from the federal government since 2008. The Energy Department has declined to approve the application, but it has not formally rejected it. The application is still pending before the department.

At a March 25, 2015, hearing of the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Energy and Water Development, Sen. Diane Feinstein said that Poneman “was heavily involved in decisions to keep USEC afloat” at a time when the company was “not meeting its goals or timetables.” She expressed her concerns about Poneman’s job shift, saying that Poneman’s work at the company now will make people distrust the department’s future decisions about Centrus.

At the hearing, Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz told Feinstein that prior to Poneman’s departure he was given a “refresher course” on government ethics rules. Under those rules, Poneman is barred for a year from seeking federal action from DOE at meetings with DOE employees. And Poneman had voluntarily extended that period for another two years when he took the Obama administration’s ethics pledge in 2009. The rules also permanently bar Poneman from representing Centrus before the DOE on contracts and grants he was “personally and substantially” involved in deciding.

But the rules primarily bar contacts between Poneman and the DOE’s direct employees. For a federal agency like the DOE, which does an overwhelming proportion of its work through contractors, this restriction is not so limiting.

For example, Thom Mason, the director of Oak Ridge, which is operated for DOE by contractor UT-Battelle LLC, told the Center for Public Integrity he spoke to Poneman in late March—shortly after Poneman started at Centrus—to discuss the performance of the uranium enrichment machines that Centrus is developing under a $117 million subcontract with the lab, which gets about 80 percent of its budget from the Energy Department.

Asked if he felt that his discussion with Poneman raised any ethical issues, Mason said he felt it was “within the scope of the relationship we have with Centrus.” Mason said that while Poneman may be barred from contacting DOE officials, that prohibition does not apply to DOE contractors. “I don’t think that there’s any conflict that I would be concerned about,” he said. The Energy Department declined comment.

But Tyson Slocum, director of energy programs for the watchdog group Public Citizen notes that Poneman can use his “deep knowledge” of the Energy Department and his contacts to aid his new employer as it seeks additional federal funds.

In moving to Centrus, Poneman has joined at least two other former senior DOE officials already at the company. Philip Sewell, Centrus’ senior vice president and chief development officer, was deputy assistant secretary at the DOE before taking a senior post at USEC in 1993, shortly after it was formed as a government-owned corporation. Peter Saba, another senior vice president, was a deputy assistant secretary in the DOE’s Office of Domestic and International Energy Policy and counselor to the deputy secretary between 1989 and 1993.

Asked about the ethics of his move, Poneman said he was puzzled by the question. “I’ve been 100 percent consistent and have thought about this for 40 years,” he told the Center for Public Integrity. “I don’t frankly see the issue. I’ve always believed that nuclear energy has a constructive role to play in combating climate change, I also believe that if nuclear is going to be part of global energy portfolio…that the United States should remain a leading light in that.”

Even with all the federal help, in the last quarter of 2014 Centrus lost $38 million, according to its annual Security and Exchange Commission filing. It lost another $15.4 million in the first quarter of 2015, the company announced on May 6.

This story is from the Center for Public Integrity, a nonprofit, nonpartisan, investigative news organization in Washington, DC. For more of their reporting on national security and accountability, go here or follow them on Twitter.

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Everything You Hate About Washington Confirmed by One Simple Job Change

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After a Mother Jones Investigation, Starbucks Says It Will Stop Bottling Water in California

by PhillipR65 Posted on May 8, 2015

Mother Jones

On the heels of a Mother Jones investigation last week that found that Starbucks sources its bottled water from a spring in the heart of California’s drought country, Starbucks announced yesterday that it will phase out use of its California bottling plant for Ethos Water over the next six months. Because of “the serious drought conditions” in California, the company will transition to its Pennsylvania supplier while looking for another source to cover the western United States, Starbucks officials said in a press release.

The California counties from which Starbucks sources and bottles Ethos have been in a drought emergency for years now. Placer County, where Ethos’ spring water is drawn, was already declared a natural disaster area by the USDA because of the drought back in 2012. Reports from more than a year ago noted that the county was already scrambling to deal with the area’s “extreme drought.” Merced county, where the bottling facility is located, declared a local emergency due to drought more than a year ago, as “extremely dry conditions have persisted since 2012.”

Meanwhile, the Pennsylvania county to which Starbucks is now shifting its entire national production of Ethos Water is itself facing drought conditions. While not as catastrophic as California’s historic water emergency, Luzerne County, where Starbucks’ east coast supplier sources and bottles Ethos, was declared to be under Drought Watch by Pennsylvania’s Department of Environmental Protection back in March. DEP issued the declaration after below-normal rainfall over the past year has led to low groundwater levels in the region, which the agency noted has the potential to cause well-fed water supplies to go dry. The state is asking local residents to voluntarily reduce water consumption and to “run water only when absolutely necessary.” DEP has put large water users on notice to plan for possible reductions in water supplies.

