From a review by Salvatore Babones on Truthout:

“Pizzigati’s book is a must-read for the contemporary progressive. I read its 370 pages in just two long sittings and would have read it in one if I hadn’t had to sleep. Pizzigati’s focus on the nitty gritty history of the battles and debates that led to the creation of mid-century America is surprisingly gripping – and full of surprises.”

Those surprises suggest how much of our nation’s own populist and progressive history we’ve forgotten, including the history and lessons to learn from movements that fought for economic justice and democracy, including the ideas they rallied around that make today’s efforts look tepid by comparison.

I should say tepid with the possible exception of the Occupy movement and growing calls to break up the banks.

BTW, for a valuable inside perspective on OWS, I highly recommend David Graeber’s new book, The Democracy Project, a gripping description of OWS, efforts to destroy it, and how it has raised the same fundamental principles of democracy raised in the American Revolutionary era — resisted in those days by most of the Founding Fathers, who saw “democracy” as threatening as today’s progressives and liberals see the horizontal principles of  “anarchism.”  That’s Graeber’s take, and his argument is backed up by much evidence. If you want a more critical take on OWS, check out Tom Frank’s essay in Issue # 21 of The Baffler.

The Senate Finance Committee released a set of policy papers on tax reform today that at least include some ideas we like for discussion and inclusion, such as a carbon tax (more on that below). A few we’d like to see included and prioritized include:

1) Transparency: Make companies reveal how much they pay by making corporate returns (reports to the IRS) public. Currently, only listed (publicly traded) companies reveal what they pay — in 10-K annual reports filed with the SEC. But those figures are usually much different from what they actually pay.

As Mark W. Everson, IRS commissioner from 2003 to 2007 has suggested, “significantly increasing business transparency could immediately improve the way private-sector entities calibrate risk and deal with each other. A proper starting point is to make corporate tax returns available to the public, not just to the IRS.”

2) Close loopholes that allow companies to deduct payments for breaking the law.

As a 2009 Tax Notes article suggests — despite a Section 162(f) prohibition on deduction for “any fine or similar penalty paid to the government for the violation of any law” — companies have used the courts to open up loopholes (e.g. by claiming that the “purpose” of the law did not include state regulations).

After Enron and the 2003 corporate crime wave, Senators Grassley (R-IA), Baucus (D-MT) and McCain (R-AZ) introduced the Government Settlement Transparency Act, which would clearly closed the tax-deduction loophole for payments made to acknowledge actual or potential violations of any law.”   The legislation was never passed by Congress, which means that as a result the banks that nearly trashed the entire financial system in 2008 were potentially able to deduct a portion of the limited penalties meted out for their crimes.

3) Financial Transaction Tax (FTT) and Other Ways to Make Wall Street Pay Its Fair Share.

You pay a transaction tax every time you buy a cup of coffee. But stock traders and speculators pay a miniscule amount. A FTT would help shrink an overbuilt financial sector that takes a disproportionate share of profits out of the economy, while providing few real social benefits (as Paul Volcker famously pointed out, the financial services sector’s only significant innovation in the past couple of decades has been ATM machines).

One of the best ideas out there to slowly siphon money away from greedy speculators and put it back into the productive economy is to impose a modest financial transaction tax. See the Robin Hood Tax web site for more.

Another good idea is to close the so-called “carried interest” loophole that allows hedge funds, private equity firms and other banksters and investors to claim income as capital gains, allowing them to pay only 15% (or less) on investment income. As Warren Buffett has said over an over, it’s time to stop coddling the super-rich.

4) Make Polluters Pay: Enact a Carbon Tax

Rex Tillerson, CEO of Exxon, told the Council of Foreign Relations last year that the debate over climate change is over. The science is a reality. But then he said humanity could simply “adapt” to the consequences. Apart from how ludicrous and full of hybris this is, there’s another question: Who’s going to pay for the tens of billions of dollars that it costs us to respond and rebuild from each natural disaster? Who’s going to pay for the droughts (estimated to cost $20 billion in overall losses and $15-17 billion in insured losses in 2012 alone), hurricanes (Sandy was $50 billion, including $25 billion in insured losses), spread of infectious diseases, runaway wildfires, and investments needed to make our cities more resilient?

