Business Roundtable/AEEG

SEE BIZ RNDTABLE TWO BAK

jamie dimond prez, mjr BS PR front for corps?

// pwl memo levels of low popularity of corps?

works w/ CoC, note BUFFER// trade groups LOBBYIST

html deMarrais

COOL RECEPTION MEANDER TALK

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AN 6 24

Last week, the New York Times reported that business expert and Yale School of Management professor Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, "who is in frequent contact with corporate leaders, said most chief executives he had spoken to preferred" President Joe Biden to ex-President Donald Trump, "some of them enthusiastically and some of them biting their lip and holding their nose."

Sonnenfeld expanded on his assertion in a Sunday, June 23 op-ed published by the Times, adding, "Trump continues to suffer from the lowest level of corporate support in the history of the Republican Party."

The Yale Chief Executive Leadership Institute president noted that some "chief executives resented Mr. Trump’s personal attacks on businesses through divide-and-conquer tactics, meddling and pitting competitors against each other publicly."

The School of Management professor added that he knows this information because he works "with roughly 1,000 chief executives a year, running a school for them," which he founded 35 years ago.

Although Sonnenfeld noted, "Our surveys show that 60 to 70 percent of them are registered Republicans," he also emphasized that many of those same executives "rushed to distance themselves from Mr. Trump’s more provocative stances, resigning en masse from his business advisory councils in 2017 after he equated antiracism activists with white supremacists. Dozens of them openly called for Mr. Trump’s impeachment in 2021 after the Jan. 6 insurrection."

Sonnenfeld writes:

*If you want the most telling data point on corporate America’s lack of enthusiasm for Mr. Trump, look where they are investing their money. Not a single Fortune 100 chief executive has donated to the candidate so far this year, which indicates a major break from overwhelming business and executive support for Republican presidential candidates dating back over a century, to the days of [former Presidents William Howard]Taft and stretching through [Calvin] Coolidge and the Bushes, all of whom had dozens of major company heads donating to their campaigns.

The Yale professor also noted that business leaders' "legitimate misgivings about Mr. Biden are overwhelmed by worries about Mr. Trump, version 2024," adding, "Trump’s primary conduits to the business community in his first term — more-reasonable voices like those of Jared Kushner, Dina Powell and Steven Mnuchin — are gone, replaced by MAGA extremists and junior varsity opportunists."

Furthermore, Sonnenfeld emphasized, "Chief executives are not protectionist, isolationist or xenophobic, and they believe in investing where there is the rule of law, not the law of rulers."

*Sonnenfeld's full op-ed is available at this link (subscription required).

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woke? commie?!

an tom d 2 23

Steve Fraser: The Republicans Face Off Against... Yes, Communism!

Recently, at a well-publicized dinner, our former president — the one who encouraged a coup d’état to keep himself in power after losing an election — expressed his latest fear. “The problem we have,” he said ominously, “is that we are headed toward communism. We are beyond socialism. A lot of people say, ‘Well, not really.’ Of course we are.” And then he added, “If you do something spectacular, they don’t talk about it. If you do something not so good, they’ll make it into a travesty. If the other side does something bad, really bad, you’ll never find it. There’s never been a period of time like that in our country’s history.And that’s the way communism starts. And… we’re not gonna let it happen.”

OMG! A new red scare in America, as in my childhood when anti-communism was a part of everyday Republican politics? Did someone revive the Soviet Union when none of us were looking? Have Xi Jinping’s confederates infiltrated this country’s business class? Who could even begin to explain it? Hmm, let’s see… how about TomDispatch regular and historian Steve Fraser, author of Mongrel Firebugs and Men of Property: Capitalism and Class Conflict in American History, who (like Donald Trump and me) lived through those red-scare years of the 1950s.

Admittedly, running against Communism was once the norm in America. With that in mind, take a little voyage of — dare I call it nostalgia? — with Fraser and meditate a bit on what a truly strange world we now live in, one of remarkable extremes of weather, income inequality, and politics. After all, one of our two major parties has gone certifiably mad (and, at least in some parts of the country, that very madness has attracted voters in a big-time fashion).

Oh, and I think I can already hear Marjorie Taylor Greene calling me a “liar” for what I just wrote… or is that my imagination? Who can tell anymore? Tom

The Specter of “Woke Communism”:How Corporate America Became the Bogeyman of Today's Anti-Communist Crusaders

Ron DeSantis, governor of Florida and perhaps the next president of the United States, is waging war against something he and many others on the right identify as “woke communism.” DeSantis even persuaded the Florida legislature to pass a Victims of Communism law, mandating that every November 7th (the anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia), all public schools in the state must devote 45 minutes of instruction to the evils of the red menace.

You might reasonably ask: What menace? After all, the Soviet Union fell apart more than 30 years ago and, long before that, communist parties around the world had dwindled in numbers and lost their revolutionary zeal. The American Communist Party was buried alive nearly three-quarters of a century ago during the McCarthy hysteria of the 1950s.

How then can there be a muscular rebirth of anti-communism when there’s no communism to face off against? The Claremont Institute, a right-wing think tank, explains the paradox this way: the powers that be of the present moment, including “education, corporate media, entertainment, big business, especially big tech, are to varying degrees aligned with the Democratic Party which is now controlled by Woke Communism.”

All clear now? A “cold civil war”is afoot, so we’re assured by DeSantis and crew, and if we don’t act quickly, “woke communism will replace American justice… the choice is between liberty or death.”

Naturally, Donald Trump has joined the chorus, declaiming that the Democratic Party functions as a cover for “wild-eyed Marxists.” People like Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden, formerly considered proud defenders of capitalism, are now censored as socialists. Steve Bannon, right-wing populist organizer and one-time Trump adviser, has attacked the Business Roundtableand venture capitalists like Larry Fink of Blackrock, the largest asset management firm in the world, because he’s determined to defend a “government of laws, not Woke CEOs.”

At the January gathering of the Republican National Committee, angry thatRonna McDaniel had held onto her position as its chairperson, right-wing activist Charlie Kirk put the matter in stark class terms: “The country club won today. So, the grassroots people who can’t afford to buy a steak and are struggling to make ends meet, they just got told by their representatives at an opulent $900/night hotel that ‘We hate you.’”

How surpassingly odd! Somehow, the “spectre” invoked nearly 200 years ago by Karl Marx in The Communist Manifesto, reflecting his urge to see the exploited and impoverished mobilized to overthrow capitalism, now hangs out at country clubs, corporate boardrooms, and the White House — all the redoubts of capitalism.

Listen to DeSantis. At a rally in Sarasota during the 2022 midterm elections, he got his loudest applause for denouncing corporate America — and not just for assaulting the Walt Disney company’s criticism of the state’s “don’t say gay” policy. He went after Wall Street, too, noting that the “masters of the universe are using their economic power to impose policies on the country that they could not do at the ballot box” and promising to “fight the Woke in corporate America.” A recent Gallup poll signals that he might be onto something, since the percentage of Republicans unhappy with big business has soared....

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2021/10/big-companies-are-funding-campaign-kill-climate-bill/620278/

no lnx

SCIENCE

Big Business Is Bankrolling an Effort to Kill the Democratic Climate Bill

The trade group that represents Apple, Walmart, Nike, and dozens of other companies is trying to kneecap the U.S.’s final chance to meet its 2025 climate goals.

By Robinson Meyer

OCTOBER 1, 2021

Four years ago, when President Donald Trump announced that he would take the United States out of the Paris Agreement, the world’s largest companies leapt into action.

Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO, personally beseeched Trump to remain in the pact. Bob Iger, Disney’s chief executive, resigned from a White House advisory council in protest. Goldman Sachs’s CEO, Lloyd Blankfein, sent his first-ever tweet just to denounce the exit. Within days, hundreds of U.S. companies had signed their own Paris Agreement pledge, promising to cut their climate pollution more than 26 percent by 2025, as compared with 2005 levels.

Today, many of those same companies—including Apple, Amazon, Walmart, Nike, Target, and dozens of others—are funding efforts to kill the Democratic reconciliation bill, which contains significant climate provisions that would allow the U.S. to meet its Paris Agreement goals.

This campaign is a quieter one. The companies are financing it through their membership fees in pro-business trade groups such as the Business Roundtable, a coalition of CEOs that lobbies for corporate-friendly policy.

That campaign seems to violate those same companies’ climate commitments. The bill would eliminate nearly 1 billion tons of carbon in the next decade, according to an analysis from the Rhodium Group, an energy-research firm. Its climate provisions “would be the largest single portion of a comprehensive plan for the U.S. to meet its nationally determined contribution” under the Paris Agreement, Trevor Houser, a partner at Rhodium, told me.

Because of the long timelines involved in actually building zero-carbon infrastructure—it can take several years to permit, construct, and connect a solar or wind plant to the power grid—the bill almost certainly represents the country’s final chance to meet those 2025 goals, Jesse Jenkins, a mechanical-engineering professor at Princeton, told me. “We’re already talking about 2022 spending, which leaves just three years ’til 2025. If this bill doesn’t pass now, the window to move the needle has closed,” he said.

“It’s either this [bill] or no federal policy, and that means that we would miss the 2025 Paris goals, and the 2030 ones too, probably,” he said.

The Business Roundtable is one of the leaders in the fight against the bill. It has dispatched C-suite executives to meet with lawmakers, and it has orchestrated an expansive opposition campaign that includes TV and radio commercials, in-person lobbying, and more than $150,000 in Facebook ads displayed to users in purple states. In one such ad, the group warned that the reconciliation bill would be “bad for Montana workers and the economy.”

If a worried Montanan went to see who ran that ad, a list of the Business Roundtable’s well-credentialed members was only a few clicks away. It includes Tim Cook, the Apple CEO; Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Google’s parent company; Doug McMillon, Walmart’s president and CEO; and the leaders of Target, Nike, 3M, and more.

The Business Roundtable says that it opposes the bill because it would raise taxes on companies and some high-income spending. “Congress has unnecessarily tied climate action with $1 trillion in tax increases on job creators, which we strongly oppose, and trillions in non-climate-related spending,” Joshua Bolten, its president and CEO, told me. “There is no policy reason to link strong action to address climate change with unrelated, harmful tax policy and substantial spending, which would not only worsen Americans’ already dangerous debt burden but also undercut the competitiveness of the U.S. economy, businesses, and workers.”

It’s true that Democrats are pursuing their entire domestic agenda in a single bill, as a procedural move to avoid some of the strictures of the Senate filibuster, which Senate moderates such as Joe Manchin of West Virginia have said that they will not alter. Because that move can only be used several times at most during a session, the party’s program has been crammed into one piece of legislation.