Nevertheless, Ethos’ Pennsylvania bottler, Nature’s Way Purewater, which bottles a number of other brands at its facility, announced in January that it planned to double production going forward.

This article was reported in partnership with the Investigative Fund at The Nation Institute, with support from the Puffin Foundation.

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After a Mother Jones Investigation, Starbucks Says It Will Stop Bottling Water in California

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Why Is My Bank Teller Trying to Sell Me a Credit Card I Don’t Want?

by DennisTPWeivsg Posted on April 9, 2015

Mother Jones

Until recently, your typical banker was someone whose main job was to accept deposits, cash checks, and dispense basic financial advice. But now that job hardly exists anymore—at least not as we once knew it. Today’s front-line bank workers—tellers, loan interviewers, and customer-service reps—earn far too little money to be considered “bankers” in the traditional sense of the word. And though they still collect and dispense money, their main job involves hawking credit cards and loans you probably don’t need.

Rank-and-file bank workers are both causes and symptoms of America’s widening economic divide, says Aditi Sen, the author of Big Banks and the Dismantling of the Middle Class, a report released today by the Center for Popular Democracy. Based on union organizer interviews with hundreds of workers in the industry, Sen found that front-line bank workers often face quotas for hawking potentially exploitive financial products, often to low-income customers, even though the workers themselves barely qualify as middle class. “We can definitely see bank workers as part of the same continuum of issues facing all low-wage workers,” she says.

Banks are, of course, notorious for squeezing profits from their employees and customers. In 2011, the Federal Reserve Board fined Wells Fargo $85 million for forcing workers to sell expensive subprime mortgages to prime borrowers. And in late 2013, a judge slapped Bank of America with a $1.27 billion penalty for its “Hustle Program,” which rewarded employees for producing more loans and eliminating controls on the loans’ quality.

Yet, by some accounts, these sorts of practices are getting worse. In a 2013 study by the union-backed Committee for Better Banks, 35 percent of low-level bank workers surveyed reported increased sales pressure since 2008, and nearly 38 percent stated that there was no real avenue in the workplace to oppose such practices. One HSBC bank employee, according to the study, reported that workers who failed to meet their sales goals had the difference taken out of their paychecks.

The increasing sales pressure comes at a time when the fortunes of the banks and their low-level workers have diverged widely. Bank profits and CEO pay have rebounded to near record levels while wages for front-line workers are stuck in the gutter.

Bureau of Labor Statistics

And that’s not all. Nearly a quarter of bank workers surveyed in 2013 reported that their benefits had been cut since 2008, and 44 percent reported that their medical and life insurance was inadequate. A recent University of California-Berkeley study found that 31 percent of bank tellers’ families rely on public assistance at an annual cost of $900 million to taxpayers.

There are several factors in all of these woes. Mergers and consolidation have led some retail banks to shutter branches and lay people off. Many banks have outsourced customer-service jobs to overseas call centers, and the rise of internet and smartphone banking has further slashed demand for flesh-and-blood tellers. In other words, it’s basically the same mix of foreign and technological competition that has concentrated wealth and depressed middle-class wages throughout the economy. And it means that banks can get away with paying people less, and demanding more in return.

But now the Committee for Better Banks is trying to cultivate common cause between low-level bank workers and the customers they’re forced to target. The interviews featured in the new report show that many bank workers strongly oppose the sales quotas as unfair and exploitive. For instance:

A teller at a top-five bank reports that she is subject to stringent individual goals on a daily basis: If she does not make three sales-points (selling someone a new checking, savings, or debit card account) each day in a month, she gets written up.

Customer service representatives at a call center for another major bank report that each individual has to make 40 percent of the sales of the top seller to avoid being written up. Selling credit cards counts more towards sales goals than helping someone open up a checking account or savings account, thereby crafting skewed incentives based on the profitability of a product sold, not on how well it matched the needs of a customer.

“A lot of time people would call and already have one, two, or three credit cards with us,” says Liz, a member of the Committee for Better Banks who worked in a Bank of America call center for five years and did not want to give her last name. “They might have a situation where they are low on funds and we end up pushing another credit card on them. There was one guy who had three credit cards and I ended up pushing a fourth on him, even though I knew that was not good for him; he would just be in more debt. But if didn’t, I would end up being put in a reprimand.”

On Monday, members of the Committee for Better Banks will converge in Minnesota’s Twin Cities to deliver a petition to bank offices demanding better pay and more stable work hours for rank-and-file workers, and an end to sales goals that “push unnecessary products on our customers.”

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Why Is My Bank Teller Trying to Sell Me a Credit Card I Don’t Want?

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