A carbon tax not only generates the needed revenues from the source of the problem, but as many (including the IMF, Brookings, and OECD) have suggested, it is probably the most effective policy option for addressing climate change, because it will send the most significant signal to the markets for a rapid shift in investment from fossil fuels to renewables and energy efficiency.  A recent OECD report comparing different national energy tax policies shows that higher energy tax rates result in the lowest carbon emissions on a per GDP basis (see page 59).  A good example of how this can work is British Columbia, which started with a modest $5/ton carbon tax in 2008, increasing gradually to  $30/ton in 2013 today.  The policy has sent a clear signal to markets and as Simon Upton, Director of OECD’s Environment Directorate pointed out at a recent energy finance conference sponsored by Bloomberg,  “no BC politicians are arguing to reduce carbon tax rates in the current election.” For more information about how a carbon tax could work here in the U.S. go here and here.

ETC.

For other ways to close corporate tax loopholes and make them pay their fair share, see this report and other ideas collected by Citizens for Tax Justice.

The judicial junkets, which were organized by conservative bastions like George Mason University Law School, are another secretive piece of a long-term strategy that was first outlined by former tobacco industry attorney Justice Lewis Powell in a memo he wrote for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

Powell, a tobacco industry lawyer who composed the memo before he was appointed by Nixon to the Supreme Court, advised the corporate supremacists to take over the courts, which he described as “the most important instrument for social, economic and political change.”

The kind of change that the Chamber et al. have since could have astonished even Powell. Over four decades, the corporate-friendly “law and economics” movement – then a marginal insurgency with barely a toehold at the most prestigious law schools — has effectively achieved near hegemonic status in legal theory.

In practical terms, the Chamber sustained a perennial campaign (mislabeled “tort reform”) to eviscerate average people’s ability to hold corporations accountable through lawsuits. Injured consumers have a much harder chance of obtaining justice, while the industry succeeded in demonizing trial lawyers and even the victims themselves. (See, for example, the movie “Hot Coffee.”)

Organized judicial junkets are not a new idea. They were first exposed by Nan Aron and others since at least the 1990s.

The junkets were first organized by conservative legal activists like Henry Manne, a libertarian ideologue who established the Law and Economics Center at George Mason University Law School in the 1980s.  Manne turned the entire law school into a bastion of resistance to regulations and other restraints on corporate power, according to Steven Teles, author of The Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement.

Because he was motivated more by ideology than money, Manne claimed the junkets were designed to have a diffuse and “inchoate” effect, rather than a direct influence on any particular case.

Although the libertarian streak continues to exist, it’s hard to imagine the Koch Brothers, Exxon, Dow and the Chamber pouring millions of dollars into such programs without some kind of payoff.  (The Kochs have given more money to GMU than any other single institution since 1985.  GMU also sponsors libertarian institutions such as the Koch-funded Mercatus Center, which wages regular attacks on environmental and other regulations.)

Moreover, CPI points to clear examples of judges attending judicial seminars that were sponsored by companies that later appeared before the same judges in court.

U.S. District Judge Carl J. Barbier, for example,  “the Eastern District of Louisiana jurist [who was later put]  in charge of considering whether BP owes billions of dollars in fines for gross negligence leading to the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil platform explosion and spill”  — attended a 2009 seminar called “Criminalization of Corporate Conduct.” The seminar was sponsored by the American Petroleum Institute and the Chamber of Commerce, among others.

In 2011, Barbier also dismissed a wrongful-death claim “in a suit brought against ExxonMobil and Chevron USA by the widow of a worker who was exposed to radioactive materials found on the companies’ equipment. …Barbier’s ruling came two years after he attended the corporate conduct seminar, [which was] funded in part by ExxonMobil and the American Petroleum Institute, according to documents.”

You’d think this cozy influence-penalty violate some kind of judicial ethics rule. In fact, years ago members of Congress introduced legislation that would prohibit judges from accepting “anything of value in connection with a seminar,”  but the bills died in committee because of corporate lobbying pressure.

Such ethical questions has meanwhile made a few deans uncomfortable. Northwestern University Law School (which CPI says has sponsored the second largest number of junkets in recent years behind George Mason) shut its program down in 2010, when Henry Butler, the program’s chief sponsor and an ideological scion of Manne, left for GMU.

Butler – a former “Koch Distringuished Professor of Law and Economics” at Univ. of Kansas – wrote an article describing Manne’s response to withering criticism of the seminars, when he pledged to the Judicial Conference that GMU would stop using corporate contributions to pay for judges’ direct expenses.”

