MetLife’s governance committee “oversees the management and mitigation of risks related to failure to comply with required or appropriate corporate governance standards,” the insurer said last month in a proxy statement. Castro-Wright, who also served on the compensation and investment committees, was paid $259,124 for his work at the insurer last year, including $145,000 in cash and $112,502 in stock awards, the filing shows.

Fox-guarding-hen-house clichés don’t come close to expressing the hypocrisy that rewards misbehavior with such largesse. Right about here, someone should be shrieking: This is what’s wrong with corporate America! This is why we shouldn’t be allowing the CEO class to influence government policy. This is why the fact that Wall Street hates Obama should be considered a badge of honor!

Yes, yes, I know, we’re not supposed to convict the innocent until proven guilty, but I defy anyone to read the Times’ masterful piece of investigative reporting and not come away convinced that Castro-Wright built his successful career at Wal-Mart by bribing government officials in Mexico to speed the approval process for building new Wal-Mart stores. In fact, the very news that Castro-Wright was forced to resign from the MetLife board is an eye-opening admission. Normal American corporate governance practice allows disgraced CEOs to keep milking the board-of-directors gravy train for years after their dishonor is exposed.

It is amusingly enraging now to go back and look at the hype the business press poured on Castro-Wright as he ascended the ladder.

From Fortune, in 2006:

Eduardo Castro-Wright, the new CEO of Wal-Mart Stores USA, turned Wal-Mart’s publicly traded Mexican subsidiary, Wal-Mex, into the country’s best retailer and a jewel of Wal-Mart’s $56 billion international arm.

To make that happen, Castro-Wright’s team slashed prices and expenses, squeezed suppliers to get products into stores faster, and used smaller store formats (dubbed Bodega Aurrerá). He also showed a knack for public relations, defusing criticism by emphasizing jobs and low prices when merchants protested the construction of a Wal-Mex store near an archaeological site.

A “knack for public relations” — a.k.a.: alleged repeated violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. (A law, by the way, that Wal-Mart attempted to water down via heavy lobbying.)

From the New York Times, 2012:

In September 2005, a senior Wal-Mart lawyer received an alarming e-mail from a former executive at the company’s largest foreign subsidiary, Wal-Mart de Mexico. In the e-mail and follow-up conversations, the former executive described how Wal-Mart de Mexico had orchestrated a campaign of bribery to win market dominance. In its rush to build stores, he said, the company had paid bribes to obtain permits in virtually every corner of the country….

Wal-Mart dispatched investigators to Mexico City, and within days they unearthed evidence of widespread bribery… [But] neither American nor Mexican law enforcement officials were notified. None of Wal-Mart de Mexico’s leaders were disciplined. Indeed, its chief executive, Eduardo Castro-Wright, identified by the former executive as the driving force behind years of bribery, was promoted to vice chairman of Wal-Mart in 2008.

Not only was he promoted, but he received cushy directorships at companies like MetLife, where his responsibilities included overseeing corporate governance.

On second thought, maybe it is isn’t necessary for Bloomberg’s Andrew Frye to have the opportunity to go all apoplectic on Castro-Wright. The facts pretty much speak for themselves. In the United States, the rewards for bribing your way to success include getting paid a quarter of a million a year to advise other corporations on how to behave responsibly.

The calculation is based on data from 2007, the most recent round of the Federal Reserve Board’s Survey of Consumer Finances, which measures the net worth of Americans. (The extensive survey is performed once every three years, and the 2010 edition is expected to be released next year.)

Allegretto then compared those numbers to the net worth of the six members of the Walton clan as reported on the Forbes 400 list in 2007. They are all children or children-in-law of the founders of Walmart. Their total net worth that year: $69.7 billion.

That’s equal to the wealth of the poorest 30 percent of all Americans, according to Allegretto’s calculations.

One of those Waltons, by the way, is Alice, whose effort to create a world-class museum in Arkansas by purchasing hundreds of millions of dollars of art was recently profiled in the New Yorker. More information on the other Waltons is available at Forbes.

(Via Doug Henwood)

That’s not to say the win wasn’t at least a potentially modest victory for regular non-rich Americans. If even a few retailers make it slightly less expensive to buy necessities because the banks lost, it’s good news. But that brings us to the skirmish’s real groundbreaking revelation: The battle proves that consumers in this new Gilded Age can still win small economic concessions from their government, as long as it’s not a people-versus-a united Corporate America fight. Indeed, in our money-dominated political system, it’s only when Regular America happens to find itself in the middle of a battle dividing Corporate America — and only if our interests align with a powerful set of corporations — that we can be heard.

Bloomberg’s must-read story about the backroom wrangling over the swipe fees perfectly captures this reality. The piece begins with a standard homage to the old populist democratic ideal, quoting a Regular American cafe owner giddily declaring victory over the Wall Street behemoth. To buttress the faux David-versus-Goliath narrative, the article then quotes Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin (D) pulling an unconvincing “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” impression by insisting that he’s just pushing to end the swipe fees because they “are not fair to small business.”