But while the substance of the Business Roundtable’s concern seems to dwell on the reconciliation bill’s new tax measures, the group is not distinguishing between its climate programs and its tax measures in its advertisements.Its intent is to kill the partisan reconciliation bill while preserving the bipartisan infrastructure bill, which does not contain the same robust climate policies.

The reconciliation bill’s tax provisions—which would finance some of the climate spending—are also opposed by ExxonMobil and the American Petroleum Institute, a fossil-fuel trade group. Those oil giants have run hundreds of thousands in Facebook ads opposing the reconciliation bill’s tax hikes, according to Axios.

The Business Roundtable’s opposition is surprising because, in 2019, the group issued an influential statement rejecting the idea that corporations are accountable solely to their shareholders. Companies should also “protect the environment” and respect their workers, suppliers, and communities, the statement said.

Some members of the Business Roundtable have distinguished the climate programs in the bill from its tax policy. Lisa Jackson, a vice president at Apple and a former EPA administrator, has said that Apple supports a clean-electricity standard, a mechanism in the bill that would require utilities to generate more of their electricity from zero-carbon sources every year. After receiving an inquiry related to this story, Amazon announced that it supported “investments in the infrastructure and [reconciliation] bills to lower emissions in key sectors like energy and transportation.” (Earlier this year, it also endorsed raising the corporate tax rate.)

Netflix, LinkedIn, and 3M, three other members of the Business Roundtable, have also explicitly endorsed a clean-electricity standard.

But none of those companies has left the Business Roundtable, meaning their membership dues are still funding an effort to kneecap the bill. “We can engage with organizations—even when we might have differing perspectives on certain issues—to raise awareness and understanding on issues of importance and drive collective action,” Sean Lynch, a spokesperson for 3M, told me.

Apple declined to comment on the record for this story. Target and Nike did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Other members of the Business Roundtable said that the group does not speak for them. “Walmart continues to support the Paris Agreement and advocate for strong and cohesive U.S. climate policy, but has not taken a position on any specific bill,” a spokesperson told me in an email.

Jenkins, the Princeton professor, said that these comments didn’t go far enough when those companies remained in the Business Roundtable, which is “actively working to sink the whole thing.”

“It’s one thing to say, ‘We have legitimate, serious concerns about the corporate-tax increase, but we support the climate provisions’—but that’s not how [the Business Roundtable] has approached the reconciliation bill at all,” he said.

“A bunch of firms have been publicly supportive of this bill or some federal climate policy. They’re stepping out and trying to lead. But I don’t think you can do that while supporting trade groups that are actively trying to tank the policy.”

Jenkins contrasted the Business Roundtable with the Edison Electric Institute,the trade group that represents investor-owned utilities. Like the Business Roundtable, its membership is divided on the bill: Some, such as Exelon, the country’s largest utility, have enthusiastically endorsed it; others, such as the Ohio-based American Electric Power, are more skeptical or openly opposed. As such, the institute had stayed “lukewarmly neutral” on the bill, Jenkins said.

It’s not 2001 or even 2009 anymore. With rare exceptions, the largest companies in America no longer bankroll explicit climate denial as they once did, either directly or indirectly. Dozens of powerful firms have committed to reducing their climate pollution in the next decade and achieving net-zero by 2050 or earlier. Many executives have also pledged support for some sort of ideal, though curiously unspecified, federal climate policy.

But that hypothetical support isn’t enough to reduce emissions, and with climate change so far advanced, delay and procrastination amount, in practice, to a kind of denial. As much as executives might want to wait for a perfect climate bill, packed only with inexpensive provisions and stripped of all inconveniences, 40 years of federal inaction on climate change should make it clear that no such bill is coming. Climate change is a difficult problem and it will require powerful people—the ones who care, at least—to compromise. If this reconciliation bill fails, then the history of climate action in the U.S. suggests that lawmakers will not try again until 2032. By that time, the world’s average temperature will have likely already cruised past 1.5 degrees Celsius.

Executives may not like some aspect of the reconciliation bill, and they should say so: That’s life in a democracy. But if this bill fails in its entirety—which is the outcome that the Business Roundtable hopes to achieve—then that would be a damning indictment of U.S.-style liberal capitalism.It will be clear to people at home and abroad that American society circa 2021 cannot sufficiently organize itself to actually fight climate change, and the CEOs’ platitudes about the Paris Agreement will be revealed as just that. The hotter, angrier, and poorer world that will result will not take them seriously, and neither should we.

Robinson Meyer is a staff writer at The Atlantic. He is the author of the newsletter The Weekly Planet, and a co-founder of the COVID Tracking Project at The Atlantic.

Big-time capital is losing its faith in Trump as CEO confidence saw its biggest quarterly drop in seven years

Igor Derysh / SalonSeptember 19, 2019

Big-time capital is losing its faith in Trump, as CEO confidence saw its biggest quarterly drop in seven years.

..."This quarter’s survey shows American businesses now have their foot poised above the brake, and they’re tapping the brake periodically,” saidBusiness Roundtable President Joshua Bolten. “Uncertainty is preventing the full potential of the economy from being unleashed, limiting growth and investment here in the U.S.”

The survey was conducted between Aug. 23 and Sept. 9, sampling 138 CEOs. On the first day of the survey, China announced new tariffs on $75 billion of U.S. products. Trump responded by announcing he would raise existing and forthcoming tariffs on China by 5 percent across the board. The escalation prompted the Dow Jones to plummet by more than 600 points in a single day.

Another survey of the nation’s top 225 chief financial officers also showed a stark drop in economic optimism, with many predicting a recession to hit in the near future.

The Duke University/CFO Global Business Outlook survey showed that 55 percent of CFOs are more pessimistic about the economy compared to the previous quarter. Fifty-three percent of the CFOs predicted a recession would hit by the third quarter of next year and 67 percent predicted a recession would begin by the end of 2020....

https://www.alternet.org/2019/09/why-would-we-trust-plutocrats-to-save-us-from-plutocracy/

no lnx

Why would we trust plutocrats to save us from plutocracy?

Written by Jim Hightower / Common Dreams September 12, 2019

Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote of being leery of a loud-talking huckster who visited his home: “The louder he talked of his honor, the faster we counted our spoons,” Emerson exclaimed.

Likewise, today’s workaday families should do a mass inventory of their silverware as an integrity check on a mess of loud-talking corporate honchos. Suddenly, 181 of these union-busting, tax-cheating, environment-contaminating, consumer-gouging corporate hucksters are asking us to believe that they stand with us in the fight against … well, against them. Wall Street banksters, Big Oil polluters, anti-union extremists and a myriad of other profiteers grouped into a prestigious collective calledBusiness Roundtable,issued a “grito” in August, trumpeting their future intentions to serve not just themselves but every “stakeholder” (which is what they call employees, customers, supplies, et al.).

Nice of them, of course, but vague proclamations are cheap, and it’s worth noting that these new champions of the common good propose no specifics—no actual sacrifices by them or benefits for us. Excuse me, but their grandiose promise of corporate beneficence is what West Texas cowboys would call “bovine excrement.”

Yes, we’ve now been joined in the trenches of class struggle by the CEOs of JPMorgan Chase, Walmart, Amazon and nearly 200 other giant corporations. Well, not quite in the trenches, for you can get your Guccis dirty in there. Still, on the battleground of public relations, Business Roundtable (the chief lobbing front for America’s biggest corporations) has declared its solidarity with all of us who seek economic fairness and equal opportunity.

Their opening volley was fired in August in a grand declaration titled “Statement on the Purpose of a Corporation.” For 50 years, that purpose has been ruthlessly clear: maximize their investors’ profits, no matter who or what they have to run over. But now, the barons of big business are putting on a softer face, proclaiming that their “fundamental commitment” is not merely to serve shareholder greed but also to benefit workers, reduce inequality, protect the environment and serve the whole community. It’s corporate kumbaya, y’all — solidarity forever!

Alex Gorsky, CEO of Johnson & Johnson, was designated to write the Roundtable’s new declaration of concern for the common people. He later expressed a historic sense of pride in the task: “There were times when I felt like Thomas Jefferson,” Gorsky gushed.

Really? This is the same guy who presided over Johnson & Johnson’s profiteering roll in spreading deadly opioids throughout America.Even as he was posing as Jefferson, an Oklahoma jury was assessing a $572 million fine on his corporation for foisting the opioid horror on the common people he now professes to love.

So forgive me for not believing for a moment that there’s one iota of sincerity in this sudden assertion of egalitarian sentiment by the soulless organizers of today’s corporate plunder. They’re still going to plunder your unions, paychecks, jobs, health, environment and overall well-being. The only difference is that they now want you to think they feel bad about it.

A few media observers have been mildly skeptical, saying it’s “an open question” whether any of the corporate proclaimers will change how they do business. But it’s not an open question at all. They won’t. They won’t support full collective bargaining power for workers, won’t join the public’s push to get Medicare for All, won’t stop using monopoly power to squeeze out small competitors and gouge consumers, won’t support measures to stop climate change, won’t back reforms to get their corrupt corporate money out of our politics … won’t embrace any of the big structural changes necessary to reverse the raw economic and political inequality that has enthroned their plutocratic rule and made them richer than royalty.

In fact, their empty proclamation is nothing but a cynical ploy to soften people’s anger at their rampant greed in hopes of fending off the actual changes that real reformers are advancing. Corporate elites won’t fix inequality for us; they’re the ones doing it to us.

https://www.alternet.org/2019/08/the-business-elite-still-believe-the-greed-is-good-fallacy-but-this-dark-philosophy-has-brought-them-to-the-brink/

nolnx

The business elite still believe the ‘greed is good’ fallacy — but this dark philosophy has brought them to the brink

Written by Independent Media Institute August 23, 2019

Gordon Gekko found religion this week. Gekko, the lead in the 1987 movie “Wall Street” about capitalism gone corruptly amok, is most famous for his phrase: “greed is good.”

On Monday, real-world Gekkos—181 corporate CEOs who belong to the Business Roundtable—signed a pledge saying they think greed isn’t so good, after all.

Instead of bowing at the altar of larger corporate profits to hand out to executives and shareholders, these CEOs declared that corporations must demonstrate some reverence for other stakeholders as well: workers, customers, suppliers, communities and the environment.

If corporations actually devoted themselves to achieving this goal, it would be a return to the decades of the 20th century between 1930 and 1970 when many corporations did, in fact, abide by these values. The American middle class was more robust then, as pay rose in tandem with productivity. Unions held a stronger position in the economy. And the disparity between CEO and worker pay was dramatically smaller. But believing the country will revert to those economic times without force is naïve. The Roundtable’s announcement is nothing but a stunt.

Though the 181 Roundtable CEOs signed the stakeholder capitalism document, practicing the principles is an entirely different thing. And not even every member of the Business Roundtable came around and endorsed the document. The “Statement on the Purpose of a Corporation” says those who did sign “share a fundamental commitment to all of our stakeholders.” They underlined the word all. And they wrote in the present tense, as if they were already operating their corporations this way.

