One year ago today, on January 6, 2021, after thousands of deceived Americans violently overtook the U.S. Capitol and delayed a critical procedural step in the peaceful transition of power, waves of corporations issued statements condemning the violence and promising to “reevaluate” their political alliances by ending donations to leaders of the insurrection. Many of these public pledges were then broken in less than 3 months.
Within a week of the attack, at least 57 large corporations vowed to cease all financial support for political leaders intent on peddling lies about election fraud. Within a month, the list of corporations opting out of donations was close to 130. Many companies specifically vowed to end all donations to the “Sedition Caucus”—the 147 members of Congress who plotted to overturn a valid election. Considering the stakes—democracy itself—this seemed like an obvious vow to make and keep.
And yet, U.S. corporations spent much of 2021 donating millions of dollars to at least 143 of the 147 congressmen and women who helped fuel, lead, and defend the deadliest attack on the Capitol in U.S. history.
This blog post situates the failure of U.S. corporations to keep their promise to withhold political donations from insurrection leaders within a historical and global context deeply rooted in corporate-backed political violence and human rights abuse.
Empty Promises Post-Insurrection
Of the 20 trade groups and Fortune 500 companies followed closely this year by Accountable.US, all of whom pledged to stop financial support for insurrection leaders, 17 broke this promise:
The American Bankers Association gave $203,000 to congressmen and women who objected to the 2020 election results.
Boeing, Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics, Northrop, L3Harris—six of the biggest 10 U.S. defense contractors—gave a total of $899,500 to GOP leaders involved in the insurrection.
General Motors, ExxonMobil, Chevron, Cigna, Pfizer, Altria Group, Eli Lilly, FedEx, and Valero Energy all gave between $60,000 and $100,000; each of these companies also financed the efforts of governors in Texas, Arizona, Georgia, and Tennessee to enact restrictive anti-voting laws.
The bulk of corporate political spending, however, is not routed directly toward individual candidates or representatives; the vast majority is donated to corporate super PACS and then distributed by the PAC to individual candidates and representatives—a difference without distinction, except in the bizarre world of U.S. campaign finance. This mode of political giving provides clever cover for corporations looking to influence political decision-makers. For example, Walmart’s pledge to “indefinitely suspend” contributions was upended in April 2021, when the retail behemoth gave $30,000 to the National Republican Congressional Committee (which distributes funds to House Republicans, two-thirds of whom objected to certifying the Electoral College) and another $30,000 to the National Republican Senatorial Committee (which is led by Senator Rick Scott (R-FL), a consistent spreader of election lies).
General Motors and Pfizer also donated to the House and Senate groups in April, claiming that there is no “accurate connection” between giving money directly to lawmakers and giving money to groups that give money directly to lawmakers.
Corporate Lies & Violence, in Context
The apparent hollowness of corporate America’s political spending promises in 2021 is surprising only if studied outside the context of a long and troubling history of corporate-backed political violence and human rights abuse around the world. That an insurrection occurred in the United States is a difficult truth to swallow—but that capitalism, increasingly defined by deeply concentrated private wealth and corporate power, stands in inherent tension with democracy is an old and familiar story.
Struggles for independence, self-determination, human dignity, and environmental sustainability have long been inexorably linked to the profit ambitions of large corporations. Examples from CAL’s work and recent events (far from exhaustive) include:
In the late 1960s, U.S.-based mining company Freeport McMoRan’s lobbying for a contract to mine the western half of the island of New Guinea was instrumental to Indonesia’s violent takeover of West Papua; the company’s mine, and Indonesia’s occupation, still exist to this day and can be traced to a litany of human and environmental atrocities.
Between 1997 and 2004, Chiquita Brands International paid nearly $2 million to a right-wing paramilitary group to protect valuable farming land in Colombia. The group did so by killing and torturing trade unionists, banana workers, political organizers, and social activists in the region.
In 2001, several large cocoa companies signed a voluntary agreement to eradicate child labor in the West African cocoa industry in 2005. Two decades later, the prevalence of child labor in West Africa’s cocoa sector has increased (to at least 1.56 million)—largely due to unreasonable production demands and low incomes paid to farmers by companies like Hershey’s, Cargill, and Nestle.
In early 2021—near the time the company broke its promise to cease political spending in the U.S.—Chevron lobbied against sanctions on Myanmar oil production, despite knowing that this activity was funding the miliary junta responsible for Myanmar’s political coup and ongoing genocide against the nation’s Rohingya minority.
In the first week of 2022, and just three weeks after the passage of a bill prohibiting the import of products produced in Xinjiang, China, Tesla announced its intent to open a new store location in the capital of Xinjiang, the epicenter of an ongoing genocide against the Uyghurs.
This blog post acknowledges the latest in a series of betrayals by corporations of the public trust: vowing to defund insurrection leaders, only to donate millions. But this particular betrayal exists within a devastating pattern—ongoing failures to defend democracy, to uphold human rights, to respect and protect the environment—and is emblematic of a broken global market.
In 2021, corporations failed to keep a promise made in response to the events on January 6—but corporate money was flowing into the pockets of insurrection leaders before the Capitol attack. By some counts, corporate PAC donations to members of the Sedition Caucus fell by two-thirds in 2021; far from good news, this illustrates the extent to which corporations helped finance insurrection leaders leading up to the attack—funding the lie that motivated so many Americans to resort to political violence one year ago today. Corporations routinely support, often in clever ways that distort the profound violence of the act (like super PACS, lobbying against sanctions for genocide, or maintaining deadly low wages), human rights abuse and threats to democracy.
In an era marked by NGOs and governments declaring democracy to be under siege, we would be wise to consider and confront the role played by corporations in this peril, and to consider the necessity of an altogether different kind of system.
In Need of a New Market Structure
The former dean of Northwestern University’s MBA program, Sally Blount, often reminded students during her tenure that “markets, while highly efficient, are not fair, kind, or wise.” Business students (including the author of this blog) are often drawn to business school by sentiments like this—by assurances that the most effective businesses are those that infuse moral quality into an otherwise amoral system. If only it were true.
If corporations—with the capacity to shape markets and, in the U.S., politics—were most effective when they were fair, kind, and wise, then we would have a very different kind of world. In this world, the one we have, corporations thrive without fairness, kindness, or wisdom. They thrive despite causing profound human suffering. Despite publicly—triumphantly, even—championing short-term private gain over long-term public and planetary interest. Despite performing social and environmental responsibility, only to repeatedly perpetrate just the opposite.
Markets, dominated by corporate actors without enforceable incentive to act responsibly (or humanely), are not efficient machines in want of moral leadership. Efficiency requires productivity without waste. Corporate America yields plenty of waste, but it’s us—you, me, our rights and our planet, and (in 2021) our best hopes for a representative government—that suffer the cost.
Markets are broken systems, in need of accountability, justice, and an altogether new kind of structure. As we continue to demand better politics, let us also reimagine the global market. We won’t get one without the other.
Reynolds Taylor is a Legal Fellow at CAL, and has an MBA from Northwestern Kellogg School of Management and JD from Northwestern Pritzker School of Law.
Photo by Blink O’fanaye under a Creative Commons license.
