Who Owns Big Oil? We do!
The American Petroleum Institute has a new public image campaign- www.whoownsbigoil.org The purpose of this website, presumably, is to convince us that if we raise taxes on hugely profitable corporations we will only be hurting ourselves. Why? Because we are all shareholders of those corporations and when they are taxed we suffer.
This entry was co-authored with Blair Bowie, WISPIRG’s federal Democracy Advocate.
The American Petroleum Institute has a new public image campaign- www.whoownsbigoil.org The purpose of this website, presumably, is to convince us that if we raise taxes on hugely profitable corporations we will only be hurting ourselves. Why? Because we are all shareholders of those corporations and when they are taxed we suffer.
Well, it’s right to say we own the oil companies, in fact, let’s have a look at division of holdings by the numbers:
31.2% Pension Funds
21.1% Individual Investors
20.6% Asset Management Companies
17.7% IRA
6.6% Other Institutional Investors
2.8% Corporate Management of Oil Companies
So 97.2% of the companies, the website is saying, are owned by the general public, versus, 2.8% which is corporate management.
Now let’s give these numbers some context, to explain why API’s website is even more misleading:
– In 2010 the Supreme Court anointed corporations with the rights of natural human beings to spend unlimited money out of their general treasury to influence elections.
Corporate treasury money is what funds the American Petroleum Institute so they can produce shiny, definitely agenda-free public education websites
– Legally, the after-tax profits of a publicly traded corporation belong to its shareholders.
– Corporate executives ultimately sign off on the decision to use money for political influence through trade associations, non-profits, and/or super PACs.
So, in conclusion, API’s website that is attempting to convince shareholders that raising taxes on oil companies will hurt their pension funds, meanwhile its being paid for by money that should really converted into dividends going to those pension funds, unbeknownst to and unapproved by 97.8% of the shareholders.
The American Petroleum Institute spent over $39 million on this sort of “public education” issue advocacy in 2010 and has already shelled out $24.3 in this election cycle. By the numbers above, 97.2% of that, or $61.5 million, is ours. Next time, I’ll take the dividend, thanks.
Still worse, we don’t even know which specific companies that money came from. Notable corporations that fund API, like Occidental Oil and Gas Corp, Devon Energy Corp, and Halliburton received an “opaque” rating on the Baruch Index of Corporate Political Disclosure for sharing little or no information on their political spending. Of course, API, like the Chamber of Commerce, is not required to reveal the source of its funding itself.
The good news is, we can know which companies we own and we can make them tell us what their doing with our money. In Wisconsin, shareholders and the public working with WISPIRG and others in the Corporate Reform Coalition to demand accountability from the corporations that they rightfully own through shareholder resolutions, petitioning the Securities and Exchange Commission, and pushing for state and federal laws to get disclosure requirements up to speed with the post-Citizens United reality.
Some proposals go further and demand that corporations get sign off from their shareholders before they can spend the dough on those nasty attack ads. Best of all, a new kind of shareholder proposal to require complete refrain from using shareholder money for politics was introduced and will be voted on this season at Bank of America, 3M, and Target.
So, vote your proxies, show up at a rally at a company near you, write to your mutual fund or pension board, and help us keep the companies that we own from using our own money for political jujitsu.