That, frankly, is ridiculous.

Take, for example, these signers of the document: Amazon, General Motors, Duke Energy, Chevron and Honeywell. In 2018, they not only paid no taxes, they demanded taxpayers give them money.

Or take these signers: Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson, and McKesson. They all face lawsuits alleging they contributed to the opioid crisis that still kills 40 Americans every day.

Or how about signatory National Gypsum, one of four companies that agreed to pay $190 million to settle a price fixing case?

And there’s signer Duke Energy, which paid $102 million in fines and restitution after pleading guilty to polluting 70 miles of the Dan River.

Among the participants is General Motors, which benefited from the U.S. taxpayer bailout, and is now shutting down two American factories and plans to close three more in North America and lay off a total of 14,000 workers even as it expands production in Mexico. And there’s United Technologies, which depends on taxpayer dollars as a massive defense contractor, but which closed a plant in Indiana and partially closed another, Carrier, and sent the work to Mexico.

Also on the list of signatories is Bank of America, Citigroup, Morgan Stanley and JPMorgan Chase, all of which required bailout money from American taxpayers. JPMorgan Chase is led by Jamie Dimon,chairman of the Business Roundtable and evangelist for the corporate focus change.

It’s just great that 181 of America’s richest CEOs attained civic enlightenment. But their statement on the purpose of corporations came with absolutely no concomitant announcements of change.

Jamie Dimon could have led the way easily. He could, for example, end the bank’s exorbitant overdraft fees, which can rise to $102 a day. These fees, generally squeezed out of the bank’s poorest account holders, rake in $2 billion a year for JPMorgan Chase.

Dimon could raise the wages of the bank’s workers, which seems a natural after U.S. Rep. Katie Porter grilled him at a congressional hearing about a JPMorgan Chase worker paid so little that she runs a $567 deficit each month.

“I’m wholly sympathetic,” Dimon told Rep. Porter about the worker’s plight.

“She’s short $567, what would you suggest she do?” the lawmaker asked.

“I don’t know, I’d have to think about that,” Dimon said.

That was in April. The CEO who pulled down $31 million last year has had four months to think about it. How long does it take to figure out that tellers might be able to cover their bills if CEO pay had not grown 940 percent since 1978 while worker pay rose only a paltry 12 percent? How long does it take to figure out that the solution is for Dimon to slash his own pay and increase that of tellers?

Similarly, on the very day that the Business Roundtable released the corporate pledge that featured Boeing CEO Dennis A. Muilenburg’s name, federal investigators determined there was sufficient merit to pursue nine unfair labor practice charges against the corporation.

The International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAM) represents Boeing workers in Washington and Oregon, and workers there receive family-supportive wages and benefits.

But Boeing has fought its South Carolina workers’ attempts to unionize. A group of about 176 technicians in South Carolina voted last year to join the IAM, but Boeing is trying to overturn that election and now faces charges that it illegally fired five workers in retaliation for their support of the union.

If Muilenburg, whose compensation last year was $30 million, really believes Boeing’s workers are among the stakeholders to which the corporation has a “fundamental commitment,” he could have ended this dispute before the unfair labor practice charges were filed by rehiring the fired workers, recognizing the IAM and bargaining in good faith with the union.

Jotting down a bunch of words on paper with absolutely no accountability for implementing them is a lot easier than complying with mandates from Congress.

And right now, Congress is striking fear in the hearts of these CEOs. That’s part of what prompted this lovefest with customers and communities and employees. This Business Roundtable document was a preemptive strike intended to prevent Congress from actually requiring decent corporate citizenship.Legislation to place workers on the boards of directors of large corporations has been introduced, and U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown sponsored legislation to give workers $1 for every $1 million corporations spend on stock buybacks, a maneuver that greatly benefits shareholders. If Brown’s proposal had been law last year, it would have put $20,000 in the bank accounts of every JPMorgan Chase worker.

CEOs can feel that cold breeze on their necks. Winter is coming, and not just in the form of legislation. There may be a downturn or possibly a recession on the horizon. And workers are restless already. They didn’t benefit from that giant tax break corporations demanded and got, the tax break that ballooned the national debt and deficit. Workers’ wages have been virtually flat for decades, while the rich continually got richer and richer. Young people are staggering under the burden of college debt and low-paid work, and they’ve told pollsters they want real change.

A whole crew of candidates for the Democratic nomination for president have offered programs to support labor unions and control corporate greed. They range from proposals to strengthen collective bargaining to those prohibiting corporations from buying back their stock unless they meet conditions like paying all workers at least $15 an hour and limiting executive compensation.

The Business Roundtable has gone back and forth on the duties of a corporation ever since University of Chicago economist Milton Friedman asserted in 1970 that despite the fact that society grants corporations benefits like limited legal liability for shareholders, corporations have absolutely no responsibilities to society.

Friedman wrote, “there is one and only one social responsibility of business—to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits.” The Roundtable embraced this greed is good philosophy is 1997, stating, “the principal objective of a business enterprise is to generate economic returns to its owners.”

Now, according to the Roundtable’s announcement on Monday, CEOs have experienced another conversion and plan a revival of 1950s corporate values. That assertion without action just doesn’t cut it. Real transformation is essential. And that will only happen if laws change to enable unions to grow and flourish again and bring about real change for working Americans because Gekko and his ilk still believe in their cold black heart of hearts that greed is good.

Tom Conway is the international president of the United Steelworkers Union (USW).

This article was produced by the Independent Media Institute.

819 art'l yesterday ceo ~ profit max, vs ceo$ max, //?

https://www.alternet.org/2019/08/financial-journalist-explains-why-shareholder-democracy-and-milton-friedman-economics-have-failed-miserably/

no lnx

Financial journalist explains why ‘shareholder democracy’ and Milton Friedman economics have failed miserably

Written by Alex Henderson August 20, 2019

“Shareholder democracy” is an economic theory that was aggressively promoted by the late Milton Friedman, the conservative University of Chicago economist who served as an adviser to President Ronald Reagan as well as British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.According to “shareholder democracy,” a corporation’s #1 responsibility is to its shareholders — not the good of society at large — and “shareholder democracy” as preached by Friedman influenced everything from Reaganomics to neoliberalism to the Libertarian Party. But Andrew Ross Sorkin (author of the 2009 book “Too Big to Fail: The Inside Story of How Wall Street and Washington Fought to Save the Financial System — and Themselves”) explains in a New York Times article that in 2019, more and more Americans are rethinking “shareholder democracy” and coming to view it as detrimental to the greater good.

“For nearly a half-century,” Sorkin explains, “Corporate America has prioritized, almost maniacally, profits for its shareholders. That single-minded devotion overran nearly every other constituent, pushing aside the interests of customers, employees and communities

Friedman, Sorkin notes, scoffed at the concept of corporate responsibility, asserting in 1970, “What does it mean to say that ‘business’ has responsibilities? Businessmen who talk this way are unwitting puppets of the intellectual forces that have been undermining the basis of a free society these past decades.”

But in 2019, according to Sorkin, one is seeing a resurgence of what used to be called “managerialism” — essentially, a belief that corporations need to be concerned about employees, communities and society’s greater good and not simply shareholders. There were hints of managerialism, Sorkin says, in a Business Roundtable statement released on Monday — when leaders of major companies ranging from Apple and Amazon to JPMorgan Chase issued a joint statement noting that employees and communities should matter to companies along with shareholders.

Sorkin attributes this statement in part to “public outrage” and a growing populism.

“Americans mistrust companies to such an extent that the very idea of capitalism is now being debated on the political stage,” Sorkin asserts. “Populism has been embraced on both ends of the political spectrum, whether in the trade protectionism of President Trump or the social-net supremacy of Sen. Bernie Sanders.”

Indeed, Sanders’ popularity shows a shift in the United States’ political landscape. The self-described “democratic socialist” has achieved much greater prominence in U.S. politics than he had in the 1990s or 2000s, and recent polls on the 2020 Democratic presidential primary have found him battling for the #2 position with the decidedly liberal/progressive Sen. Elizabeth Warren.

Reflecting on the effects of “shareholder democracy,” Sorkin explains that in the past, “Shareholders and, in turn, a new class of investors known as corporate raiders convinced executives to slash any and all fat from their budgets or risk being taken over or voted out. Layoffs increased, research and development budgets were cut, and pension programs were traded for 401(k)s. There was a rush of mergers driven by ‘cost savings’ that grabbed headlines while profits soared and dividends increased.”

The debate on “corporate democracy” versus “managerialism,” Sorkin stresses, will rage on — and not everyone in the business world agrees with the Business Roundtable statement issued on Monday.

“For whatever progress may have been made Monday, it is hardly clear the debate is over,” Sorkin explains. “In fact, the fight for corporate identity is just beginning.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/27/upshot/california-banning-soda-taxes-a-new-industry-strategy-is-stunning-some-lawmakers.html

June 27, 2018

For years, the soda industry had an ironclad strategy when a city wanted to enact a soda tax:

Spend a lot of money, rally local businesses, and shoot it down.

That strategy worked again and again, until it didn’t. In 2014, Berkeley, Calif., passed the nation’s first tax on sugary drinks, which have been linked to heart disease, obesity and tooth decay. Since then, eight communities, including three more cities in California, enacted similar bills.

Now the beverage industry has a new approach. Instead of fighting the ordinances city by city, it is turning to states, trying to pass laws preventing any local governments from taxing their products.

In California, the legislature passed a bill Thursday that will pre-empt any new local beverage or food taxes for 12 years.Arizona and Michigan have passed similar laws. In Oregon, the state’s grocers have collected enough signatures to bring a ballot initiative barring any taxes on grocery items. And legislators are considering pre-emption bills in other states, including Pennsylvania, New Mexico and Washington.

“It’s a little bit like, instead of playing a game of whack-a-mole, you could just put a sheet of plywood over all the holes,” said Franco Ripple, a spokesman for the Campaign to Defend Local Solutions, a group that was founded last year to oppose state laws that limit local autonomy.

The beverage industry says the statewide measures are an appropriate way to protect local businesses and consumers from higher taxes. “People across the country are taxed enough, and they can’t afford new taxes on what they eat and drink,” said William Dermody, the vice president for media and public affairs at the American Beverage Association, an industry trade group.

In California, the arrival of the bill to pre-empt soda taxes, which was championed by the soda industry and introduced over the weekend, came as a shock to public health advocates and many state lawmakers. The state has passed more soda taxes than any other, shepherded by progressive lawmakers who see them as a source of revenue for schools and public services and a tool to fight obesity and diabetes. Scott Wiener, a state senator who represents San Francisco and parts of San Mateo County, said the beverage industry had successfully held California “hostage.”