However, little has changed. In recent years, Butler has used pass-through groups like Donors Trust (the same shadowy billionaire’s ATM that takes money from the Kochs and their right-wing friends).

If, as Justice Brandeis once suggested, “sunlight is the best of disinfectants,” then we should demand Congress reintroduce a law that would prohibit judges from going on these judicial junkets.

To learn more about how corporations influence the courts and what can be done to take them back for we the People, check out  Justice at Stake and the Alliance for Justice – two groups leading the fight for judicial accountability and reform.

I turned to the Sunlight Foundation’s handy new tool — “Capitol Words” — and searched for the term “corporate crime” and found that the last time the phrase “corporate crime” even showed up in the Congressional Record was January 2011.

We’ve compiled various lines of evidence that corporate crime costs the country an enormous amount — whether measured in terms of lives or economic damage.  But the evidence alone is not enough to budge policymakers on the Hill or in the cop shop.  Hollywood may get it, but they still make more movies about vampires and zombies, which the government (CDC) seems to be more willing to acknowledge as a public threat than corporate crime.

We made multiple attempts to get the Department of Justice to simply measure the incidence of corporate crime, but were met with stunning silence. (The last time DoJ conducted a comprehensive study was 1979.)

Maybe the Zombies have taken over.

That would send a small signal that things are different this time.

And it’s the subtext of an article published today by the Washington Post on its front page today (Zachary A. Goldfarb, “Why has the U.S. recovery sputtered?”), which describes Geithner’s lethargic and pessimistic response to initiatives proposed by “seven of the world’s top economists,” gathered by the President at the White House. Geithner’s response was to preemptively blame an obdurate Congress. Aside from failing to even try to find ways to put the obstinate House on the defensive by forging broad support among homeowners — Obama operatives told their supporters they would mobilize them to push popular reforms post-election (and there are certainly few better ways to build upon one of the specific points of protest that came out of the Occupy movement), he could at least recognize that there are ways to support similar proposals at the Fed, as William Greider points out in The Nation.

This is moral and political cowardice at its worst, especially now that Obama has postponed taking any immediate action to address some of the other critical issues that face the nation that have fresh momentum (climate change, campaign finance reform, etc.).

Economic recovery, the president says, is his immediate priority. If so, then why keep a Treasury Secretary and sometime tennis partner who has so obviously shilled for Wall Street for the last four years, and is openly willing to demonstrate how prepared he is to put the brakes on any new policies the president may have, including one the president’s first-term economic advisors told the Post is an obvious “missing link” in Obama’s first term. Nearly 11 million American homeowners — over 20% still owe more than their properties are currently worth.

Christina D. Romer, Obama’s former top economist told the Post there needs to be a bigger focus on reducing mortgage debt – i.e. principal reduction: “[W]e are likely going to need to help homeowners that are underwater…Many of these troubled loans will need to be renegotiated and the principal reduced if we are going to truly stabilize house prices and get a robust recovery going.”

The Post does remind us that Obama has expanded programs to better tackle mortgage debt, announcing more federal funding to write down loans. But it’s clearly not enough, and Romer and others “don’t see the kind of aggressive approach that could make a big difference.”

Perhaps the blame for the president’s incremental, halting and timid approach to helping the bottom 20% cannot be placed entirely on Geithner. But it fits the pattern: As Ron Suskind reported in “Confidence Men,” it was Geithner who ignored “the president’s clear, unequivocal orders involving Citigroup…as a potential first step in a wider restructuring of the banking sector,” slow-walking it into the garbage can while taxpayers kept pouring hundreds of billions to prop up the icon of financial deregulation and corporate arrogance.

Let’s not forget that while Geithner’s priority was to bail out Citigroup – the HUD’s inspector general concluded after auditing the bank that it (and others) had defrauded U.S. taxpayers in handling of foreclosures on homes purchased with government-backed loans.

Coddling corporate criminals and “Country Club Sopranos” is just one of many pathetic patterns that suggest how little Obama steered the government away from the policies of his predecessor — but that’s one that others besides Geithner (e,g, Eric Holder) should have to answer for.

The point is, if making the middle class whole is really the priority, then it’s long past the point when Obama needs to send a clear signal that things will be different this time.

