Naughty and Naughtier

Forward-Looking Corporations and the Backward-Looking Ones

By Phil Mattera, Dirt Diggers Digest

Large corporations like to think of themselves as engines of progress. Sometimes they are, though the progress they engender may be a mixed blessing. Other times, however, they are retrogressive, working to preserve the worst practices of the past.

Both of these tendencies have been on display in the news in recent days. In the forward-looking category we have Amazon and Google, which have let it be known that they are exploring what sound like science-fiction options for home delivery of goods.

Amazon revealed it is developing a system of drones that would fly packages from a distribution center to a customer’s home in a matter of minutes after an order is placed. Meanwhile, Google is reported to be working on a delivery system consisting of driverless cars and robots.

Of all the ways that technology could improve everyday life, it is hard to believe that the most compelling is the ability to have a 10-pack of tube socks flown directly to one’s doorstep. It is also unfortunate that these companies are apparently paying little attention to the massive job losses that their innovations could bring about. Yet by some uniquely corporate definition, such innovations would amount to progress.

In the thoroughly backward-looking category we have the American Legislative Exchange Council, the big-business-dominated organization that puts corporate-designed model bills into the hands of conservative state legislators. The Guardian has been publicizing a new batch of leaked ALEC documents that shed new light on the Neanderthal thinking of the organization.

Among the revelations is that ALEC has been working to promote legislation discouraging homeowners from installing solar panels. Dubbed the Electricity Freedom Act, the model bill calls on states to repeal or limit their renewable portfolio standards, which provide the basis for pressuring utilities to purchase excess power generated by houses with the panels. Rather than seeing those homeowners as helping to address climate change problems, an ALEC official told the Guardian that they are “freeriders.”

Discouraging renewable energy is far from the only way that ALEC encourages retrograde policies. The organization has received a torrent of criticism for its role in promoting voter suppression and “stand your ground” gun laws, which represent a return to the eras of Jim Crow and the Wild West.

ALEC has also had disturbing influence over state policymaking through its publication of a series of Rich States, Poor States reports that purport to give a road map to prosperity. A report written by Peter Fisher and published by Good Jobs First (in which I played a small role) shows how these prescriptions—which include shrinking the public sector, suppressing wages and rolling back regulation—amount to nothing but snake oil.

Thanks to other internal ALEC documents just disclosed by the Guardian, we now know that the latest edition of Rich States, Poor States project was funded by $175,000 from the Searle Freedom Trust and $150,000 from the Claude R. Lambe Charitable Foundation. The latter is actually listed in the report as “Koch/Claude Lamb,” which helps make it clear that the foundation is controlled by the Koch Brothers and/or Koch Industries. See more on the foundation here.

It comes as no surprise that the Kochs would be bankrolling such a report, but what’s the story with the Searle Freedom Trust? As Sourcewatch has documented, it is a large funder of rightwing groups such as the American Enterprise Institute at the national level as well as state-level policy groups under the State Policy Network (SPN) umbrella. The trust is featured in the StinkTanks website created by Progress Now and the Center on Media and Democracy. 

Another piece just published in the Guardian based on leaked ALEC documents notes that Searle’s connection to the SPN is through its advisor Stephen Moore, an editorial writer at the Wall Street Journal and one of the co-authors of the Rich States, Poor States propaganda.

The money behind the trust comes from the inherited wealth of the late Daniel Searle, who once ran the G.D. Searle pharmaceutical corporation. That corporation, which was acquired by Monsanto in 1985, is largely forgotten. 

Yet back in the 1980s it was notorious for its Copper-7 birth control device, which was linked to many cases of pelvic infections and infertility. Searle, headed after Daniel Searle’s retirement by Donald Rumsfeld, was found to have been negligent in its testing and marketing of the device.

It is the financial legacy of such corporate irresponsibility which is helping to finance the current rightwing policy agenda. As much as they purport to be forward-looking, today’s corporations supporting that agenda are just as guilty as the Searle Freedom Trust of trying to bring us back to the laissez-faire society of the Gilded Age.

That includes Google, which joined ALEC a couple of months ago (at a time when many corporations are fleeing the group), thus making a mockery of its “do no evil” motto. Equitable public policy, not robotic delivery systems, is what we really need.

Note: The latest addition to my Corporate Rap Sheets collection is about South Korean conglomerate LG and its amazing record of price-fixing scandals.