Bill Monning, the Senate majority leader, was one of a handful of Democrats who voted against the bill. He called its passage “unprecedented” and said it would stop cities and counties “from being able to take steps to protect the health of their residents.” But he also said that state lawmakers would redouble their efforts to curb consumption of sugary drinks. He pointed out that the Senate health committee had just voted in favor of a bill that would require warning labels on sugary drinks indicating that they contribute to various health problems.

“It’s a sad day for democracy in California,” he said. “But ever the optimist I think that the outrage of Big Soda blackmailing the state legislature and the people of California is going to boomerang.”

Beverage companies spent at least $7 million to get an initiative on the ballot this November that would have prevented local communities from raising taxes without approval from two-thirds of voters or an elected body, rather than a simple majority. Such a change would have made it much more difficult for localities to pay for police, fire, transit and other public services.

According to several state senators, the industry then went to lawmakers in Sacramento with a proposal: Pass a bill banning soda and food taxes, and the industry would drop its November ballot initiative.

“They sent us a ransom note that they will drop this horrible ballot measure if we put a 12-year moratorium on local soda taxes,” said Mr. Wiener, who has long supported soda taxes and voted against the bill that now bars them. “It’s a classic case of picking your poison. The soda industry has gone completely rogue.”

Several top lawmakers said they opposed the measure banning soft drink taxes, known as Senate Bill 872, but many felt obliged to support it because they were so worried about the effects of the broader ballot initiative.

Nancy Skinner, a state senator who represents Richmond, Calif., as well as three cities that passed soda taxes in 2016, voted against the measure but said she recognized that her colleagues who supported it were in a bind. The law will not overturn soda taxes enacted before 2018, but it will prevent any new ones, including a soda tax on the ballot later this year in Richmond. “It is totally wrong to deny the residents of Richmond a vote,” she said.

Gov. Jerry Brown avoided taking a position on the bill until Thursday but has now signed it into law. Critics of the bill pointed to a photo that shows him posing with executives from Coca-Cola, PepsiCo and the American Beverage Association at a recent private dinner at the governor’s mansion. The governor’s spokesman said the meeting was unrelated to the soda tax measure.

The push for the pre-emption law began to materialize this year when an industry-financed group, theCalifornia Business Roundtable, started collecting signatures for the ballot initiative making local tax increases harder. The American Beverage Association California PAC contributed heavily to the effort, raising $6 million from Coke and Pepsi, $1 million from Dr Pepper Snapple and $100,000 from Red Bull.

The deal, reported by The Sacramento Bee on Sunday, which called it “a shakedown,” provoked a fierce outcry across the state and the country.The American Heart Association, the American Diabetes Association, the American Cancer Society and more than 20 other groups issued a joint statement on Tuesday calling on Mr. Brown to oppose it and chiding the soda industry for “resorting to backroom deals and underhanded efforts to preserve its profits.”

The beverage association, which supported the California legislation, said its turn to pre-emption simply reflected its view that taxes on drinks represented an unfair burden — not just on them, but on retailers, bottlers, shipping companies and consumers.

Mr. Dermody noted that, in several states, the pre-emption bills are backed by a coalition of business interests, including grocery stores, and, in some cases, labor unions.

The California measure is part of a broader national strategy by the beverage industry to head off local soda taxes, which have passed in eight communities. Berkeley’s passage of a major soda tax paved the way for other cities to act. Philadelphia, San Francisco, Oakland, Calif., and the county that includes Chicago imposed their own such measures in 2016, followed by Seattle in 2017. The soda industry spent at least $38 million fighting the taxesin 2016, which were backed by public health advocates and the billionaires Laura and John Arnold and Michael R. Bloomberg, former mayor of New York, who contributed $20 million to the Bay Area soda tax campaign.

The experience of the places that adopted soda taxes has been mixed. Research in Berkeley, Philadelphia and Mexico, which has a similar tax, shows that the measures appear to increase beverage prices and reduce sugary drink sales.

But there has been backlash. Cook County in Illinois repealed its tax in the face of voter complaints and industry pressure. And Mayor Jim Kenney of Philadelphia has had to back away from his initial claims that beverage tax revenue would provide enough money to pay for a universal prekindergarten program for the city, as revenue has come in below projections. Definitive evidence about public health effects of the bills is still a long way off.

The beverage companies have borrowed a tactic from the tobacco industry, which used state pre-emption laws in the 1980s to ban cigarette taxes and other municipal antismoking ordinances. Republican-controlled state legislatures have also increasingly used state pre-emption laws to prevent cities and towns from adopting a wide range of local measures, including anti-discrimination laws, bans on natural gas fracking, higher minimum wages, and restrictions on the use of plastic bags.

“The irony is that the soda companies screamed very loudly about government overreach when soda taxes began to get passed,” said Kelly Brownell, the dean of the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke University. “But now they are looking for the ultimate government overreach when it works in their favor.”

Anahad O’Connor is a staff reporter covering health, science, nutrition and other topics. He is also a bestselling author of consumer health books such as “Never Shower in a Thunderstorm” and “The 10 Things You Need to Eat.”

Margot Sanger-Katz is a domestic correspondent and writes about health care for The Upshot. She was previously a reporter at National Journal and...

gangs of am

t w e l v e

THE REVOLT OF THE BOSSES

The new mobilization of corporate

political power (1971-2002)

In August, 1971, two neighbors in Richmond, Virginia happened

to have a little chat. One was Eugene B. Sydnor, Jr., a department store

owner who had recently been appointed chairman of the U.S. Chamber

of Commerce’s Education Committee. The other wasLewis Powell, Jr.,

one of the most well-connected corporate attorneys in the country, and a

director on 11 corporate boards. The two talked about politics, and Sydnor

was so intrigued by Powell’s ideas that he asked Powell to put them

in a memo to Sydnor’s committee....

Ralph Nader, “a legend in his own time and an

idol of millions of Americans.” Quoting Fortune magazine, the memo

described Nader as ruthless, implacable, and frighteningly powerful:

The passion that rules in him.and he is a passionate man.is

aimed at smashing utterly the target of his hatred, which is corporate

power. He thinks, and says quite bluntly, that a great

many corporate executives belong in prison.for defrauding the

consumer with shoddy merchandise, poisoning the food supply

with chemical additives, and willfully manufacturing unsafe

products that will maim or kill the buyer. He emphasizes that he

is not talking just about “fly-by-night hucksters” but the top

management of blue chip businesses....

Alongside and in the wake of the Roundtable, the 1970s saw the

creation of a constellation of institutions to support the corporate

agenda, including foundations, think tanks, litigation centers, publications,

and increasingly sophisticated public relations and lobbying

agencies. According to Lee Edwards, official historian of the Heritage

Foundation, wealthy brewer Joseph Coors was moved by Powell’s

memo to donate $250,000 to the Analysis and Research Association, the

original name for the Heritage Foundation. Other contributors followed

the example of Coors. Powell also inspired an initiative by the California

Chamber of Commerce that led to the formation of the Pacific Legal

Foundation, the first of eight conservative litigation centers. Former

secretary of the treasury William Simon, head of the Olin Foundation

and one of the engineers and funders of this effort, described its goal as

the creation of a “counterintelligentsia”that would help business regain

its ideological footing.

While the Business Roundtable pursued a highly public approach

to corporate advocacy at the federal level, another group pursued an

“under the radar” approach at the state level. Founded by conservative

leader Paul Weyrich in 1973, the American Legislative Exchange

Council originally focused on right-wing causes such as abortion and

school prayer, but as numerous corporations began contributing to the

council in the 1980s, the emphasis shifted to business-oriented issues.

Eventually, the number of corporations involved in funding the council

grew to over 300. The ALEC presented itself as a nonpartisan provider

of services such as research and bill drafting to chronically understaffed

state legislators. Its forte was the drafting of model bills with beguiling

titles such as “The Environmental Good Samaritan Act” or the “Private

170 ..

Property Protection Act.” The approach proved to be highly successful,

especially in complex areas such as electricity deregulation, where state

legislators leaned on the technical expertise of the ALEC. On such issues,

the combination of the ALEC’s seemingly neutral model bills and

the active lobbying of ALEC members such as Enron CEO Kenneth Lay

proved highly effective. During the 1999-2000 legislative cycle, legislators

belonging to the ALEC introduced more than 3100 bills based on

the organization’s model bills. Of these, 450 were enacted.

At the national level, the permanent organizations that m....

On the fringe of the new corporate politics was a grab bag of dirty

tricks used to silence corporate opponents. To place environmentalists

in a bad light, public relations firm Hill & Knowlton distributed a

memorandum on the letterhead of Earth First calling for activists to

commit violence “to fuck up the mega machine.”...

171

----

Washington — Former Michigan Gov. John Engler said Thursday he plans to retire next year as president of the prominent Business Roundtable – a group of nearly 200 chief executives of major U.S. corporations.

Engler, a Republican who served three terms as governor, joined the Washington-based Roundtable in 2011 after spending six years as president and CEO of the National Association of Manufacturers.

“The outlook in early 2017 to achieve passage of major components of the Business Roundtable economic growth agenda is very bright,” Engler said in a statement announcing plans to retire as of July 1.

“Tax reform, regulatory relief and immigration reform are all possible with the new administration and Congress. I expect the pace to be brisk as everyone gets to work next year.”

Engler had a different take on the eve of Donald Trump’s nomination at the Republican National Convention earlier this year, telling the New York Times that his association was on the “opposite side of Trump on trade and immigration.” During his campaign, Trump said he would tear up free-trade agreements such as the North American Free Trade Agreement and impose taxes to protect American jobs (links) “We’re now faced with two candidates who, when it comes to the United States economy, have diametrically opposite viewpoints from us. It’s cause for great concern.” The pro-business group endorsed the 12-nation trade deal with Asia known as the Trans-Pacific Partnership and had urged Congress to approve the pact this year. Both Trump and his Democratic opponent, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, opposed the TPP.

“We cannot have a robust economy if the goal is to make things here and sell it to ourselves,” Engler told the Associated Press in January.

Engler, 68, is retiring in part for family reasons. He and wife Michelle, who live in Virginia, have triplets, Margaret, Hannah and Madeleine, who are graduating from college in the spring.

Engler also thought it would be a good time as the Roundtable transitions between chairmen. The current chair, Caterpillar CEO Doug Oberhelman, will be succeeded in January by Jamie Dimon, chairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase & Co.

“Under John’s stellar leadership, Business Roundtable has enhanced its reputation as a credible voice for an economy that serves all Americans,” Oberhelman said in a statement....

