Corporate Corruption News Articles

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Members of the Sackler family who are at the center of the nation's deadly opioid crisis have won sweeping immunity from opioid lawsuits linked to their privately owned company Purdue Pharma and its OxyContin medication. Federal Judge Robert Drain approved a bankruptcy settlement on Wednesday that grants the Sacklers "global peace" from any liability for the opioid epidemic. "This is a bitter result," Drain said. "I believe that at least some of the Sackler parties have liability for those [opioid OxyContin] claims. ... I would have expected a higher settlement." The complex bankruptcy plan ... grants "releases" from liability for harm caused by OxyContin and other opioids to the Sacklers, hundreds of their associates, as well as their remaining empire of companies and trusts. In return, they have agreed to pay roughly $4.3 billion, while also forfeiting ownership of Purdue Pharma. The Sacklers, who admit no wrongdoing and who by their own reckoning earned more than $10 billion from opioid sales, will remain one of the wealthiest families in the world. Critics of this bankruptcy settlement, meanwhile, said they would challenge Drain's confirmation because of the liability releases for the Sacklers. "This order is insulting to victims of the opioid epidemic who had no voice in these proceedings," said Washington state Attorney General Bob Ferguson. The Department of Justice urged Drain to reject the settlement. Attorneys general for nine states and the District of Columbia also opposed the plan.

Note: Purdue Pharma spent $1.2 million on lobbying just before making this deal. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on Big Pharma corruption from reliable major media sources.

40 years ago, a worn-out white Gulfstream II jet descended over Fort Lauderdale, Fla., carrying a regal but sickly passenger almost no one was expecting. Aboard were a Republican political operative, a retinue of Iranian military officers ... and Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, the newly deposed shah of Iran. The only one waiting to receive the deposed monarch was a senior executive of Chase Manhattan Bank, which had not only lobbied the White House to admit the former shah but had arranged visas for his entourage. Less than two weeks later, on Nov. 4, 1979, vowing revenge for the admission of the shah to the United States, revolutionary Iranian students seized the American Embassy in Tehran and then held more than 50 Americans — and Washington — hostage for 444 days. The shah, Washington’s closest ally in the Persian Gulf, had fled Tehran in January 1979. The shah sought refuge in America. But President Jimmy Carter ... refused him entry for the first 10 months of his exile. Chase Manhattan Bank and its well-connected chairman worked behind the scenes to persuade the Carter administration to admit the shah, one of the bank’s most profitable clients. For Mr. Carter, for the United States and for the Middle East it was an incendiary decision. The ensuing hostage crisis enabled Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini to consolidate his theocratic rule, started a four-decade conflict between Washington and Tehran ... and helped Ronald Reagan take the White House.

Note: More information is available in this 1991 New York Times article and this article. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on government corruption from reliable major media sources.

When women speak, they shouldn’t be shrill. Clothing must flatter, but short skirts are a no-no. After all, “sexuality scrambles the mind.” Women should look healthy and fit, with a “good haircut” and “manicured nails.” These were just a few pieces of advice that around 30 female executives at Ernst & Young received at a training held in the accounting giant’s gleaming new office in Hoboken, New Jersey, in June 2018. The 55-page presentation, used during the day-and-a-half seminar on leadership and empowerment, was given to HuffPost by an attendee who was appalled by its contents. Full of out-of-touch advice, the presentation focused on how women need to fix themselves to fit into a male-dominated workplace. The training, called Power-Presence-Purpose or PPP ... was billed to participants as advice on how to be successful at EY, according to Jane, a training attendee and former executive director at the firm. Attendees were even told that women’s brains are 6% to 11% smaller than men’s, Jane said. She wasn’t sure why they were told this, nor is it clear from the presentation. Women’s brains absorb information like pancakes soak up syrup so it’s hard for them to focus, the attendees were told. Men’s brains are more like waffles. They’re better able to focus because the information collects in each little waffle square. The only reason to talk to women about their size of their brains is to make them feel inferior to men, said Bruce McEwen, a neuroscientist at Rockefeller University.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on corporate corruption from reliable major media sources.

