The U.S. Supreme Court says a corporation is a person, or at least must be treated like one when it comes to most constitutional protections.

Like the right to speak. And the right to act in the political arena — giving campaign contributions, lobbying and advocating its agenda.

Now, if a corporation is in fact a person, with full constitutional rights, then it should act like a moral human person.

And what is the fundamental basis of morality? Caring about others. So, a corporation, to act like a moral human person, is going to have to care about others, not just about its own bottom line.

It is going to have to care about its human compatriots.

But the vast majority of major corporations do not give a damn about human persons. As such, they are immoral to the core. Or, maybe even worse, they are amoral.

We say, if you are not a human person, and you cannot act like a moral human person, then you should be stripped of your constitutional protections.

No right to speak, no Fifth Amendment rights, no right to participate in the political arena. You just produce your products, and go home.

It also makes sense to revisit the legal protections that facilitate corporate im- or a-morality, particularly the corporation’s defining characteristic — limited liability for shareholders.

Shareholders, the owners of a corporation, invest a certain amount of money in a company. Under the rules of limited liability, no matter how much harm the company does, or how much it owes creditors, shareholders cannot be required to pay more than the amount they already put in.

Lawrence Mitchell, a professor of law at George Washington University, believes that limited liability for shareholders leads shareholders — and therefore corporations — not to care. If your liability is limited, you will not care as much as if your liability is full.

“We call stockholders owners,” Mitchell says. “You can hardly be considered an owner if you don’t care, if you don’t act like it’s your property. Limited liability encourages stockholders not to care.”

Mitchell, who has written a book, Corporate Irresponsibility: America’s Newest Export, says that in the absence of limited liability, the corporation can always buy insurance.

“Insurance internalizes the cost of the risk,” Mitchell said. “The corporation has to pay based on the insurance company’s assessment of the risk, rather than some creditor getting stuck holding the bag if the corporation fails.”

So, yes, Mitchell would strip corporations of their limited liability protection. Let the chips fall where they may.

Admittedly, these ideas do not appear likely to be implemented soon. But there may be interim concepts to get us closer.

To determine whether a corporation is acting morally, we propose that Congress legislate a Corporate Character Commission (CCC). This would be a 10-person panel, with members chosen from the human person community. Ideal candidates would be ethicists, philosophers, corporate criminologists and the like.

The CCC would check on the criminal records, recidivism rates, acts of immorality and other wrongdoing of the largest corporations.

If the CCC were up and running now, we would propose that it take a close look at the Ten Worst Corporations of 2001. Clearly they do not care. They are not moral entities. They should be stripped of their constitutional protections. Their shareholders should be made fully liable.

There is a precedent for this kind of review at the federal level. The Federal Communications Commission reviews the character of applicants for federal broadcast licenses. The FCC does not do a very good job of it, obviously –– GE routinely gets renewed despite its recidivist record.

But just because the FCC cannot do it right, does not mean the CCC could not do it right. Let’s give it a try.

ABBOTT:
Shamefully Ripping Off the Government
Earlier this year, TAP Pharmaceutical Products Inc., a major U.S. pharmaceutical manufacturer, was forced to pay $875 million to resolve criminal charges and civil liabilities in connection with its fraudulent drug pricing and marketing conduct with regard to Lupron, a drug sold by TAP primarily for treatment of advanced prostate cancer in men.

TAP is a joint venture started by Abbott Laboratories and Takeda Pharmaceuticals of Japan to market two particular drugs, one of which is Lupron. Lupron is designed for the control of prostate cancer. TAP is headquartered in the Chicago area.

The wrongdoing was brought to the attention of federal prosecutors by Douglas Durand, the former vice president of sales of TAP Pharmaceutical.

Under the federal False Claims Act, whistleblowers who file qui tam lawsuits against companies defrauding the government are entitled to 15 to 25 percent of whatever funds the government recovers in cases where the government joins the lawsuit.

Durand filed a False Claims Act lawsuit in May 1996. The government intervened, and earlier this year, Durand was awarded $77 million as his part in the recovery of the lawsuit.

Durand provided the government with information about free samples and the implicit encouragement to bill Medicare for free samples, about the company marketing the spread between Medicare reimbursement and the amount the doctors had to pay TAP for the product, about unrestricted educational grants and about extraordinarily lavish entertainment and trips that were given to doctors who were willing to prescribe Lupron in significant quantities.

He provided information on 2 percent management fees which were given to high-volume urology practices.

Another whistleblower added some spice to Durand’s case. Dr. Joseph Gerstein is a urologist at the Tufts Associated Health Maintenance Organization in Boston.

Gerstein alleged that he was offered a substantial “unrestricted educational grant” if he would change Tufts’ decision, which had been to provide patients with the cheaper alternative to TAP’s product, back to Lupron.

TAP made it fairly clear to Dr. Gerstein that he need not account for the $25,000 unrestricted educational grant, that there were few if any restrictions on how he used the money. But it was clearly tied to the decision by Tufts to go back to using Lupron as the treatment of choice for prostate cancer.