Obama can either toss out Geithner and start helping Main Street or risk going down as the president who — despite all the soaring rhetoric to the contrary — solidified the gross inequalities that Citi’s analysts suggest are converting America into a “plutonomy.”

That the AAAS would enjoin this battle is hardly a surprise, given its longstanding ties to Monsanto and other companies with a direct interest in the outcome. But the group says that its real motivation for opposing mandatory labeling is because doing so would “mislead and falsely alarm consumers.”

“Our concern is that ideology not trump science here,” AAAS Chief Executive Alan Leshner told the LA Times. “We do regulation of foods to protect the public health.”

The argument is really ideology masked as science — part of a drastic corporate public relations offensive designed to narrow the issue of GE labeling down to a simple question of food safety.
By this reasoning consumers have no legitimate right to require that GE foods be labeled based on other criteria, including important environmental concerns (forget those stories about how Bt corn can kill Monarch butterflies) and their right NOT to feed their kids a corporate invention that has no proven additional nutritional value.

Those familiar with the history of earlier Monsanto products — including PCBs, Agent Orange (dioxin), and milk produced by injecting cows with bovine growth hormones (BGH) — have reason to suspect that the company’s campaign against labeling is not based on objective evidence, but rather an attempt to rig public policy debates by hiding them behind the claim to “sound science.”

An obvious weakness in the GE proponents’ claims is the Kremlin-like control that the companies have over any scientific assessments of their products. As the editors of Scientific American have pointed out, the monopoly patent system governing genetically engineered food in particular has given companies like Monsanto unprecedented ability to restrict independent studies because the “scientists much ask corporations for permission before publishing independent research.” Sci Am’s editors have called for an end to such restrictions, because they have effectively blocked the ability of independent scientists to conduct any study that might call into question the safety of GE food.

It’s therefore hardly surprising that Monsanto’s friends at the AAAS want food safety to be the only legitimate issue — because with very little evidence of harm to consumers, they can claim that there’s no proof that GE food is unsafe.

This is how corporations and their shills in the scientific community attempt to ring-fence public policy debates like the GE labeling debate, and block other compelling arguments to justify labeling GMO foods.

But is the AAAS’ board’s position merely a favor to Monsanto? What motivates them to take such a position? It’s hard to say for sure, but it’s quite possible that there is an institutional bias that has a lot to do with its ties to various companies with a business interest in the patenting of life, though you wouldn’t know that from reading their statement.

Scientists who wish to publish the results of their research in peer reviewed journals are normally required to declare any potential conflicts of interest along with their results — a standard that AAAS board members such as board chair Nine Federoff (who has served on the board of Sigma-Aldrich, a “biotech specialty chemical provider”) haven’t held themselves to.

One wonders how the AAAS can accuse labeling proponents of an ideological bias, when they themselves conceal such ties, as well as any other personal stake in the outcome of Prop 37. If they believe that labeling will create an unfounded stigma that will “falsely alarm consumers” and undermine the GE food market, one wonders how much of an affect that might have on their personal investment portfolios.

AAAS board members also forgot to mention that Monsanto has been a regular major sponsor of the group’s annual gatherings. And yes, sponsorship has its privileges: At AAAS’ 2010 annual meeting Robert T. Fraley (Monsanto’s Chief Technology Officer and an AAAS fellow) delivered a half-hour keynote speech that was little more than a futuristic infomercial about how GMOs will soon feed the world and eliminate hunger. No one was invited to rebut Fraley, not even a representative from the Union of Concerned Scientists who was present in the audience, but instead was shunted off to the side, where all he could do was hand out a few leaflets. We can see just what the AAAS means by “bridging science and society” – the theme of that 2010 gathering.

The AAAS Board and lobbyists for the corporations that support it often call for policy decisions to be ‘based on science,” but science cannot make such decisions by itself, science can only provide data. Decisions like the one being put before California’s voters are made on values, and California voters should ask themselves what they value more when they go to the polls next week: the right to know what their families eat when they sit down to dinner, or the profits of the agribusinesses that custom design vegetables that have no significant additional nutritional benefit for consumers?

To learn more go to the Yes on 37 CA Right to Know Campaign’s web site.

That’s consistent with what a spokesperson from the AG’s office told me when I called them a few weeks ago .

The case is American Tradition Partnership (ATP) v. Bullock, originally decided by the Montana Supreme Court, which refused to apply the controversial Citizens United decision to state-level elections.  The suit was brought to the federal Supreme Court by James Bopp, Jr., the same attorney who represented Citizens United.

