Give it Back Campaign takes aim at Corporate Influence
A new grassroots effort seizes on Enron to demand a democracy of the people

For those who want to know what to do about Enron, see Charlie Cray. “We need to make an example out of Enron,” he says, looking over the tax returns for Fortune 500 companies (that part comes later). Cray is the director of Citizen Works’ Give it Back campaign, a fresh effort to wrest control of politics and policies out of corporate hands and return democracy to the people.

The campaign has four goals:

1. To educate citizens about the dominating role of corporations in our society;
2. To demand that the Enron executives give money back to the workers/pension holders and other domestic and global victims;
3. To demand that politicians give back their Enron contributions; and
4. To demand that corporations give back power to the people. Citizens have begun calling their elected officials and telling them to give back their Enron contributions to the workers who were burned by the company.

It is a small but symbolic step, a good baby step for politicians not so used to regurgitating their diet of corporate money.

Next will come the reports and the facts, the public pressure to exhort companies to get out of politics, pressure politicians to distance themselves financially from big business, and ultimately, establish public funding of elections and enact real corporate reform. “One of the strengths of America’s democracy is a separation of Church and State,” Cray says. “Now we need to get the other free-market fundamentalist institution, corporations, out of politics.” Give it Back builds on the fact that Enron was a high-profile example of the corrupting influence of corporate money in politics. But it was only one example. And until corporate money is out of elections, big business will continue to direct policy, making necessary reforms near impossible.

Still, progress is being made.

One can take heart from states like Maine and Massachusetts, where clean-election laws have gone into effect. Even the weak Shays-Meehan campaign finance law is a step in the right direction. But so much more needs to be done to rid public elections of the corrupting influences of corporate cash.

“A lot of people are going to continue to push for deeper campaign finance reform in the wake of Enron,” Cray says. “They realize that after Shays-Meehan, the problem still exists because lawyers on K Street are still busy figuring out loopholes that their corporate clients can exploit.”

One can also take heart from Lord Browne, president of British Petroleum, who announced in March that the oil giant would cease all political contributions for ideological reasons. Last election cycle, Cray says, BP spent $4 million in the United States alone. Give it Back will be targeting other large companies, asking them to make similar pledges.

Enron’s demise also highlighted the incredible inequality of current tax system. While middle-class Americans work hard and pay their taxes, big corporations and their armies of accountants and lawyers are driving trucks through loopholes and moving billions into off-shore tax havens, paying hardly anything in taxes. Enron, for example, paid no taxes 4 out of its last 5 years and utilized almost 900 off-shore tax havens. Overall, corporate taxes are now at 1.3 percent of gross domestic product after a steady decline from 5.2 percent 50 years ago, according to Citizens for Tax Justice.

So the Give it Back campaign will also exhort corporations to give back their fair share of taxes to help pay for the public infrastructure and services they use.

As part of Give it Back, Citizen Works is charting the extent to which Fortune 500 companies are utilizing tax havens. “We’re going to take that info and put in other information besides that, like how many superfund dumps they have and other corporate crimes,” Cray says.

Cray is calling the combination of information “The Matrix,” named for a computer program that Enron employees created to determine how much money it would take to win over certain politicians and whether it would be a worthwhile investment.

Citizen Works is also working on a second Matrix that combines how much money politicians took from Enron, whether they’ve given it back, and how they’ve voted on certain key corporate reform issues, like campaign finance reform or pension reform.

“Both of these will be posted on our web site so that people can use them as a tool to track their elected officials and companies they may or may not want to do business with,” Cray says.

The idea for Give it Back came out of a weekend strategy session in February that gathered together experts in everything from pensions to securities to energy. The idea was to plan a response to Enron. The result was a realization.

“One of the things we realized was that what all the Enron-related issues have in common is the overwhelming influence corporations have over our political system, whether it is energy deregulation, deregulation of financial markets, commodities futures, or overseas subsidies for Enron projects from obscure bureaucracies, like the Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC).” Cray says. “All that is achieved in large part due to the fact that Enron and other companies have taken our political system hostage.”

Give it Back merely seemed like a logical encapsulation.

Now, the trick will be spreading the word and moving the campaign to a state and local level.

“We’d love to have people at other organizations take this whole Give it Back campaign and apply it at a state-by-state level,” Cray says. “It’s important that people start their own state-level campaigns.”

To get involved e-mail ccray@citizenworks.org or call Charlie Cray at 202-265-6164.