Marble Falls Phil Mattera is a corporate researcher as dogged as any community organizer. He’s been doing this for decades at the highest level, while also creating various trackers so that anyone from organizers to journalists can keep up with the perfidy of corporations, no matter how much spin and spam comes out of their communications departments. We’ve been lucky for more than a decade to include a regular column from Phil in Social Policy. One that is now on the website is a doozy. Technically speaking, Phil is the Research Director of Good Jobs First and Director of the Corporate Research Project, all of which are definitely full-time jobs, which is why I say, we’re lucky, as are our readers, that they can catch Phil in Social Policy. He also has a substack thing, which I read regularly and brings me to the point.
In my inbox today, Phil asked the question whether a spate of big-time settlements, $100-million-plus, on governmental lawsuits was evidence of a crackdown or an anomaly? The notion that the Trump administration is bringing corporations of any kind to heel seems anathema, since mostly we read about the White House and its agencies kowtowing to companies big and small in an embarrassing and often self-serving way. But, like I said, Phil tracks this stuff, so his report was full of surprises, which I’m delighted to share some in an “even a broken clock is right two times a day” spirit.
Here are the highlights:
- EPA, DOJ, and a federal court in Michigan ordered utility DTE Energy to pay a $100 million penalty for Clean Air Act violations at its coke battery in River Rouge.
- PacifiCorp, owned by Berkshire Hathaway, agreed to pay $575 million to resolve U.S. government claims relating to wildfires in Oregon and Washington because of their faulty transmission lines.
- Walmart agreed to pay $100 million to settle a case brought by the Federal Trade Commission and a group of states that it stiffed delivery drivers of lose tens of millions of dollars’ worth of earnings, by deceiving them about the base pay, incentive pay and tips.
- Aetna, owned by CVS Health, agreed to pay $117 million to resolve DOJ allegations that it violated the False Claims Act by submitting or failing to withdraw inaccurate and untruthful diagnosis codes for its Medicare Advantage Plan enrollees in order to increase its payments from Medicare.
- Adobe Systems agreed to pay $150 million, including a $75 million penalty and $75 million in free services to customers, in a case brought by the Justice Department alleging that the company’s subscription practices violated the Restore Online Shoppers’ Confidence Act by making it hard to cancel.
- The Department of Commerce’s Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) announced that Applied Materials Inc. would pay a $252 million penalty for illegal exports of U.S. semiconductor manufacturing equipment to China.
See what I mean. Who knew?
If all of that’s not shocking, in and of itself, Phil makes the point that “If the Trump Administration maintains this pace, it will end up with 36 mega-penalties for the year, nearly twice the number announced during the first year of Trump 2.0….” Furthermore, it “would give the administration a mega-penalty annual tally comparable to that of the past two Democratic presidencies. Biden’s annual total averaged 36.5 and Obama’s average was 43. For Trump 1.0 the figure was 32.”
It’s too much to hope that this will be a pattern for the administration, but for those that kept fondling their prayer beads for some good news from this administration, it’s working, so keep it up!