By filing the case at the U.S. Supreme Court, the clever corporate rights attorney effectively invited the Court to stomp on Montana’s decision by expanding the scope of its Citizens United decision, thereby freezing and ultimately overturning a century-old state ban on corporate spending on state elections, and deterring any potential replication of Montana’s example.  And that’s exactly what most observers concede will happen: Montana will be overturned either through an immediate summary reversal or later in a full hearing.  But there is another procedural option:  If the Court refuses to even accept the case for hearing, then Montana’s laws would automatically stand and Citizens United would immediately be effectively reversed in that state.

The Court indeed has no business hearing the case, argue attorneys for non-partisan advocacy groups Essential Information and The Eleventh Amendment Movement (TEAM), in amicus briefs to the Court.  They argue that the 10^th and 11^th Amendments to the U.S. Constitution prohibit the Supreme Court from hearing the case, since the 11^th Amendment expressly forbids a private party from suing a state in federal court.

According to the Corporate Crime Reporter, when attorney Carl Mayer recommended that Montana’s attorney general raise the jurisdictional issue before the Supreme Court moves to rule on the case, an assistant attorney general e-mailed back that his office was reluctant to raise 11^th Amendment issues because of “the potential implications in other contexts, if your theories were adopted.”   The response not only fails to spell out what those “implications” would be, but it suggests that the assistant AG admits the argument may be powerful enough to prevail.

But without a full explanation, one must ask if that is really their objection?

Rewind the clock to a couple of weeks ago, when I got a call urging me to check out a little-noticed change in the Supreme Court’s handling of the caption – or title – of the case, a change that has important implications for the Court’s consideration of the case.

Although I’m not an attorney, I know enough of the history to recognize that small tweaks in Supreme Court procedure can have significant historical consequences, consequences that invariably benefit well-connected interests.

Many readers will no doubt recall Santa Clara v. Southern Pacific Railroad (1886).  During oral arguments, one justice suggested that the Court didn’t want to waste time belaboring whether or not corporations are “persons” under the law. The court’s clerk (a former corporate lawyer) seized upon the brief interjection and grotesquely transformed it (in the headnote to the case) into a rigid and powerful doctrine known as “corporate personhood.”  (See Thom Hartmann’s book Unequal Protection.) Thus a huge expansion of corporate rights was made without any real examination of whether it made sense.

Examples like that should make anyone already concerned about the impact of the Court’s Citizens United decision immediately curious (if not suspicious) to learn that the title of the Montana case has somehow changed in a way that could prevent certain constitutional arguments from affecting the outcome of the case.

I went over to the Supreme Court to try to sort out where and how the change in the title or caption of the case had come about.

Rather than walk you through all the nuances of the paperwork, let’s cut to the chase:  The title of the case changed after it was filed and no one at the Court that I talked to seemed able to explain why.

That the name was changed after the case was filed is obvious. The Supreme Court’s web site uses a different name for the case than the one originally used by Montana’s Supreme Court.

Such a change might not be consequential if it weren’t for the fact that the defendant’s name was changed from “Attorney General of the State of Montana” et al., to “Steve Bullock, Attorney General of Montana, et al.” – i.e. from the title of the OFFICE to the name of the INDIVIDUAL who currently holds that office.

On page 32 of its amicus brief, TEAM quotes Justice Kennedy’s opinion in an earlier case when he specifically stated that “suit…is barred by a state’s Eleventh Amendment immunity unless it falls within the exception this Court has recognized for certain suits … against state officers in their individual capacities.”

Hence the reason to be suspicious: Did Kennedy, who authored the Court’s 2/17 order staying the Montana Supreme Court’s decision, understand the implications of changing the title (i.e. that it could mean the difference between the Court’s accepting or rejecting the case, as TEAM’s amicus brief claims) since he wrote the pertaining Court decision?

I wondered.

Had I stumbled into some kind of “11th Amendment-Gate”?

I called the Public Information Office (PIO) of the Supreme Court to find out if I could get through to either William K Suter, the Clerk handling the case, or his staff attorney, Danny Bickell, since their names were on the 2/17 cover letter transmitting Justice Kennedy’s order staying the state court’s decision and granting Bopp’s application to review the case.