Soon, though, the true story comes out: the one about how the real power behind the push to end swipe fees is not Mom and Pop at the General Store, but some of the biggest multinational retailers in the world — small-business-eating godzillas like Target, Best Buy, Wal-Mart and Home Depot — armed with some of the most powerful lobbying firms in Washington.

Bloomberg, not surprisingly, fails to mention this truism: Despite the saccharine rhetoric to the contrary, executives from huge corporation don’t altruistically deploy political and financial muscle on behalf of customers — as is their fiduciary responsibility, they deploy it in search of cold, hard profit for shareholders. But frankly, that fact doesn’t have to be explicitly stated — after a few throwaway lines about “small businesses,” the story makes clear that the swipe-fee fight was actually all about “how far the richest interest groups” are willing to “go when a single decision puts billions of dollars up for grabs.”

Ultimately, the retail giants marshal campaign contributions and harness populist rhetoric against banks to wage and win a tenacious fight that professional D.C. prognosticators said they would almost certainly lose. This war is so tenacious, in fact, that Durbin describes it as “one of the most heated debates and exchanges that many of us in the Senate have seen in our time.”

In that quote, the Illinois Democrat reveals a disturbing truth about economic policymaking. The only “heated” debates over money — that is, genuine fights rather than staged exercises designed to appease party activists — are those that pit one set of corporate-backed politicians against another. Otherwise, there’s no fight at all.

After all, many of the anti-bank populist arguments that the giant retailers used to win the swipe fee battle had previously been voiced when Congress prepared to authorize the Wall Street bailout of 2008. Even though such populism had more natural traction in the aftermath of the bank collapse than it does today, those same claims were ignored. After all, they were made merely by public interest organizations, grassroots groups and regular Americans — not by a set of multinational corporations. Just a few years later, the same anti-Wall Street discourse, now backed by millions of corporate dollars, won the day in Congress.

This dynamic defines most legislative issues. For example, the passage of “free” trade deals, which are vehemently opposed by labor unions, consumer groups environmental organizations and most Americans, tends to be slowed only when an influential set of corporations raises an objection (like when the auto industry temporarily stalled the Korea Free Trade Agreement). Likewise, while consumers have long demanded less expensive medications, it was only when large corporations trying to cut costs began advocating for generic drugs that Congress started to seriously consider challenging the pharmaceutical industry’s patents. And it is only now that the powerful natural gas industry stands to profit from a national move away from coal that we may finally see minimal legislation promoting a lower-carbon-emission policy.

The list of similar examples is endless, but the paradigm is the same. If change is possible at all right now, it is primarily possible at fleeting moments when the corporate state is divided against itself.

For the most part, that’s really depressing. But, as evidenced by the swipe fee fight, at least it leaves open the possibility that those moments still arise every once in a while, and still offer the chance for (albeit marginal) economic victories for working people. If there’s a larger organizing strategy to be gleaned from that reality — and I think there is — it is that activists should now be aggressively focused on opportunities to exploit, expand and multiply those instances to divide and conquer. Unless there’s a much larger structural shift in our politics, those moments represent some of the last small hopes for change.

One of the plaintiff’s central arguments was that Wal-Mart has a policy of leaving promotion and pay decisions to the discretion of individual managers, and that these managers have made discriminatory decisions. If the women suing Wal-Mart had prevailed, every American employer would have been on notice that it is not enough to sit on their corporate hands and allow gender discrimination to take its natural course in this way. Instead they would have had to make it their business to ensure that their managers treated women fairly. But the Court didn’t want that, as the majority feels that “allowing discretion by local supervisors” is “a very common and presumptively reasonable way of doing business.” (In his opinion for the majority Justice Scalia also announces, without citing any evidence, that most managers work carefully to avoid discrimination in their pay and promotion decisions when left to their own devices. That makes it all the more puzzling why the higher one gets in the corporate hierarchy in the U.S., the fewer women there are.)

So the Supreme Court looked to procedure. To bring a case as a class action in federal court, the plaintiffs have to get permission from the judge to proceed as a class. This makes sense: You wouldn’t want someone to be able to file a lawsuit on your behalf without an objective outsider considering whether the lawsuit was in your interest and whether the person filing it would represent you well. To protect you from becoming part of a class action that doesn’t benefit you, plaintiffs have to persuade a judge that they satisfy the requirements of what is known as Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 23 before their lawsuit can proceed as a class action.

One of Rule 23′s prerequisites is that “[o]ne or more members of a class may sue … as representative parties on behalf of all members only if there are questions of law or fact common to the class.” The Wal-Mart plaintiffs clearly alleged common questions of law or fact, including statistical evidence that Wal-Mart pays and promotes men more than women; Wal-Mart’s policy of leaving decisions regarding promotion and (within certain ranges) pay up to individual managers; evidence that Wal-Mart has a uniform corporate culture across its stores; and evidence that Wal-Mart’s culture fosters discrimination against women. These are precisely the kind of “common questions of law or fact” that courts routinely accept as satisfying the Rule 23 “commonality” prerequisite.

