Two years ago, US democracy was threatened when election-denying citizens and militias stormed the US Capitol, demanding that federal representatives overturn the results of a valid election. This insurrection, while ultimately unsuccessful, cost lives and called into stark question the future of American democratic institutions. In the wake of this deadly attack, companies across the United States, including many of the largest, pledged not to support members of Congress who fueled the insurrection and voted — in the early morning of January 7, 2021, mere hours after Capitol windows were smashed and Capitol police were beaten — to abandon the winner of an election that was unambiguously fair and free.
A year ago today, on the first anniversary of this anti-democratic attack, we wrote about the scores of Fortune 500 companies that funded election-denying members of Congress, even after making — and, no doubt, profiting from — public vows not to. At that time, we said that better politics and stronger democratic institutions depended on reimagining corporate power. Consider this our progress report.
The conclusions are bleak: in the 2021-22 election cycle, nearly half of Fortune 500 companies contributed nearly $16 million to election deniers, including dozens of successful re-election campaigns. Another $121.5 million was routed to these individuals through corporate PACS, trade associations, and various other special interest vehicles. The significance of this is most clear — and most damning — when studied within a historical and global context that is rife with corporate-backed political violence, human rights abuse, and greenwashing.
Vows Made and Broken
In late 2022, ProPublica released a comprehensive record of political donations by Fortune 500 companies made to the 147 congressional Republicans (the “Sedition Caucus”) who voted against certifying the 2020 general election results. Two-hundred and thirty-five (of 500) companies made ProPublica’s list, giving anywhere from a single donation of $500 to several hundred donations totaling more than $600,000.
The top four defense contractors in 2022 — Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon Technologies, and General Dynamics — are responsible for nearly ten percent of the total amount given by all 235 companies. These four corporations collectively funded the campaigns of 115 of the 147 members of Congress who sought to invalidate the 2020 election results. Lockheed, Boeing, and Raytheon all promised to indefinitely cease donations to these campaigns in the immediate aftermath of the January 6 attack.
Three of the top four telecommunications companies in 2022 — AT&T, Comcast, and Verizon (but not T-Mobile) — each gave well over $100,000. AT&T financially supported the Sedition Caucus more than any other corporation over the past two years, giving nearly 200 separate contributions that amounted to more than half a million dollars. All three companies publicly announced, in the days after the insurrection, a halt to these donations.
The Vice President of Corporate Affairs at Occidental Petroleum, a large energy company that touts its commitment to climate sustainability, said shortly after the insurrection that the company was “pausing to reevaluate our overall approach to political giving to ensure that we contribute to candidates who support our interests and align with our values.” Four months and four weeks later, Occidental began donating again, and over the past nearly eighteen months has contributed more than 150 percent the amount it gave before the Capitol attack occurred — distributed among more election-denying members of Congress than before. A full 32 percent of the company’s total political giving went toward these gifts. What other conclusion can be drawn than that the company’s values are aligned with the politics it funds?
Companies often break their promises to behave ethically, with integrity, or merely in compliance with domestic and international law. Our work in the West African cocoa sector is one, among many, examples: large cocoa and chocolate companies — household brands, including Nestlé, Hershey’s, Mars, and Godiva — have repeatedly pledged, with much fanfare, to eradicate hazardous child labor in the West African cocoa industry. In the two decades that have passed since the first pledge (and the eighteen years since the first missed deadline), the prevalence of child labor and trafficking has increased due to the low incomes paid to farmers by the same companies pushing public relations campaigns about their ethics in the region.
Even in this age of enhanced consumer awareness, companies thrive despite causing profound human suffering, despite championing short-term private gain over long-term public and planetary interest, and despite promoting social and environmental responsibility as they perpetrate just the opposite.
Violence and Abuse Is Nothing New
While we are frustrated and saddened that companies often prioritize their own profits above the democratic interests of communities and the laws, norms, and structures that protect those interests, we are not surprised. After all, struggles for political self-determination have long been threatened by the profit ambitions of large corporations.
For example, we have written extensively (here and here) about the US-mining giant Freeport McMoran’s deplorable record of labor, human rights, and environmental abuse in West Papua, Indonesia, where it previously owned and still operates the world’s largest gold and third largest copper mine. Indigenous communities in West Papua continue to contest the region’s 1962 violent takeover by Indonesia, which was supported by the United States and in which Freeport played an alleged instrumental role. Freeport, which brings in several billion dollars in revenue each year, allocated 55 percent of its political giving in the 2021-22 election cycle to election-denying members of Congress. The largest donation went to Representative Steve Scalise (LA-1), a powerful House Republican and prominent spokesperson for the lie that former President Trump won the 2020 general election. It is no secret why: Rep. Scalise, who sits on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, is an advocate for less energy regulation.
On October 10, 2021 — a full eleven months post-election and ten months after the inauguration of President Biden — Rep. Scalise was adamant on Fox News Sunday that state legislatures are the ultimate arbiters of election rules and procedures, and that a number of states — those that instead abided by the rulings of state courts or state constitutions — held invalid elections the previous year. This is the “independent state legislature theory,” a radical argument, without constitutional, judicial, or historical basis, which removes checks-and-balances on state legislatures when it comes to making and enforcing election laws. (The Supreme Court recently heard oral arguments on this theory in Moore v. Harper, a case that will be decided over the next few months and which stands to dramatically undermine the fabric of the United States’ democratic system.)
Despite the hoax being peddled by Rep. Scalise and others (most notably the former president), a bloody attempt at a coup d’état, and ongoing attacks on the integrity of US democratic systems and institutions, Freeport contributed to Rep. Scalise’s 2022 reelection campaign — three times.
Freeport’s behavior in West Papua and the United States is hardly an aberration. In the 1960s-80s, US companies, including familiar names like Johnson & Johnson, Caterpillar, Kodak, General Motors, Chrysler, Ford, Philips, Volkswagen, Rolls-Royce, and Mercedes-Benz, reported “hundreds of troublemaking workers” to Brazil’s political police during the country’s brutal military dictatorship. In 2021, 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 2022, French cement company Lafarge pled guilty to charges of conspiring to provide material support to terrorist organizations in Syria, where it operates a cement production plant. The list of examples goes on.
All for Profit
In the United States, when it comes to money in politics, domestic corporations are treated as legal persons under the law. They can speak with dollars, just like US-based readers of this blog. But Fortune 500 corporations speak with significantly outsized resources. Direct donations to individual politicians are measured in the thousands rather than tens, and donations to super-PACS are measured in the millions. Money is power, as the old adage goes. Those with power make choices — and so the question is: what does corporate power want, and what is it willing to forfeit to get it?
We have been given the answer. Insurrection be damned. Democracy is a cost some companies can afford to cut.
Reynolds Taylor is a Staff Attorney at Corporate Accountability Lab.