The Court’s spokespeople said they didn’t think it was necessary to put me through to Suter, that they would be happy to answer my questions.

Okay, I said. But it would be a lot easier if they first pulled the file, so that I could refer to specific documents and make my questions absolutely clear.

After waiting about 15 minutes, they got back on the line, when I began by pointing to the difference in the caption as described in ATP’s original application on 2/9 AND Montana’s 2/15 response in opposition to the corporate attorneys’ application for a stay on the state court’s decision, versus the caption used in Justice Kennedy’s 2/17 order.

I asked if they could explain the change that happened within these two days.

The first answer was that I would have to ask counsel for the parties themselves (i.e. either Bopp or the AG of MT) who, he explained, “can put down anything they want.”

But, I pointed out, it didn’t appear that either had requested the change. For example, the state of MT did not use Bullock’s name in their 2/15 response, but rather the title of the case as decided by the Supreme Court of Montana. And that was the same name Bopp had used earlier in his request for a stay.

The explanation they then gave was that, since Bullock himself filed the document, “they’re interchangeable,” (i.e. “Bullock” and “Attorney General”), adding “it’s all the same.”  Really? Is the person and the office one and the same, for legal purposes?

I asked if that was his opinion or the Court’s.

“No,” was the testy reply. “I have no opinion, and it’s not the Court’s. It’s up to the parties.”

So now we were going in circles. It reminded me of filling out paperwork at the DMV a few weeks earlier.

I persisted once more. The parties did not change the caption, the Court did. At which point he explained that “it’s the Court’s prerogative” to do so. Wait, what? Either the parties decide or the Court does, but it could not be both. They said the Court can list Bullock by name because he is the individual who responded in his capacity as attorney general.  Sure, Bullock is the lawyer for Montana, which is why he responded. But cases do not evolve into being suits against lawyers for a party. It was Citizens United v. FEC, not James Bopp v. FEC.

(Attorneys I asked later said that changing the caption, renaming the parties in a case,  without both a formal motion and an order from a court was pretty much unheard of.)

But enough of that run around. I wasn’t going to get any further there, so I decided to call the Montana Attorney General’s office that same afternoon to find out if they agreed or not with what I’d just heard, and to ask whether or not they saw any significance in the change in the caption or title of the case.

John Doran, Attorney General Bullock’s press officer, told me that because they hope to argue the case before the Supreme Court, it “makes no difference” to them whether or not the caption of the case was changed without their consent or request. Doran added that he understood that the 11^th Amendment Foundation (sic) had pointed to the change in arguing that the Supreme Court should not hear the case. But, he suggested, they’d rather argue the case and prevail rather than have it tossed out before they get the chance to do so.

Doran was effectively confirming what the Corporate Crime Reporter later made clear — i.e. Bullock’s office is admitting that the attorneys for TEAM and Essential Information have raised a perfectly valid (and potentially effective) argument. A last-minute motion could still be filed to prevent the Court from interfering with Montana’s citizens’ right to clean elections.  But rather than act expeditiously, or explain to citizens of Montana why he will not not (i.e., what the “potential implications” would be of NOT making the motion), he is maintaining a stony silence.

What happens with Montana’s case will affect the entire country, not just Montana. Thus, the citizens of Montana and, indeed, all of us deserve to have the very best legal strategies put forth to win this case.  Anything less than that should make us ask, are we being held hostage to one person’s self-aggrandizing gambit or what?

Attorney General Bullock…why exactly are you not raising Montana’s constitutional sovereign rights in this case?

Attorney General Bullock’s number is 406-444-2026.

Let’s keep asking until we get an answer.

Coll (with help from a team of investigators) traveled around the world and conducted hundreds of interviews with former executives, whistleblowers, activists, regulators, and lawyers familiar with the company (the company itself provided only “limited” access, including 8 authorized interviews w/o attribution), combining the results into a series of chapters that key upon different operations and events in the company’s recent history, starting from the Valdez oil spill (managing the crisis marked the beginning of ex-CEO Lee Raymond’s ascent to the top of the company) and extending to current CEO “T. Rex” Tillerson’s decision to acquire XTO and make Exxon the number one natural gas producer in the country.