---

https://www.stopcorporateabuse.org/sites/default/files/resources/insidejobcai.pdf

Business Roundtable (BRT)

represents the CEOs of America’s largest companies, who rake in over US$6 trillion on an annual basis.35 BRT’s mandate is to represent the transnational corporations that literally fuel climate change. Despite being an admitted observer to the UNFCCC, Business Roundtable has not vocalized strong support for these negotiations, nor has it publicly admitted that climate change and its dangers are a reality backed by an overwhelming amount of scientific data. In fact, it has actively tried to oppose climate policies that are in line with the Paris Agreement.

Links to the fossil fuel industry

Members of BRT include CEOs of some of the world’s biggest polluters, including Shell, Chevron, Exxon Mobil, Conoco Phillips, Duke Energy, Phillips 66, Marathon Oil Corporation, Marathon Petroleum Corporation, and Peabody Energy.36 What it says about climate change and its causes BRT has acknowledged “the potential consequences of climate change” and says it “supports both government and private sector actions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions globally,”37 but it has largely refrained from addressing the severity of global warming, only describing the consequences as “potentially serious and far-reaching.”38 Public stance on the UNFCCC or the Paris Agreement BRT does not have a clear or strong stance regarding the outcomes of UNFCCC negotiations or the Paris Agreement,37,39 raising questions as to what its stance on these critical climate change policies is.

Track record on climate policy

●Top priorities include gaining access to federal lands for drilling. The organization’s energy and environment priorities for 2017 include calling for “Increase[d] access to onshore and offshore federal lands to ensure reliable supplies of coal, oil, and natural gas in the coming decades.”40 Notably, recommendations for reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions are absent.39

● Lobbied against lifesaving climate policies, not just once… In February 2017, BRT wrote to the White House requesting reductions in “regulatory burdens [to the U.S. economy].” 41 Among other things, it asked that the Clean Power Plan, the cornerstone of the U.S.’ UNFCCC negotiating platform, be “recrafted to address concerns about EPA [Environmental Protection Agency] overreach infringing on state authority.”41 It also asked that federal regulations to protect water sources be “pulled back” and regulations to lower air quality standards be delayed.41

● ... but multiple times! In a 2015 letter to former U.S. President Obama, BRT expressed “highest concern” over and made recommendations to weaken key U.S. climate policies that are fundamental to meeting commitments in line with the Paris Agreement, including the revision of the National Ambient Air Quality Standards for ground-level ozone, GHG emissions regulations, and the New Source Review under the Clean Air Act. 42-43

● Linked to climate denialists now in senior government positions. Rex Tillerson, U.S. secretary of state and former Exxon Mobil CEO,44 chaired one of BRT’s executive committees from 2011-2015.45

● Applauded highly controversial pipelines.BRT praised U.S. President Trump’s decision in January 2017 to advance the controversial Dakota Access and Keystone XL pipelines, calling it a “major victory for workers and American families.”46 Its CEO described the Keystone XL pipeline as an “environmentally responsible infrastructure project.”

http://prospect.org/article/when-shareholder-capitalism-came-town

origin of bad behavior:

...

What shareholders possess is a contractual claim to the “residual value” of the corporation once all its other obligations have been satisfied—and even then the directors are given wide latitude to make whatever use of that residual value they choose, just as long as they’re not stealing it for themselves.

It is true, of course, that only shareholders have the power to elect the corporate directors. But given that directors are almost always nominated by the management and current board and run unopposed, it requires the peculiar imagination of corporate counsel to leap from the shareholders’ power to “elect” directors to a sweeping mandate that directors and the executives must put the interests of shareholders above all others.

Given this lack of legal or historical support, it is curious how “maximizing shareholder value” has evolved into such a widely accepted norm of corporate behavior.

Milton Friedman, the University of Chicago free-market economist, is often credited with first articulating the idea in a 1970 New York Times Magazine essay in which he argued that “there is one and only one social responsibility of business—to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits.” Anything else, he argues, is “unadulterated socialism.”

A decade later, Friedman’s was still a minority view among corporate leaders. In 1981, as Ralph Gomory and Richard Sylla recount in a recent article in Daedalus,the Business Roundtable, representing the nation’s largest firms, issued a statement recognizing a broader purpose of the corporation: “Corporations have a responsibility, first of all, to make available to the public quality goods and services at fair prices, thereby earning a profit that attracts investment to continue and enhance the enterprise, provide jobs and build the economy.” The statement went on to talk about a “symbiotic relationship” between business and society not unlike that voiced nearly 30 years earlier by General Motors chief executive Charlie Wilson, when he reportedly told a Senate committee that “what is good for the country is good for General Motors, and vice versa.”

By 1997, however, the Business Roundtable was striking a tone that sounded a whole lot more like Professor Friedman than CEO Wilson. “The principal objective of a business enterprise is to generate economic returns to its owners,” it declared in its statement on corporate responsibility. “If the CEO and the directors are not focused on shareholder value, it may be less likely the corporation will realize that value.”

The most likely explanation for this transformation involves three broad structural changes that were going on in the U.S. economy—globalization, deregulation, and rapid technological change. Over a number of decades, these three forces have conspired to rob what were once the dominant American corporations of the competitive advantages they had during the “golden era” of the 1950s and 1960s in both U.S. and global markets. Those advantages—and the operating profits they generated—were so great that they could spread the benefits around to all corporate stakeholders. The postwar prosperity was so widely shared that it rarely occurred to stockholders, consumers, or communities to wonder if they were being shortchanged.[yanni farifakis kpfa 7/5/16 8 am]

It was only when competition from foreign suppliers or recently deregulated upstarts began to squeeze out those profits—often with the help of new technologies—that these once-mighty corporations were forced to make difficult choices. In the early going, their executives found that it was easier to disappoint shareholders than customers, workers, or even their communities. The result, during the 1970s, was a lost decade for investors.

Beginning in the mid-1980s, however, a number of companies with lagging stock prices found themselves targets for hostile takeovers launched by rival companies or corporate raiders employing newfangled “junk bonds” to finance unsolicited bids. Disappointed shareholders were only too willing to sell out to the raiders. So it developed that the mere threat of a hostile takeover was sufficient to force executives and directors across the corporate landscape to embrace a focus on profits and share prices. Almost overnight they tossed aside their more complacent and paternalistic management style, and with it a host of inhibitions against laying off workers, cutting wages and benefits, closing plants, spinning off divisions, taking on debt, moving production overseas. Some even joined in waging hostile takeovers themselves.

Spurred on by this new “market for corporate control,” companies traded in their old managerial capitalism for a new shareholder capitalism, which continues to dominate the business sector to this day. Those high-yield bonds, once labeled as “junk” and peddled by upstart and ethically challenged investment banks, are now a large and profitable part of the business of every Wall Street firm. The unsavory raiders have now morphed into respected private-equity and hedge-fund managers, some of whom proudly call themselves “activist investors.” And corporate executives who once arrogantly ignored the demands of Wall Street now profess they have no choice but to dance to its tune.

THE INSTITUTIONS SUPPORTING SHAREHOLDER VALUE

An elaborate institutional infrastructure has developed to reinforce shareholder capitalism and its generally accepted corporate mandate to maximize short-term profits and share price. This infrastructure includes free--market-oriented think tanks and university faculties that continue to spin out elaborate theories about the efficiency of financial markets....

With the rise of behavioral economics, and the onset of two stock-market bubbles, the efficient--market hypothesis has more recently come under serious criticism. Another of last year’s Nobel winners, Robert Shiller, demonstrated the various ways in which financial markets  are predictably irrational. Curiously, however, the efficient-market hypothesis is still widely accepted by business schools—and, in particular, their finance departments—which continue to preach the shareholder-first ideology.

Surveys by the Aspen Institute’s Center for Business Education, for example, find that most MBA students believe that maximizing value for shareholders is the most important responsibility of a company and that this conviction strengthens as they proceed toward their degree, in many schools taking courses that teach techniques for manipulating short-term earnings and share prices. The assumption is so entrenched that even business-school deans who have publicly rejected the ideology acknowledge privately that they’ve given up trying to convince their faculties to take a more balanced approach.

Equally important in sustaining the shareholder focus are corporate lawyers, in-house as well as outside counsels, who now reflexively advise companies against actions that would predictably lower a company’s stock price.

For many years, much of the jurisprudence coming out of the Delaware courts—where most big corporations have their legal home—was based around the “business judgment” rule, which held that corporate directors have wide discretion in determining a firm’s goals and strategies, even if their decisions reduce profits or share prices. But in 1986, the Delaware Court of Chancery ruled that directors of the cosmetics company Revlon had to put the interests of shareholders first and accept the highest price offered for the company. As Lynn Stout has written, and the Delaware courts subsequently confirmed, the decision was a narrowly drawn exception to the business--judgment rule that only applies once a company has decided to put itself up for sale. But it has been widely—and mistakenly—used ever since as a legal rationale for the primacy of shareholder interests and the legitimacy of share-price maximization.

Reinforcing this mistaken belief are the shareholder lawsuits now routinely filed against public companies by class-action lawyers any time the stock price takes a sudden dive. Most of these are frivolous and, particularly since passage of reform legislation in 1995, many are dismissed. But even those that are dismissed generate cost and hassle, while the few that go to trial risk exposing the company to significant embarrassment, damages, and legal fees.

altern: Other notable industry associations include the Canadian Council of Chief Executives [14] (CCCE), formerly called the Business Council on National Issues (BCNI), a group comprised of Canada’s top 150 CEOs who were a major force for the promotion and implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). The CCCE remains one of the most influential “interest groups” in Canada.

In the United States there are prominent industry associations like the Business Council, the Business Roundtable, and the Financial Services Forum. The Business Council describes itself as “a voluntary association of business leaders whose members meet several times a year for the free exchange of ideas both among themselves and with thought leaders from many sectors.”

Likewise, the Business Roundtable [15] describes itself as “an association of chief executive officers of leading U.S. companies with more than $7.3 trillion in annual revenues,” which believes that “businesses should play an active and effective role in the formation of public policy.”

Finally, the Financial Services Forum [16] proclaims itself to be “a non-partisan financial and economic policy organization” which aims “to pursue policies that encourage savings and investment, promote an open and competitive global marketplace, and ensure the opportunity of people everywhere to participate fully and productively in the 21st-century global economy.”

Business Roundtable

From SourceWatch

The Business Roundtable is an association of chief executive officers of 150 of the largest corportaions operating in America.[1]

Contents[hide]

BR promotes voluntary cuts to greenhouse gases

The PR firm Porter Novelli is helping the Business Roundtable's "Climate RESOLVE" program, O'Dwyer's PR Daily reports. Climate RESOLVE was created to encourage companies to voluntarily reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, responding to George W. Bush's call for a voluntary 18 percent reduction of emissions by 2012 and attempting to undermine an international treaty on GHG.

