About the Big Business Blotter

The Big Business Blotter is a newsletter about corporate crime and wrongdoing.

What, you reasonably might ask, do I mean by “corporate crime”? I mean this in the most literal sense: when corporations violate federal criminal law.

And what, you might also ask, do I mean by “and wrongdoing”? This means all the other bad things corporations do, from civil violations that result in enforcement actions from federal regulatory agencies like the EPA, FTC, OSHA and SEC to terrible things might not even be illegal, but which are clearly wrong, that Big Business gets away with.

About Me

I’m Rick Claypool, a research director for Public Citizen’s President’s office. My work is focused on corporate crime and wrongdoing and the ways corporate power distorts democracy. Growing up in a steelworker family in small industrial towns on the outskirts of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, I saw firsthand how rampant corporate greed and recklessness can devastate working class communities. I currently reside in Rhode Island.

News outlets that have covered my work include the Associated Press, USA Today, McClatchy, The Wall Street Journal, Kaiser Health News, NPR, The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Bloomberg News, The Guardian, The American Prospect, Politico, The Intercept, STAT News, the Texas Tribune, the San Francisco Business Times, Vox and Vice’s Motherboard.