Coll, who calls the Exxon his most difficult and secretive subject to date (compared to the war in Afghanistan and the bin Laden family, both topics of previous books), nevertheless manages to explore various tentacles of the “corporate state” — from the “Death Star” (the company’s Irving, TX headquarters) to controversial overseas outposts, including Aceh (where the company “seemed to be both part of the problem and part of the solution” when it came to human rights abuses), Russia (Raymond’s aggressive handling of the company’s negotiations for the purchase of Yukos almost certainly induced Putin to have Yukos oligarch Mikhail Kodorkovsky arrested before he could outmaneuver him in an upcoming election), and Ecuatorial Guinea, Nigeria and Chad (“an emblematic case of the challenges Exxon faced abroad”) – i.e. countries where, as Raymond’s good friend Dick Cheney once explained, the company deals with unsavory dictators and corrupt regimes because “the good Lord didn’t see fit to put oil and gas only where there are democratic regimes friendly to the United State.”

As a result there are numerous revelations both about Exxon’s operations around the world, and here in the U.S. (There is also a chapter on Jacksonville, MD, where an Exxon gas station leaked 24,000 gallons of gasoline into the ground in a neighborhood where most homes relied on backyard wells for their drinking water — resulting in major litigation).

Of course there is a great deal of coverage of the battles over climate change (PR and legislative).  Although Exxon rightly deserves close scrutiny for its driving role in the climate denial movement, which peaked during Raymond’s tenure, some readers will be surprised to learn that in recent years Exxon has shifted positions, and even supports a carbon tax.

(Coll says that was not a red herring, but rather reflected Tillerson and company’s belief that a straight carbon tax would be much simpler than any “cap and trade” system that would be difficult to administer, “vulnerable to manipulation by speculators and other distorting complexities” and (are you listening Koch brothers and allied libertarians?) result in far less government bureaucracy.  Perhaps Tillerson should make an effort to convince the API to come around to this position).

The book confirms what many have suspected about the Iraq war — that if oil was not the primary motivation to invade Iraq, once it started, Exxon realized it would have to compete for the country’s vast reserves once they were made available to foreign companies.  It bears repeating, however, that this was a war rationalized and legitimized by various spurious arguments promoted by leading neo-conservatives who sat at think tanks funded by Exxon, including the American Enterprise Institute, where Lee Raymond (Dick Cheney’s close friend and neighbor) was Vice Chairman of the board.

There is much to Coll’s book that I won’t dig into here, even if there are many “missing chapters” to the Exxon story that Coll could not possibly have covered or completed in 624 pages.

For example: Exxon funded a group called Public Interest Watch, which somehow convinced the IRS to audit Greenpeace at a time when Greenpeace was exposing Exxon’s underwriting of a vast climate denial network (a story first reported by the WSJ’s Steve Stecklow — see “Did a Group Financed by Exxon Prompt IRS to Audit Greenpeace,” March 21, 2006). Coll mentions that, but does not add that a few years before that, Exxon representatives also met with representatives of the corporate espionage firm, Beckett Brown Inc (BBI) at the offices of the CMA (Chemical Manufacturing Association, then the leading trade association of the chemical industry) to discuss a “Greenpeace” job, a meeting apparently arranged by PR hatchet man Nick Nichols of Nichols Dezenhall (now with CounterPoint Strategies). (Greenpeace is currently suing Dezenhall and other parties, along with the principals of BBI for stealing campaign plans, donor lists and other important information that would presumably be valuable to the PR firm’s clients).

Worse, perhaps is the pass he seems to give the company on its current environmental footprint, probably in the interests of tying the book together around a theme running throughout: that Tillerson’s Exxon is somewhat different than Raymond’s.

Despite covering the company’s climate denial strategy, Coll largely attributes the worst of it to Lee Raymond’s tenure and the attacks on science that were fostered during that time (Raymond didn’t believe climate change was fully proven, despite a vast consensus to the contrary).

By contrast, Coll suggests, Tillerson should get “credit for accomplishments not visible on ExxonMobil’s balance sheet,” including pulling back from funding the worst climate denialists.  Certainly Exxon’s campaign against climate science has been scaled back.  In part that’s due (as Coll suggests) to the overwhelming consensus that could not longer be denied even in Texas (the reputational risks of continuing to deny the facts had grown so high that even loyal shareholders began voting against management on climate-related resolutions).

Coll also gives the company props for reducing its direct greenhouse gas emissions by 11 million tons, “a significant achievement” that reflects a disciplined operational and engineering culture that became much safer and process-efficient after the Valdez spill (due in no small part to Raymond, as we learn early on in the book).

