Ben Stein Still Needs A Conscience

Time for a comment in response to the latest pro-business hosannas from one of our most visible conservative media shills (from this NYT column Sunday, where Stein basically tells both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton to stop beating up poor ExxonMobil and, presumably, “embrace their inner capitalist”)…

First, ExxonMobil, like all the other gigantic integrated energy companies in this country, is owned not by a cabal of reactionary businessmen holding clandestine meetings in a lodge in the Texas scrublands (as Oliver Stone so brilliantly illustrated in “Nixon”).

ExxonMobil, in fact, is owned mostly by ordinary Americans. Mutual funds, index funds and pension funds (including union pension funds) own about 52 percent of ExxonMobil’s shares. Individual shareholders, about two million or so, own almost all the rest. The pooh-bahs who run Exxon own less than 1 percent of the company.

When ExxonMobil earns almost $12 billion in a quarter, or $41 billion in a year, as it did in 2007, that money does not go into the coffers of a few billionaire executives quaffing Champagne in Texas. It goes into the pension and retirement accounts of ordinary citizens. When Exxon(Mobil) pays a dividend, that money goes to pay for the mortgages and oxygen tanks and in-home care of lots of elderly Americans.

Let’s put aside the laughable suggestion from Stein that ExxonMobil acts out of some sort of benevolent instinct towards its shareholders beyond its typically rapacious methods of ensuring unabated profit (and it has been particularly good at that, of course, aided in no small part by what has to be the most sympathetic administration to its needs that this country has ever seen).

Let’s instead take a look at the utter bare-knuckled, bunker mentality of this company towards governments, unions, and “activist” shareholders.

And let’s also take a look at its refusal to implement non-discriminatory practices (from HuffPo’s Marc Gunther here after its last shareholder meeting; this year's meeting hasn't been announced yet but it could come in May, with proxy mailings due to be sent to shareholders soon)…

“Your failure and unwillingness to communicate with your shareholders speaks volumes about your corporate governance policies,” said California’s state controller John Chiang on a conference call.

Robert A.G. Monks, the longtime shareholder activist who holds 100,000 XOM shares through a family trust, said ExxonMobil is “unwilling to acknowledge that they live in a world where they are accountable.”

“It is a closed company,” said Monks, who’s been a regular at the company’s shareholder confabs. “It is a company that listens only to itself.”

Among the institutional owners who say they will withhold their votes for (Stanford University’s Michael) Boskin (as president) are the California state teachers retirement fund, and public pension funds from New York state, New York City, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, North Carolina and Connecticut, as well as labor union funds. Not an insignificant group.

…

You won’t be surprised to hear that ExxonMobil will again stubbornly oppose a resolution asking the company to adopt in writing a non-discrimination policy against gays and lesbians. All but two FORTUNE 500 companies have done that. Exxon says it opposes discrimination. But what kind of a signal does XOM’s refusal to codify its stance send to GLBT employees or prospective employees?

And believe me, though ExxonMobil’s stock has performed well, there is an entire universe of investment instruments out there for fund participants that could yield comparable or better returns for Stein’s elderly oxygen-tank-dependent Americans (and doing so with a much clearer conscience, I might add).

See, it’s a lot easier to Stein to poke fun at people who question an invested company’s earnings than it is to acknowledge potentially actionable legal behavior (and to read more about the antics of this bunch, including alleged connections to military killings and human rights violations, to say nothing of the periodic environmental catastrophes for which these cretins are responsible from time to time, read here).

ExxonMobil doesn’t need a hug; it needs an indictment. And the law of averages says that one day, despite their mammoth power and influence, they’re going to get it.