Dirt Diggers Digest Phil Mattera
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violationtracker.goodjobsfirst
1 25 ymail
he Senate Judiciary Committee’s hearing on Pam Bondi’s nomination to be Attorney General was filled with talk of weaponization of the Justice Department. Republicans put that label on everything they dislike about the DOJ’s behavior during the Biden Administration, while Democrats used it to warn about what will happen if Donald Trump carries through with his vow to get the Department to exact revenge on his perceived enemies.
Nothing was said about the ways in which the DOJ has been substantially disarmed over the past eight years and will probably be further weakened in the next four. That is with regard to the prosecution of corporations, which are increasingly being treated with leniency rather than the iron fist commonly proposed for other types of offenders.
Bondi spoke repeatedly during the hearing about her intention to crack down on drug dealers, terrorists, human traffickers, and immigration violators. There were some oblique references to business malfeasance. She responded positively to comments on the False Claim Act offered by Sen. Grassley, who reminded us of his leading role in the 1986 updating of the Civil War-era law to enhance the role of whistleblowers. It was unclear, however, whether Bondi was signaling her interest in cases against major federal contractors or just ones targeting smaller fish such as individual healthcare providers.
Bondi also agreed with comments by Sen. Klobuchar about the importance of antitrust. Here it was unclear whether this indicated support for aggressive action against corporate concentration of all kinds or just cases against the Big Tech companies the Right likes to vilify. Bondi was evasive when asked about upholding legislation requiring Big Pharma to negotiate with the federal government on prescription drug prices.
While she sparred on several issues with Adam Schiff, the new Senator from California, she seemed to agree with him on the importance of preventing price-gouging in the wake of the disastrous fires in Los Angeles. Schiff, however, had referred to abusive practices by oil companies, while Bondi seemed to focus on gouging by local businesses.
The ambiguities in Bondi’s comments can also be found in her record as Attorney General of Florida from 2011 to 2018. On the one hand, Bondi’s tenure was tainted by accusations that she backed away from investigating misconduct by the for-profit Trump University because of a $25,000 contribution to a political action committee supporting her re-election campaign by a Trump family foundation.
Bondi initiated relatively few cases against large corporations, yet she was heavily involved in multistate rightwing legal initiatives to undermine the Affordable Care Act, to undo a ban on some semi-automatic weapons enacted by Connecticut in the wake of the Sandy Hook massacre, and to block a plan by the EPA and six states to improve water quality in the Chesapeake Bay by restricting pollution runoff by factory farms.
On the other hand, Bondi participated in numerous more enlightened multistate attorneys general lawsuits. These included major cases against BP for the Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, against big banks for mortgage abuses during 2000s, against Wells Fargo related to the bogus accounts scandal, and against General Motors for selling vehicles with defective ignition switches.
There seem to be two sides to Pam Bondi. She was a rightwing partisan during and after her time as Florida AG and she may have allowed those beliefs to stand in the way of prosecuting allies such as Donald Trump. Yet she also was reasonably serious about carrying out the responsibilities of an AG to serve as a consumer champion and was willing to confront at least some powerful corporate interests.
If, as seems likely, Bondi is confirmed, she will serve in an administration headed by a man who has little regard for norms such as the independence of the DOJ and will probably be inclined to discourage investigations of companies which support him and encourage prosecutions of those he dislikes.
Which Pam Bondi will occupy the AG’s office: the partisan loyalist who carries out Trump’s illegitimate wishes or the upright law enforcement officer?
web version: https://dirtdiggersdigest.org/archives/7708
substack
report on fed fines big banks: the-trillion-dollar-mark-corporate-misconduct-cases-reach-a-dubious-milestone
DC — Regulatory fines, criminal penalties, and class-action settlements paid by corporations in the United States since 2000 have now surpassed $1 trillion. Total payouts for corporate misconduct grew from around $7 billion per year in the early 2000s to more than $50 billion annually in recent years, according to a new report by Good Jobs First.
This amounts to a seven-fold increase in current dollars — a 300% increase in constant dollars.
These figures are derived from Violation Tracker, a wide-ranging database containing information on more than 600,000 cases from about 500 federal, state and local regulatory agencies and prosecutors as well as court data on major private lawsuits.
- Explore Violation Tracker.
The database shows that 127 large parent companies have each paid more than $1 billion in fines and settlements over the past quarter-century. The most penalized industries are financial services and pharmaceuticals, followed by oil and gas, motor vehicles, and utilities.