About a half a dozen journalists were in a northern California courtroom to cover a third lawsuit alleging that Monsanto’s pesticide glyphosate causes cancer. [Sylvie] Barak told others that she was a freelancer for the BBC. When journalists searched the internet for Barak, they noticed that her LinkedIn account said she worked for FTI Consulting, a global business advisory firm that Monsanto and Bayer, Monsanto’s parent company, had engaged for consulting. Monsanto has also previously employed shadowy networks of consultants, PR firms, and front groups to spy on and influence reporters. And all of it appears to be part of a pattern at the company of using a variety of tactics to intimidate, mislead and discredit journalists and critics. In the latest example of Monsanto’s efforts to track journalists, The Guardian reported in August on internal documents from the company’s “fusion center,” which worked to discredit reporters and nonprofits via third-party actors. In the California trial, the reporter who first identified Barak as an FTI plant said she ... saw an uptick in Monsanto’s industry partners contacting her as she covered the trial. A guy named Jay Byrne ... contacted her on social media to discuss how GMO criticism was part of a Russian influence campaign; when she Googled Byrne, she learned he is Monsanto’s former director of communications. In a January deposition, a Monsanto representative said that in 2016 the company spent “around $16 or 17 million” on activities to defend glyphosate.

Note: Major lawsuits are now unfolding over Monsanto's lies to regulators and the public on the dangers of glyphosate. Yet the EPA continues to use industry studies to declare Roundup safe while ignoring independent scientists. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on corporate corruption from reliable major media sources.

In 2015, Maryland’s main election system vendor was bought by a parent company with ties to a Russian oligarch. The state’s election officials did not know about the purchase until July 2018, when the FBI notified them of the potential conflict. The FBI investigated and did not find any evidence of tampering or sharing of voter data. But the incident was a giant red flag ... especially as many states have outsourced vote-counting to the private sector. Democracy in the United States is now largely a secretive and privately-run affair conducted out of the public eye with little oversight. The corporations that run every aspect of American elections, from voter registration to casting and counting votes by machine, are subject to limited state and federal regulation. The companies are privately-owned and closely held, making information about ownership and financial stability difficult to obtain. The software source code and hardware design of their systems are kept as trade secrets. A small network of companies ... have near-monopolies on election services, such as building voting machines. Across the spectrum, private vendors have long histories of errors that affected elections, of obstructing politicians and the public from seeking information, of corruption, suspect foreign influence, false statements of security and business dishonesty. The computer security world has been sounding the alarm since voting machines were adopted. Now lawmakers, election officials and national security experts are joining in.

Note: Computer scientists have shown nearly every make and model of electronic voting machine to be vulnerable to hacking. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing elections corruption news articles from reliable major media sources.

During a nine month investigation, the BBC has uncovered the disturbing truth about the way authorities in New York City are conducting the fight against Aids. HIV positive children - some only a few months old - are enrolled in toxic experiments without the consent of guardians or relatives. In some cases where parents have refused to give children their medication, they have been placed in care. The city's Administration of Children's Services (ACS) does not even require a court order to place HIV kids with foster parents or in children's homes, where they can continue to give them experimental drugs. In 2002, the Incarnation Children's Center - a children's home in Harlem - was at the hub of controversy over secretive drugs trials. [Reporter Jamie Doran] speaks to a boy who spent most of his life at Incaranation. Medical records, obtained by the This World team, prove the boy had been enrolled in these trials. "I did not want to take my medication," said the boy, "but if you want to get out of there, you have to do what they say." He also conveys a horrifying account of what happened to the children at Incarnation who refused to obey the rules. "My friend Daniel didn't like to take his medicine and he got a tube in his stomach," he said. For months, the BBC tried to get information from the people responsible for the trials, but none would comment. The companies that supply drugs for the trials are among the world's largest, including Britain's own Glaxo SmithKline (GSK).

Note: Read a long list of examples of humans being treated as guinea pigs by corporate and governmental programs. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on corruption in government and in Big Pharma from reliable major media sources.

