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Article

25 Apr 2018

Author:
Irit Tamir, Oxfam America

Words matter, but lobbying dollars get the job done

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Today Oxfam released a new report, Dollars and Sense: Corporate Responsibility in the Trump Era, which compares how 70 US companies used their corporate voice publicly over the first year of the Trump administration. We read every public statement, scoured every publicly available corporate policy and dug into the lobbying disclosures of each of the top 10 companies across seven key sectors. Our main finding calls into question whether corporate America has truly earned the praise it has received in some corners for speaking out against President Trump’s policies and rhetoric. We discovered that while many companies and their executives have unquestionably spoken out in very public ways in 2017, behind closed doors, they primarily used their lobbying power to push for lower taxes. In other words, when it comes to the responsible use of corporate power, less has changed in the era of Trump than meets the eye.