Corporate Integrity Project

NLPC seeks to promote integrity in corporate governance, including honesty and fair play in relationships with shareholders, employees, business partners and customers. In doing so, NLPC places special emphasis on:

* Asserting that the social responsibility of the corporation is to defend and advance the interests of the people who own the company, the shareholders. True responsibility is fidelity to one’s own mission, not someone else’s, or someone else’s political agenda.

* Exposing the seeking of influence on public officials by corporations, which is the inevitable result of high levels of government spending and intervention in the marketplace.

* Combating practices that undermine the free enterprise system, including philanthropic giving to groups hostile to a free economy.

Labor Department Seeks to Prevent Managers From Playing Politics With Pension Funds

Posted on by Carl Horowitz

By law, managers of employer-sponsored pension plans must act in the best interests of investors. Unfortunately, many such fiduciaries are applying an unusually broad definition. That’s why the U.S. Department of Labor has clarified the issue. On April 23, the DOL released a guidance statement intended to discourage benefit managers from applying the principle known as Environmental, Social and Governance to investment decisions. Such a practice might seem worthy, noted the department, but it may place safety and soundness in harm’s way. The action is especially a rebuke to those who see issues advocacy as a top business priority.

Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG), alternately known as Corporate Social Responsibility, is a philosophy holding that a corporation is not only a business enterprise, but also a steward of the public good. A company, in this view, can and should be at once profitable and morally conscious. A company must … Read More ➡ “Labor Department Seeks to Prevent Managers From Playing Politics With Pension Funds”

Facebook Remains a Threat to Free Speech

Posted on by Peter Flaherty

During his two days on Capitol Hill, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg repeatedly denied that the company censors information and opinion with which it disagrees, despite extensive evidence to the contrary.

Facebook censorship is real. The National Legal and Policy Center has regularly had our Facebook postings suppressed when they pertain to Black Lives Matter, which we have regularly criticized.

It just so happens that Zuckerberg has a different view of Black Lives Matter. Zuckerberg purports to value free expression, famously allowing the “signature wall” at Facebook headquarters. But when in 2016 “Black Lives Matter” graffiti was met with “All Lives Matter,” Zuckerberg just could not have it. He issued a memo calling such sentiments “unacceptable” and “malicious” and assured everyone that the company was “investigating the current incidents.”

Click here to read the rest in the Daily Caller.

 … Read More ➡ “Facebook Remains a Threat to Free Speech”

Apple Falsely Claims it Uses ‘100-Percent Renewable’ Energy

Posted on by Paul Chesser

Media consistently pour the love on the progressive moralizers at Apple (except for occasional slams about Chinese labor conditions), and nowhere are they more willing to amplify phony claims about the company’s “goodwill” achievements than when it comes to the environment.

All corporate mouthpieces need to do in Cupertino is post some propaganda on their press release page about “renewables” and the tech bloggers and business media drool. Lazy-minded (and just plain lazy) liberal journalists eagerly adopt, repurpose and regurgitate even the most outrageous and debunk-able of claims, and dis-serve their reading public by delivering the misinformation.

Witness Monday’s announcement that “Apple (is) now globally powered by 100 percent renewable energy.” Here’s how some of the uncritical beat writers (representative of most of those who wrote about it) disseminated the release:

… Read More ➡ “Apple Falsely Claims it Uses ‘100-Percent Renewable’ Energy”

Amnesty International Joins Criticism of Apple CEO Tim Cook on China

Posted on by Paul Chesser
Tim Cook

Apple CEO Tim Cook has received accolades for free speech advocacy by respected institutions such as the Newseum, but the company is being called on the carpet for consigning its data storage services – especially crucial encrypted access keys – to a bunch of communists.

Amnesty International announced Thursday it would initiate a social media campaign against Apple, because the Cupertino, Calif. tech giant caved to the Chinese government and agreed to allow its customers’ data to be housed on servers there.

The effort coincides with a visit by Cook to the China Development Forum, where he is co-chairing an event sponsored by the government in which business leaders meet with public officials in an effort to improve relations.

It also follows only a month after Reuters reported that Apple agreed to store encrypted keys used to access customers’ (or, users’) data storage accounts (such as iCloud).

According … Read More ➡ “Amnesty International Joins Criticism of Apple CEO Tim Cook on China”

Corporations Paying for Employee Protest: Does the Tail Wag the Dog?

Posted on by Carl Horowitz

There’s nothing unusual about a corporation offering employees paid leave for vacations, illness or personal emergencies. That’s a fact of the modern workplace. But lately employers have begun to provide a far less justifiable benefit: paid leave for social justice activism. Very often, employees themselves, backed by social media mobs, demand that management take stands on gun control, global warming, immigration and other major issues. And these shakedowns can result in the termination of less than compliant executives. It’s another example of why business should not be a vehicle for political advocacy.

The Left always has been resourceful in building cadres. And the workplace has become the new frontier. Not that many companies aren’t already on board with this. At Luxe, a San Francisco-based valet parking smart phone app, founder and CEO Curtis Lee, angered over President Trump’s January 2017 executive order temporarily barring entry into the U.S. … Read More ➡ “Corporations Paying for Employee Protest: Does the Tail Wag the Dog?”

