The Contenders: on Corporations

Bill Richardson: Resigned from Peregrine Systems amid 2002 financial collapse

But according to the San Diego Reader, ”Records show that Richardson attended, in person or by phone, 15 board meetings. In those meetings, directors were hearing that the company might get caught cooking the books.“

In May 2002 the company announced it had found accounting irregularities and the stock collapsed. Richardson resigned in June.

Chris Dodd: Reliable vote for banking & insurance industries

In his election to Congress in 1974, Dodd represented Connecticut’s fairly conservative (and often Republican) second district, of the state’s eastern end. In 1980, he moved on to the Senate, thus expanding his constituency to include the bankers and brokers of the wealthy New York suburbs, and the insurance industry long based around Hartford.

Chris Dodd: Co-sponsored bill to make suing corporations harder

Dodd was an original co-sponsor of 1995 legislation making it more difficult for people to sue corporations, allowing judges to decide which plaintiffs were worthy, and limiting judgments in cases where the companies could successfully claim they didn’t know they were committing fraud. His defining moment came when Bill Clinton vetoed the bill. As the Journal of Accountancy noted, “perhaps the bill’s strongest supporter in Congress, Senator Christopher J. Dodd urged both House and Senate Democrats to override Clinton’s veto, even if it amounted to a defeat of the intent of his own party’s president.”

Chris Dodd: Advocated against extreme predatory lending practices

But his close ties to the financial sector remain troubling, all the more so in view of his recent ascendancy to the chair of the powerful Senate Banking Committee, giving him oversight of the banking, financial services, and insurance industries. On the eve of the Democratic takeover of Congress (and of Dodd’s announcement of his candidacy), a government watchdog group said, “It’s a tightrope walk when you’re the chairman of a committee that regulates the industry that gives the most money to politics, in general. It has to be tempting to take a lot of money from the industry, because they want to give it so much.” Dodd, clearly, has long given in to temptation.

Joe Biden: OpEd: beholden to corporations because so many based in DE

John Edwards: Oil windfall tax is most serious blow against wealthy

The reporter quotes former Labor Secretary Robert Reich: “Rhetorically, if you’re calling Edwards an economic populist, it’s true he cares a lot about the poor,” says Reich (who is hardly radical, though he himself cared too much about the poor to stay for Clinton’s 2nd term). “He evinces a lot of concern for the middle class and middle-class anxieties. But he’s not in any way attacking the rich or corporations. He is not explaining one fundamental fact of modern economic life, which is that the very rich have all the money.”