The Climate RESOLVE campaign kicked off on September 23, 2004 with ads in the Washington Post and Roll Call to be followed by "one-pagers" for "Congressional aides, environmental officials and reporters to keep them abreast of efforts to control greenhouse gas."

Climate RESOLVE is also hosting a two-day "GHG Management Workshop," featuring a talk by White House Council on Environmental Quality chair James L. Connaughton. The Business Roundtable says 70 percent of its members have signed up for Climate RESOLVE. "They are eager to avoid the mandated cuts that are going into effect in much of the world under the Kyoto Protocol, the pending international treaty of global warming," O'Dwyer's writes.[2]

Support for Bush Administration initiatives

"The Business Roundtable and the National Association of Manufacturers have set up two umbrella organizations" to privatize Social Security and limit class action lawsuits, the Washington Post repored in February 2005. "One, the Alliance for Worker Retirement Security, will pressure Congress directly, capitalizing on the lobbying staffs and corporate executives of the member companies. The other, the Coalition for the Modernization and Protection of America's Social Security, will conduct a nationwide television and grass-roots pressure campaign costing $15 million to $20 million. COMPASS has hired OnPoint Advocacy to conduct grass-roots lobbying and Apco Worldwide Inc. for public relations. Tita Freeman, communications director at the Business Roundtable, said COMPASS has a budget of $15 million to $20 million, which may grow as the fight progresses."[3]

Members

http://www.businessroundtable.org/pdf/members.pdf

Contact details

Business Roundtable

1615 L Street NW

Suite 1100

Washington, DC 20036

Phone: (202) 872-1260 begin_of_the_skype_highlighting (202) 872-1260 end_of_the_skype_highlighting

Web: http://www.businessroundtable.org/

SourceWatch resources

Alliance for Energy and Economic Growth

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Alliance_for_Energy_and_Economic_Growth

Philip M. Condit - former chair

External link

References

Articles

"PN helps BR on global warming", O'Dwyers PR Daily, September 22, 2004.
Thomas B. Edsall, "Conservatives Join Forces for Bush Plans: Social Security, Tort Limits Spur Alliance," Washington Post, February 13, 2005.
David DeGraw, "Full Report: The Economic Elite Vs. The People of the United States of America," Amped Status (ampedstatus.com), February 15-27, 2010.

The Alliance for Energy and Economic Growth (AEEG) describes itself as "a broad-based coalition whose members develop, deliver, or consume energy from all sources." ^[1] The U.S. Chamber of Commerce states in its 2005 annual report that it "co-founded and manages the day-to-day operations of the Alliance for Energy and Economic Growth, a broad-based coalition whose members develop, deliver, and consume energy from all sources. The coalition represents consumers; energy companies involved in all phases of energy exploration, production, and transmission; agricultural groups; and business and labor organizations — all united in support of a comprehensive national energy plan."^[2]

Contents[hide]

Nuclear Energy Institute

The Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI) was a founding member of AEEG. "As a member of the Alliance, we will encourage investment in energy technologies that improve efficiency, increase output and protect the environment," stated NEI's Joe F. Colvin in a May 2001 press release. ^[3]

NEI's financial report for 2006 lists AEEG as both an expense and a source of income. Under "program expenses," NEI lists "Alliance for Energy and Economic Growth," with the cost being $2,918,120. Under "income-producing activities," NEI again lists AEEG, as bringing in $3,012,173 in revenues. NEI's 2006 financial report describes AEEG as "educate the public and policymakers about the need for a comprehensive energy strategy." ^[4]

But NEI's 2007 financial report filed with the IRS no longer lists AEEG as an expense or a source of revenue, which may indicate that NEI is no longer a financial contributor to AEEG. ^[5]

According to the DeSmogBlog, "AEEG's voice mail directs you call Rob Dubrow at the Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI) for questions regarding billing." ^[6]

Website contacts

AEEG's website, yourenergyfuture.org, is registered to Gordon Barnes at the American Gas Association. The webmaster contact given is the Edison Electric Institute. The website was created on April 24, 2001, according to domain registration records. ^[7]

Lobbying

Lobbying disclosure forms filed with the U.S. Senate Office of Public Records list two lobbyists for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce who advocated on behalf of AEEG.

In 2002, Geraldine Ferraro (then with the Golin Harris firm) registered to lobby on behalf of AEEG on the "Yucca Mountain initiative," referring to the proposed nuclear waste repository site in Nevada. Later disclosure forms said the lobbying contract was terminated in November 2002, with some $100,000 having been spent ($60,000 in the first half of 2002 and $40,000 in the second half).

Also in 2002, JHS Associates registered to lobby behalf of AEEG, on "energy / nuclear policy issues related to Public Law No 97425." The lobbyist identified on the contract was John H. Sununu. This contract was terminated in December 2002, with less than $10,000 spent in each half of the calendar year.

Members

AEEG's website says it has "more than 1,200 members" and represents "consumers; energy companies involved in all phases of energy exploration, production and transmission; agricultural groups; and business and labor organizations." ^[8] It does not list its members on its website.

While "general membership in the Alliance is free ... there is a fee for participation on the Alliance Steering Committee," states AEEG's website. ^[9] A brochure on the AEEG website lists the following Steering Committee members, as of March 29, 2005: ^[10]

Personnel

Members of the Management Committee

On its website, as of February 2009, the alliance listed the members of its management committee as being^[11]

James May, President and Chief Executive Officer of the Air Transport Association of America
Dave McCurdy, President & Chief Executive Officer of the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers
Donna Harman, President and CEO of the American Forest & Paper Association
David Parker, President and CEO of the American Gas Association
Andrew Sharkey, President and Chief Executive Officer of the American Iron and Steel Institute
Red Cavaney, President and CEO of the American Petroleum Institute
Edward Hamberger, President & CEO of the Association of American Railroads
Thomas Kuhn, President of the Edison Electric Institute
Donald Santa Jr., President & CEO of the Interstate Natural Gas Association of America
Jay Timmons, the Executive Vice President of the National Association of Manufacturers
Evan Gaddis, President and CEO of the National Electrical Manufacturers Association
Kraig Naasz, President and CEO of the National Mining Association
Frank Bowman, President and Chief Executive Officer of the Nuclear Energy Institute
John Shaw, Senior Vice President, Government Affairs for the Portland Cement Association
R. Josten, Executive Vice President of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce

Contact info

Alliance for Energy and Economic Growth

1615 H Street, N.W.

Washington, DC 20062-2000

Phone: 202-463-5642

Fax: 202-887-3445

Email: info AT yourenergyfuture.org

Web: http://www.yourenergyfuture.org

Resources and articles

References

↑ "Your Energy Future," AEEG website, accessed March 2008.
↑ U.S. Chamber of Commerce, [http://www.uschamber.com/NR/rdonlyres/e5hbltk43bftaej6v7kfjc5olgblcltbumsgzdnr3refbxmo6m6ei6dkwwm4qogdtpazfvms2gmr4jdufe5mfdba3ff/032306lbRPT2005AnnualReport.pdf "Environment, Technology & Regulatory Affairs"], U.S. Chamber of Commerce, page 13.
↑ "Alliance for Energy & Economic Growth Calls for Comprehensive National Energy Policy," NEI press release, May 2, 2001.
↑ "Nuclear Energy Institute IRS form 990 report for 2006 (PDF), via GuideStar, accessed February 2008.
↑ "[1]Nuclear Energy Institute IRS form 990 report for 2007, via GuideStar.
↑ "Alliance for Energy and Economic Growth," DeSmogBlog profile, accessed March 2008.
↑ "yourenergyfuture.org domain registration information" via Network Solutions, accessed March 2008.
↑ "Your Energy Future - Members," AEEG website, accessed March 2008.
↑ "Your Energy Future - Contact us," AEEG website, accessed March 2008.
↑ "Alliance for Energy and Economic Growth brochure (PDF)," AEEG website, accessed March 2008.
↑ Alliance for Energy and Economic Growth, "Members of the management committee", Alliance for Energy and Economic Growth website, accessed February 2009.

External articles

"United Seniors Association: Hired Guns for PhRMA and Other Corporate Interests", Public Citizen, July 2002.
David Roberts, "Industry groups lobby against climate legislation", Grist, December 7, 2007.
"US Chamber, National Association of Manufacturers and Industry Front Group Kick Off Four-State Tour to Kill Senate Climate Change Bill", Common Dreams, March 12, 2008.
Justin Willet, "Industry groups decry cap-and-trade cost", Columbia Daily Tribune, April 2, 2009.
Darren Samuelsohn, "Obama Aides Meet With Senate Dems to Map April Strategy for Climate Bill ", The New York Times, March 25, 2010.

External resources

Retrieved from "http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Alliance_for_Energy_and_Economic_Growth"

The Wonk Room

The Alliance For Energy And Economic Growth Is A Bunch Of Right-Wing Pollutocrats

By Brad Johnson on Mar 26th, 2010 at 12:19 pm

The Alliance For Energy And Economic Growth Is A Bunch Of Right-Wing Pollutocrats

Per Matt Yglesias’s note that the “male-dominated nature of Wall Street is a source of dysfunction,” meet the Alliance for Energy and Economic Growth:

These fourteen men are the representatives of the Alliance for Energy and Economic Growth (AEEG) who are meeting with Sen. John Kerry (D-MA), Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT), and Sen. Lindsey Graham to negotiate the terms of comprehensive climate and clean energy legislation. The AEEG is the U.S. Chamber of Commerce-managed working group of the trade associations representing America’s carbon-pollution industries, founded in 2001. Five of these AEEG representatives sit on the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s Association Committee of 100, helping shape the organization’s policy.

Five of the groups are suing to block the Environmental Protection Agency’s scientific finding that greenhouse gases are harmful pollutants — the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the American Petroleum Institute, the National Association of Manufacturers, the Portland Cement Association, and the American Farm Bureau Federation. The American Petroleum Institute ran an astroturf campaign against the House climate legislation last year, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce called for a “Scopes monkey trial” on the science of climate change.