“The fact that penalties have reached the 10-figure level suggests that we have been living through a continuous corporate crime wave,” said Philip Mattera, Good Jobs First research director and lead author of the report. “Every year, companies pay out billions of dollars for a wide range of offenses. Many large corporations are fined or enter into settlements over and over again, often for the same or similar misconduct.”
Among the findings:
- Bank of America has by far the largest penalty total at $87 billion. It and other banks, both domestic and foreign, account for six of the 10 most penalized parent companies.
- Other bad actors includeBP (mainly because of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill), Volkswagen (because of its emissions software cheating scandal), Johnson & Johnson (largely because of big settlements in cases alleging its talcum powder causes cancer), and PG&E (due to cases accusing it of causing or contributing to wildfires in the West).
- Recidivism is a major issue. Half a dozen parent companies—all banks—have each paid $1 million or more in over 100 different cases, led by Bank of America with 225. Two dozen parents have at least 50 of these cases on their record.
- All of the top 10 and 95 of the 100 most penalized parent companies are publicly traded. The most penalized privately held company is Purdue Pharma, which is going out of business for its role in causing the opioid crisis.
- In more than 500 of the cases involving criminal charges, the U.S. Justice Department offered the defendant a deferred prosecution or non-prosecution agreement, thus allowing it to avoid entering a plea. Numerous companies have gotten more than one of these leniency agreements.
- Cases brought by state and local government prosecutors and regulators account for $215 billion of the trillion-dollar total. Nearly two-thirds of that amount came from actions brought by groups of state attorneys general or financial regulators acting in concert. California and New York far surpass the rest of the states in the penalties achieved through single-state actions.
The Occupational Safety and Health Administration accounts for more than one-third of the 600,000 cases in Violation Tracker, which includes only fines of $5,000 or more. But because OSHA’s fines have been kept artificially low and are often below that threshold, the agency accounts for only $3 billion of the $1 trillion total (for example, a company today pays a maximum fine of just over $16,000 when an employee is killed on the job).
The study calls on prosecutors and regulators to supplement monetary penalties with other kinds of remedies, such as forcing companies to divest from lines of business in which they were engaged in serious misconduct. The Justice Department also needs to be more aggressive in bringing criminal charges against individual corporate executives in the most serious cases.
It also calls for greater consistency among states in their commitment to enforcement. Apparently half-hearted approaches to enforcement in states such as South Dakota and Utah deprive residents of the protections contained both in state regulations and in the federal laws the states help to enforce.
“Numerous states also need to improve their disclosure practices, so that the public can see how much enforcement they are actually doing,” said Good Jobs First research analyst Siobhan Standaert, co-author of the report.
Read the full report online or get it in a PDF.
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cfpb
violation tracker gave data to consumer agy
Dirt Diggers Digest
corporate misconduct and how to research it
By Philip Mattera Launched 4 years ago
6 24 ralph radio
MAY 30 •
Corporate Criminals Await Sentencing
MAY 23 •
MAY 16 •
Private Equity is Bad Medicine for Hospitals
MAY 9 •
[PHILIP MATTERA]
What Does a Billion-Dollar Settlement Accomplish?
MAY 2 •
[PHILIP MATTERA]
APR 25 •
APR 18 •
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Violation Tracker Current Parent Company Summary
Current Parent Company Name: BP
Ownership Structure: publicly traded (ticker symbol LSE: BP)
Headquartered in: United Kingdom
Major Industry: oil and gas
Specific Industry: oil & gas
Penalty total since 2000: $36,486,562,463
Number of records: 409
| TOP 5 OFFENSE GROUPS (GROUPS DEFINED) | PENALTY TOTAL | NUMBER OF RECORDS |
|---|---|---|
| environment-related offenses | $34,582,215,109 | 285 |
| consumer-protection-related offenses | $669,467,567 | 6 |
| financial offenses | $525,000,000 | 1 |
| competition-related offenses | $408,000,000 | 8 |
| government-contracting-related offenses | $160,001,800 | 5 |
| TOP 5 PRIMARY OFFENSE TYPES | PENALTY TOTAL | NUMBER OF RECORDS |
|---|---|---|
| oil spill | $32,619,835,000 | 9 |
| air pollution violation | $1,438,789,598 | 76 |
| consumer protection violation | $669,315,000 | 4 |
| investor protection violation | $525,000,000 | 1 |
| price-fixing or anti-competitive practices | $390,250,000 | 6 |
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