Corporate Cowards Abandon NRA in Wake of Parkland Shooting

Posted on by Paul Chesser

The horrific shootings at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla. – other than the obvious evil present in killer Nikolas Cruz – have been the result of a massive breakdown of government institutions – from deputies who didn’t enter the school, to the many warnings about Cruz that were ignored by authorities, to the failure of federal, state and local lawmakers to fortify their schools with armed security to protect students and faculty after too many incidents already.

Nonetheless the pressure groups of the Left and the legacy media, in the immediate days following the incident, trained their sights on the National Rifle Association, its millions of members, its finances, its influence, and its corporate partners.

Never ones to let a good crisis go to waste, countless organizations and media enterprises made it their mission to outline how much NRA money supported various Congress members. … Read More ➡ “Corporate Cowards Abandon NRA in Wake of Parkland Shooting”

BlackRock CEO Larry Fink Calls Upon Business to Save the World

Posted on by Carl Horowitz

With about $6 trillion of assets under management, BlackRock Inc. carries a lot of weight in the business world. And Laurence Fink, CEO and chairman of the New York-based investment firm, wants everyone to know that. In a letter dated January 12, Fink urged dozens of CEOs of publicly-traded companies to expand their horizons beyond the confines of profit. “Society is demanding that companies, both public and private, serve a social purpose,” he wrote. “To prosper over time, every company must not only deliver financial performance, but also show how it makes a positive contribution to society.” Though such words sound reasonable, they epitomize a common error about the institutional role of the corporation.

For decades, corporations, prodded by government, nonprofit activists and their own shareholders, have been retooling themselves as social problem solvers. Under the doctrine of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), companies are behaving as policy-oriented philanthropies. … Read More ➡ “BlackRock CEO Larry Fink Calls Upon Business to Save the World”

Conservatives Get ‘Shi**y’ Treatment from Twitter, Google – Again

Posted on by Paul Chesser

Legacy media organizations can be counted on to squawk when their voices aren’t heard in Republican-controlled forums – such as White House press conferences.

But when it’s conservatives who are censored on powerful, widely read platforms, it’s hard to find any journalists who care.

Such was the case last week when Project Veritas exposed, in an undercover investigation, how Twitter systematically diminishes – and even bans – access to posts published by those on the Right. One Twitter manager in charge of gatekeeping called their censorship victims “shi**y people.”

Then there was the revelation by The Daily Caller that Google’s “fact check” feature seems to exclusively target conservative web sites in its results. In other words, no suspect or controversial claims by liberal web site publishers are scrutinized for accuracy – only those on the right.

While mainstream media outlets are obsessed about President Trump’s remarks about “sh**hole” … Read More ➡ “Conservatives Get ‘Shi**y’ Treatment from Twitter, Google – Again”

‘Safe Spaces’: Workplace Radicalism with a Corporate Logo

Posted on by Carl Horowitz

U.S. Bank isn’t just about banking. And Greg Cunningham wants everyone to know that. Cunningham, vice president of diversity and inclusion at the Minneapolis-based institution, is busy traversing the nation, coaxing bank employees to confront their inner racism, sexism and other attitudes that get in the way of a harmonious workplace. “Transforming a culture of 67,000 people is never easy,” he says. “You have to make sure that everyone knows that there is something in this for them.”

Reprogramming of this sort is a trend. Corporations are creating on-premises ‘safe spaces’ for employees presumably at risk of harassment by managers and peers. Advocates tout the practice as fostering teamwork and ultimately profits. Don’t believe them. Under the guise of addressing a workplace morale crisis, such ‘spaces’ actually create rather than resolve employee divisiveness. It’s a variation on that national behavior modification program known as “diversity,” which has nothing to … Read More ➡ “‘Safe Spaces’: Workplace Radicalism with a Corporate Logo”

Is Eric Schmidt’s Departure Indicative of ‘Womanizing’ Culture at Google?

Posted on by Paul Chesser
Eric Schmidt

On the same day an Associated Press survey of its member editors determined that workplace sexual harassment was the No. 1 story of 2017, Google’s corporate parent company Alphabet said its CEO, Eric Schmidt, will leave as chairman of its board of directors.

The development comes as Google became the subject of a recent report about corporation-wide mistreatment of women, accompanied by heightened scrutiny of Schmidt’s increasing reputation as a “womanizer.”

According to the New York Post, “news outlets have been sniffing around Schmidt’s former flames looking for a Harvey Weinstein-like bombshell,” but an anonymous source said “there is no sexual harassment.” A Google insider told the newspaper all his relationships have been “consensual” and that there are no settlements from the company to keep things quiet.

Nonetheless Schmidt’s exploits sound positively (Matt) Lauer-esque, with a “marriage” reminiscent of the separate lives existence of Bill and Hillary … Read More ➡ “Is Eric Schmidt’s Departure Indicative of ‘Womanizing’ Culture at Google?”