The least conservative of the industry lobbyists are Dave McCurdy of the Alliance of Auto Manufacturers, a former New Democrat congressman from Oklahoma (and Wonk Room guest blogger), and former general Evan Gaddis of the National Electric Manufacturers Association. Seven of the lobbyists were George W. Bush contributors, and two others — Erik Heilman and Rich Nolan — were Republican staffers. The overall political contributions of these fourteen men is whoppingly Republican, either as a direct contribution or funneled through conservative industry political action committees. They’ve donated $326,497 to Republican candidates compared to $100,346 to Democrats, more than a three-to-one ratio:

Contributions from AEEG Representatives

The Alliance for Energy and Economic Growth representatives meeting with Sen. Kerry, Graham, and Lieberman:

Industry Representatives at Climate Negotiations Representative Title Organization Pct D


Marv Fertel	director and CEO	Nuclear Energy Institute	13
Evan Gaddis	president and CEO	National Electrical Manufacturers Association	47
Jack Gerard	president and CEO	American Petroleum Institute	20
Ed Hamberger	president and CEO	American Association of Railroads	5
Erik Heilman	senior director of government affairs	American Forest & Paper Association	N/A
Bruce Josten	executive vice president for government affairs	U.S. Chamber of Commerce	14
Tom Kuhn	president	Edison Electric Institute	28
Mark Maslyn	executive director of public policy	American Farm Bureau	N/A
James C. May	president and CEO	Air Transport Association	33
Dave McCurdy	president and CEO	Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers	76
Rich Nolan	vice president of government affairs	National Mining Association	0
David N. Parker	president and CEO	American Gas Association	27
John S. Shaw	senior vice president of government affairs	Portland Cement Association	0
Jay Timmons	executive vice president	National Association of Manufacturers	2
Pct D: Percentage of political contributions to Democrats.	Pct D: Percentage of political contributions to Democrats.	Pct D: Percentage of political contributions to Democrats.	Pct D: Percentage of political contributions to Democrats.

gangs of america:

Now, questions were being asked, not only about Bush’s business record

but about Vice President Cheney’s as well, and the SEC opened an

investigation into charges that Halliburton, the company Cheney had

run prior to becoming Vice President, had engaged in dubious billing

and accounting practices under his watch.

With the Bush Administration absorbed in its own damage control,

it was the Business Roundtable that stepped in with what appeared to be

a deeper explanation of the corporate crime wave, along with a proposal

for curing the patient. According to the Business Roundtable, the problem

in the industry was essentially one of business not doing enough to

keep pace with the times. As the Enron scandal peaked in March of

2002, the Roundtable released a statement declaring that the problems

with Enron were a “troubling exception” in a system with an “overall

record of success.” Nevertheless, Roundtable president Franklin Raines

announced that the organization was in the process of an expedited review

of its 1997 corporate governance standards. Two months later, the

Roundtable released the results of the review, a series of “best practices”

recommendations for the organization of corporate boards and

committees, the approval of stock options, and the disclosure of pertinent

information.

As the for use of stock options for executive compensation, the

Roundtable recommended no essential changes. Instead, the organization

affirmed the appropriateness of a “management compensation

structure that directly links the interests of management to the long-term

interests of shareholders, including short-term and long-term incentives.”

If ever there were an area where Congress might want to heed the

advice of groups other than big business, it would be a spate of scandals

involving big business itself. Yet the legislation adopted in response to

the scandals, the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, represented a fairly mild set of

measures that barely exceeded the “best practices” recommendations of

the Roundtable: requiring CEOs to certify their company’s financial

reports, tightened the regulations for corporate auditing committees,

banning inside loans to executives and board members, prohibiting

accounting firms from serving as consultants to their clients during audits

(but not prohibiting accounting firms from advising their clients at other

times), requiring disclosure of off−balance sheet items, and increasing

fines for fraud and other violations.

CRIME

WAVE 217

Not surprisingly, the Roundtable applauded Sarbanes-Oxley, the

legislative enactment of the Roundtable’s assertion that big business

merely needed an accounting tune-up, and that voluntary measures corporate

sector would mainly be sufficient to get the house of corporate

America back in order. Congress readily agreed; neither Republicans

nor Democrats fought for stronger measures. That response by the Republican

was understandable, given the party’s traditional identification

with the interests of big corporations. But what had happened to the

Democrats?

The answer can be found by following the money.

When Billionaires Become Educational Experts

“Venture philanthropists” push for the privatization of public education.

By Kevin K. Kumashiro

For years, critics have pointed to the decreasing ability of health-care professionals to make decisions and provide services because of the demands of insurance companies and health-management organizations to sustain profits. Health-care decisions are increasingly being made by the wrong people and for the wrong reasons.

So, too, with public education. Current reforms are allowing certain individuals with neither scholarly nor practical expertise in education to exert significant influence over educational policy for communities and children other than their own. They, the millionaires and billionaires from the philanthropic and corporate sectors, are experimenting in urban school districts with educational reform initiatives that are not grounded in sound research and often fail to produce results. And yet, with funding for public education shrinking, the influence of these wealthy reformers is growing.

There is also much profit to be earned from public education. The American educational system today is a $500–600 billion enterprise, funded overwhelmingly by public dollars, with billions of dollars in services and products being outsourced, and with political lobbying groups like the Democrats for Education Reform, financed by hedge-fund millionaires, leading the push to further outsource. The public educational system has always had ties to the business sector, including business leaders themselves and the philanthropies funded by business fortunes. But that influence has not always looked the same. Despite the fact that philanthropic giving has never constituted more than 1 percent of total educational funding, in recent years a handful of millionaires and billionaires have come to exert influence over educational policy and practice like at no other time in American history. What has happened? The roles of business and philanthropy have shifted, reconfigured, and converged over the past century, and therefore seeing the bigger picture of public education requires understanding the interrelated histories of philanthropic and corporate influence.

Early Corporate Influence

Philanthropies have a long history of giving to public education, a history that includes early efforts by white businessmen to shape the education of communities of color. Following the US Civil War, for example, philanthropies helped to establish primary and vocational schools for African Americans in the South, as well as normal schools that eventually became black colleges and universities, which expanded access even as they reinforced segregated and differentiated learning. In the first half of the twentieth century, philanthropies supported and expanded the use of intelligence testing that justified a racialized understanding of what different groups of students could learn and do, making commonsensical the notion of academic tracking. Clearly, the early philanthropies were varied in their goals and impact, funding initiatives that both reinforced and challenged inequities in education. But these philanthropies, perhaps the best known of which were the Carnegie Corporation, the Ford Foundation, and the Rockefeller Foundation, increasingly tried to raise the visibility of educational inequities and thus were widely perceived as liberal and altruistic for much of the twentieth century.¹(http://www.aaup.org/article/when-billionaires-become-educational-experts#note1)

The business sector also has a long history of influencing public education, particularly in the period from 1890 to 1940, when public school districts were consolidating and becoming larger and larger. As immigration made cities increasingly diverse, and as members of the working class won more and more seats in city governments, the business elite made concerted efforts to take control of local school boards, not only by getting business leaders elected to school boards but also by structuring the boards to reflect the centralized control and bureaucracy that characterized the large industries that were emerging at this time. That is, the business elite influenced school governance both by constituting its governing bodies and by structuring its model of management. The business elite turned its attention to higher education as well, as in the 1950s when the US Chamber of Commerce and other corporate advocates began creating a network of organizations on university campuses that aimed to cultivate probusiness values in the next generation of leaders.²(http://www.aaup.org/article/when-billionaires-become-educational-experts#note2)

Philanthropy and Business Roundtables

As the United States entered the second half of the twentieth century, significant economic, legal, cul- tural, and ideological changes occurred that would prompt the formation of new structures in both the philanthropic and the corporate sectors. In the early 1970s, two national groups emerged that would have enormous influence on public policy generally, and educational policy in particular, in the decades to follow: the Philanthropy Roundtable and the Business Roundtable.

First, the Philanthropy Roundtable. The 1950s and 1960s were a time of numerous and significant legal and cultural challenges to inequities of race, class, and gender. The civil rights movement brought together a range of constituents to push for landmark legislation and policy changes across the nation. To opponents of the civil rights movement, such attempts at resource redistribution and governmental regulation departed from the American ideals of self-sufficiency and meritocracy and in the process threatened to weaken the American economic system of “free enterprise.” Opponents also took note of how such legal changes were led by a “liberal establishment” that was organized and strategic in ways that conservatives were not yet.

In 1971, Lewis Powell, who would soon after become an associate justice on the US Supreme Court, wrote an internal Chamber of Commerce memorandum known as the “Powell Manifesto.” This memorandum described a concerted liberal attack on the American free-enterprise system and on American democracy itself and called for organizing and action. In response to the Powell Manifesto, a group of conservatives, particularly philanthropists with family business fortunes, came together and formed a national roundtable that would strategize about how to use their personal wealth for conservative movement building.

At the helm were wealthy conservatives whose philanthropic work helped to seed what eventually grew into an interconnected web of organizations and initiatives. Their project was as much legislative as it was ideological, in that they aimed to influence legislation and policy as well as to shape “common sense” in society. In the decades to follow, the conservative philanthropies developed interconnected funding priorities and strategies to advance publicpolicy agendas that favored business and opposed social welfare and that would enable the American political and economic systems to continue to benefit those racial and social-class groups that were already privileged in society.

They sought to develop a cadre of students in higher education who embraced conservative ideologies, a generation of scholars who produced research that would make conservative ideologies accessible and who would then enter government service, a network of regional and state policy think tanks and advocacy organizations, and a protocol for using the media to reach the public effectively.³(http://www.aaup.org/article/when-billionaires-become-educational-experts#note3) Their strategies have been quite successful, as evidenced by the emergence of such public figures as Dinesh D’Souza, Chester Finn, Newt Gingrich, and Thomas Sowell, all of whom were once beneficiaries of fellowships and other forms of professional support from the philanthropies, as well as by the preponderance of messages in the media and legislation that were developed in related think tanks.

At the top of the chopping block was public education, considered by some to be a drain on the government and a crutch for society not only because it was the most expensive of domestic enterprises but also because it exemplified what they considered to be a socialist enterprise. Conservatives called for the entire school system to be privatized, made into a free enterprise, and the conservatives’ strategy of choice was school vouchers. Early on, Milton Friedman, one of the leading proponents of free-market reform, argued that “vouchers are not an end in themselves; they are a means to make a transition from a government to a free-market system.” Not surprisingly, the focus of many conservative foundations has been and continues to be school-choice and school-voucher initiatives.

Until recently, the four most influential conservative foundations nationally were the Bradley, Olin, Scaife, and Smith Richardson foundations, sometimes dubbed theFour Sisters. The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation in Wisconsin is the country’s largest conservative foundation and includes among its priorities the ending of affirmative action and of welfare. A former board member is William Bennett, secretary of education under President Reagan. The Bradley Foundation is involved in various educational policy initiatives, including the support of school-voucher programs and privatization. The John M. Olin Foundation, which ceased operations in 2005, focused on developing research through think tanks as well as through higher education, with large gifts to Harvard, Yale, the University of Chicago, and other universities, as well as to individual researchers. The Scaife Family Foundations, consisting of the Sarah Scaife, Allegheny, and Carthage Foundations and funded by the Mellon family fortune, gives to a range of think tanks and lobbying and publishing groups. The H. Smith Richardson Foundation in North Carolina supports, according to its website, the “next generation of public policy researchers and analysts” by funding think tanks and universities. All of the Four Sisters have contributed funding to the leading conservative think tanks, including the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, the Heritage Foundation, and the Hoover Institution.