But “not visible on ExxonMobil’s balance sheet,” are also certain externalities that conveniently reflect the company’s current and projected business  strategy, “externalities” that Exxon continues to assiduously work to keep invisible, including major greenhouse gas emissions such as fugitive methane releases from its new fracking and natural gas production and delivery operations.

If denial and obstruction were a thing of the past (in fact, Exxon has started funding groups like the George Marshall Institute again), then <a href=”http://polluterwatch.org/rex-tillerson”>Tillerson</a> would not continue to fund groups like the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), which has been promoting weak fracking regulations in states across the country.  In fact, Exxon was THE company inside ALEC that sponsored that chemical disclosure loophole bill, as the <a href=”http://www.nationofchange.org/alec-slips-exxon-fracking-loopholes-new-ohio-law-1338539750“>NYT reported</a>.

Despite claims that natural gas is “cleaner” than “clean coal” (a compound myth), both investors and and academics like Cornell’s Robert Howarth have made it pretty clear that the surge in natural gas is in reality a potential “carbon bomb” (e.g. methane is tens of times more potent as a greenhouse gas than CO2 in the short term) which, because it is so cheap, could potentially set back the urgent transition to clean energy for as many years as Exxon’s climate denialism did in years past.

If so, the panels are now available on video.

Aurora Institute(Canadian group)
Citizen Works 
The Corporate Library (Excellent corporate governance and CEO pay info)
“The Corporation” (a new movie about corporations)
CounterCorp is the only annual independent film festival devoted to corporate power and related issues
Essential Information
Corpwatch (Web-based news reports on corporations)
Gangs of America (download the book)
International Forum on Globalization
Multinational Monitor (also ck their links for more)
Program on Corporations, Law and Democracy 
Reclaim Democracy 
UN Report on Regulating Corporations (July 2004)

Corporate Crime:

Citizen Works
Corporate Crime Reporter
Corpwatch 
Department of Justice
DOJ’s Corporate Fraud Task Force
Earthrights (Alien Torts Claims Act)
Government Accountability Project (help for whistleblowers)
Milberg, Weiss Bershad Hynes & Lerach LLP plaintiff attorneys’ Enron Fraud website
Multinational Monitor
Securities and Exchange Commission
Taxpayers Against Fraud (False Claims Act)
Transaction Records Access Clearinghouse (independent data on federal law enforcement)

Researching Corporations:

Corporate Research Project
Disinfopedia (a project of PR Watch)
Endgame (a large index of business-related sites)
Multinational Monitor links page
SEC EDGAR Database
Corporate Governance
AFL-CIO Database on Companies That Move Jobs Offshore
Executive Paywatch (AFL-CIO)
Corporate Watch (UK)
Library of Congress Business Resources

Leading Washington Watchdogs:

Center for Public Integrity 
Center for Responsive Politics (info on campaign contributions, lobbying, etc.)
Citizen Works
Common Cause
Congress Watch (Public Citizen) 
Essential Information
Government Accountability Project
OMB Watch
Project on Government Oversight
Public Citizen (main page)
Taxpayers for Common Sense
Center for American Progress (we recommend subscribing to the Daily Progress Report)
“Special Interest Takeover” (Center for American Progress report on Bush Administration)
Open the Government (coalition of groups and journalists interested in open government)
Institute for Policy Studies is the nation’s oldest multi-issue progressive think tank
The Daily Progress Report, published by the Center for American Progress, is an excellent summary of key current national political news

Government Links:

Fedstats (portal to government statistics from various agencies)
Firstgov (U.S. government’s official web portal)
National Archives and Records Administration 
Thomas (Internet search engine for legislation – maintained by the Library of Congress)
U.S. House of Representatives
U.S. Senate
Rep. Waxman’s Report on Secrecy in the Bush Administration
Clerk of House of Representatives – how they voted
“Inside Washington” – key links from Commondreams.org
Congressional Record daily digest

Business Links:

Business Roundtable
The Conference Board
Hoovers
U.S. Chamber of Commerce
Zimmerman’s Research Guide
Corporate Governance Links
Tax Governance Institute

Activist Groups:

Essential Information
Good Works
Common Dreams publishes progressive news stories and press releases
National Organizers Alliance
Idealist.org (jobs for activists)

Other

Multinational Monitor corporate links page has over 1,000 links