A series of corporate leaks over the past few years provides a remarkable window in the hidden engines powering social media. In January 2021, a few Facebook employees posted an article on the company's engineering blog purporting to explain the news feed algorithm that determines which of the countless posts available each user will see and the order in which they will see them. Eight months later ... a Facebook product manager turned whistleblower snuck over ten thousand pages of documents and internal messages out of Facebook headquarters. She leaked these to a handful of media outlets. Internal studies documented Instagram's harmful impact on the mental health of vulnerable teen girls. A secret whitelist program exempted VIP users from the moderation system the rest of us face. It turns out Facebook engineers have assigned a point value to each type of engagement users can perform on a post (liking, commenting, resharing, etc.). For each post you could be shown, these point values are multiplied by the probability that the algorithm thinks you'll perform that form of engagement. These multiplied pairs of numbers are added up, and the total is the post's personalized score for you. Facebook, TikTok, and Twitter all run on essentially the same simple math formula. Once we start clicking the social media equivalent of junk food, we're going to be served up a lot more of it–which makes it harder to resist. It's a vicious cycle

Note: Read our latest Substack focused on a social media platform that is harnessing technology as a listening tool for the radical purpose of bringing people together across differences. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on Big Tech and media manipulation.

The first report of the Maha Commission made headlines in May when it raised concerns about a "chronic disease crisis" in children. Echoing language that [Robert F.] Kennedy campaigned on, the report argued that "the American diet has shifted dramatically toward ultra-processed foods" and that "nearly 70% of children's calories now come from UPFs, contributing to obesity, diabetes, and other chronic conditions". "The greatest step the United States can take to reverse childhood chronic disease is to put whole foods produced by American farmers and ranchers at the center of healthcare," the report found. It went on to describe the dismal state of nutrition research in the United States: "Government funding for nutrition research through the NIH is only 4-5% of its total budget and in some cases is subject to influence by food industry-aligned researchers." Kennedy has ordered the FDA to explore how to eliminate a policy that allows food companies to decide themselves whether food additives are safe, called the Generally Recognized as Safe (Gras) loophole. "That's a really, really big deal," says Dariush Mozaffarian, a cardiologist and director of the Food is Medicine Institute at the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University. "Ninety-nine per cent of compounds in food were added through this loophole." Several states are also pursuing policies that would limit spending from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (Snap) on "junk food".

Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on health and food system corruption.

A new study of defense department spending previewed exclusively to the Guardian shows that most of the Pentagon's discretionary spending from 2020 to 2024 has gone to outside military contractors, providing a $2.4tn boon in public funds to private firms in what was described as a "continuing and massive transfer of wealth from taxpayers to fund war and weapons manufacturing". The report from the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and Costs of War project at Brown University said that the Trump administration's new Pentagon budget will push annual US military spending past the $1tn mark. That will deliver a projected windfall of more than half a trillion dollars that will be shared among top arms firms such as Lockheed Martin and Raytheon as well as a growing military tech sector with close allies in the administration such as JD Vance, the report said. The US military budget will have nearly doubled this century, increasing 99% since 2000. "The US withdrawal from Afghanistan in September 2021 did not result in a peace dividend," the authors of the report wrote. "Instead, President Biden requested, and Congress authorized, even higher annual budgets for the Pentagon, and President Trump is continuing that same trajectory of escalating military budgets." The growth in spending will increasingly benefit firms in the "military tech" sector who represent tech companies like SpaceX, Palantir and Anduril.

Note: Learn more about arms industry corruption in our comprehensive Military-Intelligence Corruption Information Center. For more, read our concise summaries of news articles on military corruption.

Unhealthy food and beverage companies powerfully undermine the eating habits of young people by deploying ubiquitous ads that encourage poor dietary choices and increase the risk of serious disease and premature death, according to a sweeping new study published in Obesity Reviews. The first-of-its-kind summary highlights a clear cumulative pattern: The more high-fat, high-sugar, and salty food ads young people see, the more of those products they consume–and the higher the risk that they may develop obesity, type 2 diabetes, and other diet-related diseases. Companies also disproportionately target adolescents, lower-income communities, and Black and Latino youth with the marketing of health-harming food and beverages. The review summarizes 25 years of scientific evidence and findings from 108 empirical studies and 19 systematic reviews of unhealthy food marketing to adolescents (13-17) and young adults (18-25). One study showed that children who watched just five minutes of food ads ate about 130 more calories that day. Only 19% of studies examined health impacts, but most of those found links between unhealthy food marketing and higher BMI, weight gain, or increased obesity risk–especially from ultra-processed foods and sugary drinks. One U.S. study ... found that children who could recall more food ads chose more food items and consumed more calories after exposure.

Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on health and food system corruption.

Trust in academic research is crucial. This trust, however, could be affected by the presence of conflicts of interest (CoIs), situations where a specific interest of the researcher could compromise the researcher's impartiality. Academic research in fields such as economics, medicine, and many others is becoming more costly and often depends on funding or access to databases controlled by private parties. To what extent do these relationships undermine trust in research? In our new NBER working paper, we address this ... by examining how different types of CoIs shape perceptions of the trustworthiness of economic research. Trust in the results declined across all groups (on average by 30%) following the disclosure of a CoI, despite the research being peer-reviewed and published in a prestigious academic journal. This decline was moderated by expertise, with average Americans experiencing greater declines in trust than "elite" economists (who publish in the top journals). Nonetheless, even elite economists experienced a drop in trust. Financial incentives (such as funding) were not the sole or the most significant factor influencing trust. Instead, privileged access to data had the most pronounced effect. When research utilized private data aligned with the interests of the data provider, trust in the results decreased by over 20%. Trust dropped by approximately 50% if the data provider retained review rights over the research outcomes.

Note: "Trust the science" sounds noble–until you realize that even top editors of world-renowned journals have warned that much of published medical research is unreliable, distorted by fraud, corporate influence, and conflicts of interest. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on corruption in science.

In 2022, three U.S. inspectors showed up unannounced at a massive pharmaceutical plant. For two weeks, they scrutinized humming production lines and laboratories spread across the dense industrial campus, peering over the shoulders of workers. Much of the factory was supposed to be as sterile as an operating room. But the inspectors discovered what appeared to be metal shavings on drugmaking equipment, and records that showed vials of medication that were "blackish" from contamination had been sent to the United States. Quality testing in some cases had been put off for more than six months, according to their report, and raw materials tainted with unknown "extraneous matter" were used anyway, mixed into batches of drugs. Sun Pharma's transgressions were so egregious that the Food and Drug Administration [banned] the factory from exporting drugs to the United States. But ... a secretive group inside the FDA gave the global manufacturer a special pass to continue shipping more than a dozen drugs to the United States even though they were made at the same substandard factory that the agency had officially sanctioned. Pills and injectable medications that otherwise would have been banned went to unsuspecting patients. The same small cadre at the FDA granted similar exemptions to more than 20 other factories that had violated critical standards in drugmaking, nearly all in India.

Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on Big Pharma corruption.

Haiti could be Erik Prince's deadliest gambit yet. Prince's Blackwater reigned during the Global War on Terror, but left a legacy of disastrous mishaps, most infamously the 2007 Nisour massacre in Iraq, where Blackwater mercenaries killed 17 civilians. This, plus his willingness in recent years to work for foreign governments in conflicts and for law enforcement across the globe, have made Prince one of the world's most controversial entrepreneurs. A desperate Haiti has now hired him to "conduct lethal operations" against armed groups, who control about 85% of Haitian capital Port-Au-Prince. Prince will send about 150 private mercenaries to Haiti over the summer. He will advise Haiti's police force on countering Haiti's armed groups, where some Prince-hired mercenaries are already operating attack drones. The Prince deal is occurring within the context of extensive ongoing American intervention in Haiti. Currently the U.S.-backed, Kenyan-led multinational police force operating in Haiti to combat the armed groups is largely seen as a failure. Previously, a U.N. peacekeeping mission aimed at stabilizing Haiti from 2004 through 2017 was undermined by scandal, where U.N. officials were condemned for killing civilians during efforts aimed at armed groups, sexually assaulting Haitians, and introducing cholera to Haiti. Before that, the U.S. was accused of ousting Haitian leader Jean-Bertrand Aristide after he proved obstructive to U.S. foreign policy goals, in 2004.

Note: This article doesn't mention the US-backed death squads that recently terrorized Haiti. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on corruption in the military and in the corporate world.