Several other foundations gave more than $100 million to conservative causes between 1998 and 2004, including the Walton Family and DeVos foundations. Created by the heirs of Sam Walton of Wal-Mart, the world’s largest corporation, the Walton Family Foundation in Arkansas has financed nearly every ballot initiative for vouchers since 1993. Walton funds such provoucher organizations as the Alliance for School Choice, as well as organizations that draw communities of color into the provoucher movement, such as the Black Alliance for Educational Options and the Hispanic Council for Reform and Educational Options. The Richard and Helen DeVos Foundation in Michigan, funded by the AmWay fortune, supports vouchers as well as organizations of the Christian Right, including Focus on the Family, which have vast media and communications resources. More recently, the Charles Koch Foundation has targeted higher education by funding faculty positions, think tanks, and educational initiatives in universities across the country. The websites of the Media Matters Action Network (http://mediamattersaction.org) and People for the American Way (http://www.pfaw.org) provide descriptions of these and numerous other such foundations.

Of course, conservative foundations are not the only ones funding education. Liberal philanthropies that identify with the goals and legacy of the civil rights movement also contribute to education, but they are far less visible and influential in changing federal or state-level policy. Perhaps the most notable strategic difference between conservative and liberal philanthropic organizations is the expectation of how organizations will use their funds. Whereas the liberal philanthropies tend to fund a large number of organizations for specific projects of limited term and scope, the conservative ones are more likely to fund the general operations of a smaller number of organizations over longer periods of time in order to build institutional infrastructure. The conservative foundations especially direct funding to organizations that aggressively lobby in state legislatures and Congress and that engage effectively in media campaigns, thus ensuring that their ideas are enacted into law with public support. Consequently, the conservative movement has emerged as an interconnected web of organizations with aligned missions and coordinated strategies, often facilitated by shared board members.⁴(http://www.aaup.org/article/when-billionaires-become-educational-experts#note4)

The history and function of the Business Roundtableparallel those of the Philanthropy Roundtable. The 1960s were marked by declining corporate profits resulting from such factors as deficit spending to fund the war in Vietnam, rising oil prices following the formation of OPEC, and an increasingly competitive market in a globalizing economy.⁵(http://www.aaup.org/article/when-billionaires-become-educational-experts#note5) The decade also saw increasing governmental regulation of the workplace and increasing influence of organized labor. In response, some business leaders felt the need to organize the corporate sector in order to influence public policy in ways that advanced corporate interests, particularly the interests of the business elite. In 1972, the Business Roundtable formed, consisting of the top three hundred CEOsin the nation.

The Business Roundtable had always addressed a range of public policies, but in the late 1980s it began focusing significant attention on public education. In 1989, it called for six “national education goals” and, soon after, nine “essential components of a successful education system.” This call put pressure on states to move toward an outcomes-based model of educational reform, using standardized tests to measure student and teacher performance, with sanctions and rewards for failure or success. Reinforcing the pressure put on states was a large network of influential foundations, centers, universities, and public media, assembled by the roundtable, that consisted of such entities as the Annenberg Center, the Broad Foundation, the Education Trust, Harvard Graduate School, and most newspaper editorial boards.

In so doing, the Business Roundtable effectively laid out a blueprint for standards-based reform, begun during the Reagan administration but culminating in the 2001 No Child Left Behind Act, which has become so taken for granted as the way to think about educational quality and educational reform that even Democrats, from Clinton onward, have put forth proposals that were framed by these concepts.

Venture Philanthropy

As the United States neared the end of the twentieth century, the globalizing economy provided fertile ground for an unprecedented accumulation of wealth by the corporate elite. Taking this new wealth and the lessons learned about leveraging wealth for both increased profits and political influence, several millionaires and billionaires transformed the landscape of philanthropy, developing new organizations that operate much more like the conservative foundations than traditional philanthropies. These are the venture philanthropies.⁶(http://www.aaup.org/article/when-billionaires-become-educational-experts#note6)

Unlike traditional philanthropy, which sought, at least in principle, to “give back” to society, venture philanthropy parallels venture capitalism in its goal of investing capital in ways that earn more. In contrast to venture capitalism, one benefit of venture philanthropy is that it operates under different incorporation laws, providing tax shelters for what are really financial investments. Whereas the financial returns may not be as immediate as those of corporate transactions, the policy foci of today’s venture philanthropists indeed reveal the economic incentive of their investments. They overwhelmingly are pushing for the privatization of public education, creating new markets worth hundreds of billions of dollars, as well as for the prerogative to direct how public tax dollars get spent. They target the large urban school districts, experimenting with models they hope eventually to “scale up” nationally, as they have done in Chicago, where theGates Foundationalone has spent millions on small-school initiatives, school turnarounds, youth organizing, and parent organizing.⁷(http://www.aaup.org/article/when-billionaires-become-educational-experts#note7)

Another departure from traditional philanthropy is the role that venture philanthropists play in their investments. Whereas traditional philanthropists view their giving as donations that support what others were doing, venture philanthropists view their giving as entryways into that work. That is, philanthropists themselves are now getting significantly involved in goal setting, decision making, and evaluating progress and outcomes to ensure that their priorities are met. This hands-on role allows venture capitalists to affect public policy more directly and substantially, particularly in a climate where their financial aid is so desperately needed.

Indeed, the timing was fortuitous for venture philanthropy. Setting the stage was the 1983 report by the Reagan administration,A Nation at Risk, which claimed not only that public schools were failing but also, more significantly, that their failure was a primary cause of the nation’s economic recession at that time. Such a crisis gave the business elite yet another reason to turn their attention to public education. And for their part, educational leaders needed the additional funding because fewer and fewer tax dollars were being earmarked for education. States have been disinvesting in education for decades: over the past twenty years in Illinois, for example, state contributions to public higher education dropped from almost 50 percent to less than 20 percent of university budgets. Cities and districts have also been disinvesting: from the 1980s through the 1990s, the federal government reduced its funding to cities, and, when combined with the global financial crisis of the past few years, this reduction in funding provided cities and districts new justification to slash education budgets further, resulting in the current furloughs of public school teachers and staff, shortened school years, reduced services and resources, and reduced educational quality. This was the result not only of less money, caused in large part by dramatically decreasing taxes paid by corporations and the wealthy, but also of lower priority being placed on education at a time when budgets for prisons and wars were steadily increasing.

Such cuts, of course, disproportionately affect students of color and working-class students, who disproportionately populate the public schools and public universities, which brings us full circle to the time of the early philanthropies when white businessmen were using their wealth to change the education of primarily poorer students of color, often with even greater disparities resulting. The change is not only in educational policy but also in public-policy decision making more broadly, signaling the transition from public deliberation by an elected government to decisions of self-appointed individuals with no accountability to the public.

The two leading venture philanthropies, the Gates Foundation and the Broad Foundation, do include among their grantees historically liberal organizations like the teacher unions. However, their funding priorities and strategic initiatives are so framed by neoliberalism, and their partnerships with conservative organizations and leaders so extensive, that their impact is indistinguishable from that of the conservative foundations. Overwhelmingly, by number of initiatives and amount of funding, the leading venture philanthropies are emphasizing the privatization and marketization of public education with such initiatives as outsourcing of school management, which can best be seen in school districts that are targeted for charter- school growth, where the majority of charter schools are managed by for-profit companies; incentive pay for teachers; alternative routes to certification for teachers and school leaders; and school-choice and charter- school initiatives. The leading venture philanthropies are investing in a web of organizations not unlike the web of foundations, think tanks, media organizations, and advocacy groups that characterizes the conservative network. The Gates Foundation, for example, funds think tanks like the American Enterprise Institute to issue reports, communications groups like Teach Plus to amplify the voices of teachers who specifically counter the voices of the teacher unions, and leadership groups like the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers to develop policies around the common-core standards.

The top-giving venture philanthropies include a broad mix of foundations from family fortunes: the Broad Education Foundation, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Walton Family Foundation, the Michael and Susan Dell Foundation, the Donald and Doris Fisher Fund, and the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation. These megaphilanthropies are funding other education-related venture philanthropies, like the Charter School Growth Fund and the NewSchools Venture Fund. Venture philanthropies include not only the national foundations from individual family fortunes but also the local philanthropies that were founded by collectives of business leaders, as is the case in Chicago with the Chicago Public Education Fund and the Renaissance Schools Fund. The result is a philanthropic sector that is inseparable from the business sector, advancing school reforms that cannot help but to be framed by corporate profitability.

Kevin K. Kumashiro is professor of Asian American studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where he was formerly chair of educational policy studies. He is president-elect of the National Association for Multicultural Education. His e-mail address is*kevink@uic.edu*.

Notes

William Watkins, The White Architects of Black Education: Ideology and Power in America, 1865–1954 (New York: Teachers College Press, 2001).
Anuradha Mittal and Felicia Gustin, Turning the Tide: Challenging the Right on Campus (Oakland, CA: The Oakland Institute and the Institute for Democratic Education and Culture—Speak Out, 2006); David B. Tyack, The One Best System: A History of American Urban Education (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974).
Kathleen deMarrais, “’The Haves and the Have Mores’: Fueling a Conservative Ideological War on Public Education (or Tracking the Money),” Educational Studies 39, no. 3 (2006): 201–40.
Jeff Krehely, Meaghan House, and Emily Kernan, Axis of Ideology: Conservative Foundations and Public Policy (Washington, DC: National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy, 2004).
David Hursh, “Assessing No Child Left Behind and the Rise of Neoliberal Education Policies,” American Education Research Journal 44, no. 3 (2007): 493–518.
Kenneth Saltman, The Gift of Education: Public Education and Venture Philanthropy (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010); Janelle Scott, “The Politics of Venture Philanthropy in Charter School Policy and Advocacy,” Educational Policy 23, no. 1 (2009): 106–36.
Pauline Lipman, The New Political Economy of Urban Education: Neoliberalism, Race, and the Right to the City (New York: Routledge, 2011).

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The Wonk Room

The **Alliance** For Energy And **Economic** **Growth** Is A Bunch Of **Right**-Wing Pollutocrats

The **Alliance** For Energy And **Economic** **Growth** Is A Bunch Of **Right**-Wing Pollutocrats

When Billionaires Become Educational Experts

Early Corporate Influence

Philanthropy and Business Roundtables

Venture Philanthropy

Notes

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The Alliance For Energy And Economic Growth Is A Bunch Of Right-Wing Pollutocrats

The Alliance For Energy And Economic Growth Is A Bunch Of Right-Wing Pollutocrats