The Court used this previously clear “common questions of law or fact” requirement to thwart the Wal-Mart women by redefining the requirement beyond recognition. According to Justice Scalia, “common questions of law or fact” now means that plaintiffs must “demonstrate that the class members have suffered the same injury.” In no universe that I have visited do these two phrases require the same thing.

It’s not clear just how far the Court will take this bizarre new rule. Does “same injury” mean that the plaintiffs must show that every single class member was denied the exact same promotion? Or that each one was underpaid by the same amount? Scalia writes that it does mean that suffering “a violation of the same provision of law” won’t suffice as suffering the “same injury.” This is a remarkable and counterintuitive holding: After this ruling, a group cannot sue their joint employer for violating the same legal right for each one of them. Instead they have to prove that the legal violation harmed them in the same way. This is completely backward: Courts exist to redress violations of the law, regardless of whether those violations cause their victims to suffer in the same or different ways. It is thanks to this procedural backflip that Wal-Mart and other employers can now delegate their way out of being responsible for discrimination in their workplaces.

Arguably before Monday’s Dukes v. Wal-Mart decision, American employers were subject to legal liability if they delegated so much discretion to individual managers that those managers created a pattern of discriminating against women — at least, the four Justices in the minority, who dissented from the part of the decision that redefined sufficient commonality for class action suits, believe that this was the law. Now employers have every incentive to take their hands off the reins and let managers make pay and promotion decisions based on whatever criteria they choose. This is a major loss for women, minorities, senior citizens, the disabled and any other group that tends to get the short end of the stick in the workplace. The procedural manipulations required to reach this point have caused a major loss for any group of people that seeks to redress a legal violation through a class action: Now each individual will have to pay for legal representation alone and probably forgo evidence of violations against similarly situated people. Goliath has won, and it is every David for himself.

The suit alleged that the policies and culture at Wal-Mart discriminate against women (including pay and opportunities for promotion). In particular, Dukes and the women who joined her pointed to Wal-Mart’s practice of letting local managers subjectively decide on pay and promotions as almost uniformly leading to discrimination.

Nan Aaron, the president of the Alliance for Justice, pointed to a just few individual examples of discrimination raised by female Wal-Mart employees seeking the class certification (via the Huffington Post):

When a woman with a master’s degree who had worked at Wal-Mart for five years asked her department manager why she was paid less than a 17-year-old boy who had just been hired, she was informed, “You just don’t have the right equipment… You aren’t male, so you can’t expect to be paid the same.” Another female employee was informed that a male employee got a bigger raise then she did because he had “a family to support.” Another was told that men would always be paid more than women at Wal-Mart because “God made Adam first, so women would always be second to men.”

The district court approved and a federal appeals court upheld the certification of the class-action. Wal-Mart, in its appeal, argued that a class of potentially 1.5 million was simply too big. (In response, the plaintiffs noted that Wal-Mart is the largest employer in the Unites States and that any class-action brought by its employees would have to involve a very big class).

As a report from the Alliance for Justice put it:

[Wal-Mart] maintains that the large number of its stores, managers, and employees means that pay and promotion decisions turn[ed] on decisions made by individual store managers and cannot support the commonality among class members that is required for class certification.

Plaintiffs counter with a powerful narrative that shows how sex discrimination at Wal-Mart was the inevitable byproduct of a strong and centralized corporate system that originated in the company’s Home Office in Bentonville, Arkansas, and permeated each of the company’s stores in the United States.

The Supreme Court decision: The decision Monday hinged not on whether Wal-Mart enacted discriminatory policies, but on whether there were sufficient grounds to treat the women as a class. Despite the plaintiffs’ arguments, and the decisions in district court and the federal appeals court, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of Wal-Mart.

The workers “provide no convincing proof of a company-wide discriminatory pay and promotion policy,” Justice Antonin Scalia wrote for the court.

The justices unanimously agreed on disqualifying the class, but Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan all indicated that they do see a common issue among all the plaintiffs’ complaints but don’t believe the case could proceed to achieve monetary damages for the women workers. They suggested that the case return to a lower court and proceed — still as a class-action — as one that would not seek money damages.

But the court also voted 5 to 4 that the case can’t proceed as any type of class action. It is this decision that could set a precedent for class-actions against large corporations

The ramifications: For the plaintiffs in the Dukes case, the decision is huge blow. The individuals seeking damages for discrimination could now file individually, but even if individual filings were successful, they would not challenge the pervading discrimination pointed to in the Dukes case.  Ginsburg wrote in her decision: “Women fill 70% of the hourly jobs in the retailer’s stores, but make up only 33% of the management employees… The higher one looks in the organization, the lower the percentage of women.” Individual damages claims will not address this.

The ramifications for U.S. workers may be more troubling. In decertifying this class, the Supreme Court has set a difficult standard for any future large-scale class actions. The Supreme Court’s decision is another in a long line of rulings by the Roberts Court that side with corporate interests, a trend Dan Manatt noted on the HuffPo last year. And, crucially, the decision could undermine class actions as a vital means to challenge pervasive biases in big companies.