Palantir has long been connected to government surveillance. It was founded in part with CIA money, it has served as an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) contractor since 2011, and it's been used for everything from local law enforcement to COVID-19 efforts. But the prominence of Palantir tools in federal agencies seems to be growing under President Trump. "The company has received more than $113 million in federal government spending since Mr. Trump took office, according to public records, including additional funds from existing contracts as well as new contracts with the Department of Homeland Security and the Pentagon," reports The New York Times, noting that this figure "does not include a $795 million contract that the Department of Defense awarded the company last week, which has not been spent." Palantir technology has largely been used by the military, the intelligence agencies, the immigration enforcers, and the police. But its uses could be expanding. Representatives of Palantir are also speaking to at least two other agencies–the Social Security Administration and the Internal Revenue Service. Along with the Trump administration's efforts to share more data across federal agencies, this signals that Palantir's huge data analysis capabilities could wind up being wielded against all Americans. Right now, the Trump administration is using Palantir tools for immigration enforcement, but those tools could easily be applied to other ... targets.

Note: Read about Palantir's recent, first-ever AI warfare conference. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on Big Tech and intelligence agency corruption.

As a sales rep for drug manufacturers Questcor, Lisa Pratta always suspected the company's business practices weren't just immoral but illegal, too, as she explains in "False Claims – One Insider's Impossible Battle Against Big Pharma Corruption." Pratta began working for Questcor in 2010 as the sales rep in the Northeast region for Acthar, a drug which helped relieve autoimmune and inflammatory disorders. "If prescribed correctly, Acthar could help people walk again. And talk again," writes Pratta. But, she adds, "Questcor made more money when it was prescribed incorrectly." They would do anything to sell Acthar. From paying doctors to prescribe it to using bogus research studies proclaiming its miraculous efficacy, they were so successful that Achtar's price rose from $40 per vial in 2000 to nearly $39,000 in 2019 – an increase of 97,000%. Some sales reps were making up to $4 million a year and, in turn, kept the physicians doing their bidding in a life of luxury. "They took them on scuba diving trips and bought clothes and shoes for their wives. One guy bought his doctor a brand new Armani suit and expensed it to Questcor," she recalls. In March 2019, the Department of Justice served a 100-page lawsuit against Mallinckrodt, alleging illegal marketing of Acthar, bribing doctors to boost sales and defrauding government health care programs. It also mentioned Pratta's role in the case, meaning her long-held anonymity was now public knowledge.

Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on corruption in science and Big Pharma profiteering.

If there is one thing that Ilya Sutskever knows, it is the opportunities–and risks–that stem from the advent of artificial intelligence. An AI safety researcher and one of the top minds in the field, he served for years as the chief scientist of OpenAI. There he had the explicit goal of creating deep learning neural networks so advanced they would one day be able to think and reason just as well as, if not better than, any human. Artificial general intelligence, or simply AGI, is the official term for that goal. According to excerpts published by The Atlantic ... part of those plans included a doomsday shelter for OpenAI researchers. "We're definitely going to build a bunker before we release AGI," Sutskever told his team in 2023. Sutskever reasoned his fellow scientists would require protection at that point, since the technology was too powerful for it not to become an object of intense desire for governments globally. "Of course, it's going to be optional whether you want to get into the bunker," he assured fellow OpenAI scientists. Sutskever knows better than most what the awesome capabilities of AI are. He was part of an elite trio behind the 2012 creation of AlexNet, often dubbed by experts as the Big Bang of AI. Recruited by Elon Musk personally to join OpenAI three years later, he would go on to lead its efforts to develop AGI. But the launch of its ChatGPT bot accidentally derailed his plans by unleashing a funding gold rush the safety-minded Sutskever could no longer control.

Note: Watch a conversation on the big picture of emerging technology with Collective Evolution founder Joe Martino and WTK team members Amber Yang and Mark Bailey. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on AI.

According to recent research by the Office of the eSafety Commissioner, "nearly 1 in 5 young people believe it's OK to track their partner whenever they want". Many constantly share their location with their partner, or use apps like Life360 or Find My Friends. Some groups of friends all do it together, and talk of it as a kind of digital closeness where physical distance and the busyness of life keeps them apart. Others use apps to keep familial watch over older relatives – especially when their health may be in decline. When government officials or tech industry bigwigs proclaim that you should be OK with being spied on if you're not doing anything wrong, they're asking (well, demanding) that we trust them. But it's not about trust, it's about control and disciplining behaviour. "Nothing to hide; nothing to fear" is a frustratingly persistent fallacy, one in which we ought to be critical of when its underlying (lack of) logic creeps into how we think about interacting with one another. When it comes to interpersonal surveillance, blurring the boundary between care and control can be dangerous. Just as normalising state and corporate surveillance can lead to further erosion of rights and freedoms over time, normalising interpersonal surveillance seems to be changing the landscape of what's considered to be an expression of love – and not necessarily for the better. We ought to be very critical of claims that equate surveillance with safety.

Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on Big Tech and the disappearance of privacy.

The inaugural "AI Expo for National Competitiveness" [was] hosted by the Special Competitive Studies Project – better known as the "techno-economic" thinktank created by the former Google CEO and current billionaire Eric Schmidt. The conference's lead sponsor was Palantir, a software company co-founded by Peter Thiel that's best known for inspiring 2019 protests against its work with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) at the height of Trump's family separation policy. Currently, Palantir is supplying some of its AI products to the Israel Defense Forces. I ... went to a panel in Palantir's booth titled Civilian Harm Mitigation. It was led by two "privacy and civil liberties engineers" [who] described how Palantir's Gaia map tool lets users "nominate targets of interest" for "the target nomination process". It helps people choose which places get bombed. After [clicking] a few options on an interactive map, a targeted landmass lit up with bright blue blobs. These blobs ... were civilian areas like hospitals and schools. Gaia uses a large language model (something like ChatGPT) to sift through this information and simplify it. Essentially, people choosing bomb targets get a dumbed-down version of information about where children sleep and families get medical treatment. "Let's say you're operating in a place with a lot of civilian areas, like Gaza," I asked the engineers afterward. "Does Palantir prevent you from ‘nominating a target' in a civilian location?" Short answer, no.

Note: "Nominating a target" is military jargon that means identifying a person, place, or object to be attacked with bombs, drones, or other weapons. Palantir's Gaia map tool makes life-or-death decisions easier by turning human lives and civilian places into abstract data points on a screen. Read about Palantir's growing influence in law enforcement and the war machine. For more, watch our 9-min video on the militarization of Big Tech.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) has canceled plans to introduce new rules designed to limit the ability of US data brokers to sell sensitive information about Americans, including financial data, credit history, and Social Security numbers. The CFPB proposed the new rule in early December under former director Rohit Chopra, who said the changes were necessary to combat commercial surveillance practices that "threaten our personal safety and undermine America's national security." The agency quietly withdrew the proposal on Tuesday morning. Data brokers operate within a multibillion-dollar industry built on the collection and sale of detailed personal information–often without individuals' knowledge or consent. These companies create extensive profiles on nearly every American, including highly sensitive data such as precise location history, political affiliations, and religious beliefs. Common Defense political director Naveed Shah, an Iraq War veteran, condemned the move to spike the proposed changes, accusing Vought of putting the profits of data brokers before the safety of millions of service members. Investigations by WIRED have shown that data brokers have collected and made cheaply available information that can be used to reliably track the locations of American military and intelligence personnel overseas, including in and around sensitive installations where US nuclear weapons are reportedly stored.

Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on Big Tech and the disappearance of privacy.

BlackRock Inc.'s annual proxy statement devotes more than 50 pages to executive pay. How many of those are useful in understanding why Chief Executive Officer Larry Fink was compensated to the tune of $37 million for 2024? Not enough. The asset manager's latest remuneration report has heightened significance because BlackRock's shareholders delivered a rare and large protest vote against its pay framework at last year's annual meeting. That followed recommendations ... to withhold support for the so-called say-on-pay motion. In the wake of the rebuke, a board committee responsible for pay and perks took to the phones and hit the road to hear shareholders' gripes. Investors wanted more explanation of how the committee members used their considerable discretion in arriving at awards. There was also an aversion to one-time bonuses absent tough conditions. Incentive pay is 50% tied to BlackRock's financial performance, with the remainder split equally between objectives for "business strength" and "organizational strength." That financial piece was previously described using a non-exhaustive list of seven financial metrics. Now there are eight, gathered under three priorities: "drive shareholder value creation," "accelerate organic revenue growth" and "enhance operating leverage." There's no weighting given to the three financial priorities. The pay committee says Fink "far exceeded" expectations, but those expectations weren't quantified.

Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on financial industry corruption.

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