For a company compelled to enter into such a massive settlement, TAP was surprisingly belligerent. “We fundamentally disagree with many of the government’s allegations, but we resolved this matter to make clear our commitment to proper and ethical business practices, and to avoid protracted legal battles and ensure uninterrupted availability of Lupron for many thousands of patients who rely on it,” said TAP President Thomas Watkins in announcing the company’s plea. Watkins did admit that TAP provided free samples of Lupron to doctors with the knowledge that those physicians would seek and receive reimbursement for sales of the product. But he said that “we fundamentally disagree with government claims regarding TAP’s pricing and reimbursement policies. We believe we consistently complied with pricing laws and regulations.”

The TAP fiasco was only the tip of the proverbial iceberg for Abbott.

As the TAP case was being resolved in Boston, the Chicago Tribune reported that federal prosecutors were investigating whether a division of Abbott Laboratories and at least three other companies worked with medical-care providers to bilk government health insurance programs for the poor and elderly.

According to the report, at issue is whether the medical product manufacturers engaged in a kickback scheme to encourage hospitals, nursing homes or home-care providers to buy pumps and related supplies used to feed seriously ill people by giving the products away or selling them at a discount.

Some providers then allegedly billed the products at a higher price to either Medicare, the federal health insurance program for the elderly, or Medicaid, the federal-state health insurer for the poor.

Abbott wouldn’t elaborate on what investigators from the U.S. attorney’s office for the Southern District of Illinois are looking at, but said the North Chicago-based company isn’t the only target of the prosecutors’ probe, the Chicago Tribune reported.

“We are aware of the investigation, and the investigation is inclusive of the whole industry, which includes manufacturers, distributors and providers,” said Mary Beth Arensberg, a spokeswoman for Abbott’s Ross Products division, which makes the equipment.

And when they weren’t seeking to take what wasn’t theirs, Abbott was allegedly engaging in market practices that addicted patients to the powerful painkiller OxyContin, a prescription medication given to cancer patients and those suffering from chronic, moderate to severe pain.

Earlier this year, in an effort to stop the overly aggressive and deceptive marketing of OxyContin, West Virginia Attorney General Darrell V. McGraw, sued Abbott and Purdue Pharma, the manufacturers and chief promoters of the drug.

With oxycodone — a member of the same family of drugs as opium and heroin — as one of its main ingredients, OxyContin is also one of the most commonly abused prescription medications in the Appalachian region.

McGraw alleged that, though they knew the dangers posed by misuse of OxyContin, the defendants willingly marketed the product in a coercive and deceptive manner in hopes of achieving a greater margin of profit and eventually an illegal monopoly on the narcotic pain medication market.

ARGENBRIGHT:
Sometimes Corporate Crime Doesn’t Pay
Sometimes, at least, it turns out that corporate crime and law-breaking doesn’t pay.

Ask Argenbright, a leader in the privatized airport security business in the United States. Argenbright controls roughly 40 percent of the market. Its employees screen passengers and carry-on bags for the airlines, which have been delegated these responsibilities by the federal government.

Not for long.

In November, the U.S. Congress agreed on legislation that will federalize airport security operations. The workers doing security checks at airports will become federal employees, with higher wages and greater professional requirements. Working conditions should improve, and the extremely high worker turnover rate should plunge. And Argenbright should fade from the picture.

The move against the trend of privatization and contracting out of government-provided services was obviously spurred by the September 11 terrorist attacks. But it was Argenbright’s extraordinarily poor performance record that confronted Congress with an empirical reality that overcame ideological resistance to an expansion of government power and closure of a private market.

Owned by the British firm Securicor, Argenbright in May 2000 pled guilty to two counts of making false statements to federal regulators and paid $1.55 million in fines in connection with charges that it failed on a massive scale to do background checks on security screeners employed at Philadelphia International Airport, failed to provide them with required training, and then lied to federal authorities about it.

The government’s sentencing memorandum in the case summarizes the charges. “During the period January 1, 1995 through December 31, 1998 the Philadelphia district office of Argenbright Security, Inc. [ASI] hired more than 1,300 untrained pre-departure screeners to work at the security checkpoints at Philadelphia International Airport over a period of more than four years. Through its employees in Philadelphia, ASI caused dozens of criminals to be hired by not checking their backgrounds, but falsely certifying that the checks had been done. ASI’s district manager Steven Saffer encouraged and permitted test scores to be falsified and phony GEDs to be created.”

Federal prosecutors acknowledged going easy on Argenbright. Rather than piling on the charges, they put their faith in a compliance program and a three-year probationary period.

Those hopes turned out to be misplaced.

In October 2001, Argenbright agreed to a new plea agreement.

Government papers filed with the U.S. District Court for Eastern Pennsylvania in advance of the plea contained this amazing list of allegations: “The government’s investigation and review of Argenbright’s post-sentencing operation and compliance efforts demonstrates that Argenbright, in violation of its probation and the court-ordered compliance and audit plan: (1) has continued to hire pre-departure screeners at Philadelphia International Airport after the date of sentencing who have disqualifying criminal convictions; (2) has retained and continued to employ pre-departure screeners with criminal records after the date of sentencing even though it certified to the Court that it had re-checked and re-verified every employee’s background before the date of sentencing; (3) has made new false statements to the FAA [Federal Aviation Administration] regarding employee background verifications of a significant percentage (25%) of its Philadelphia employees whose files have been reviewed by agents of the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Office of Inspector General; (4) has engaged in many new FAA regulatory violations in Philadelphia (32% of files randomly reviewed by FAA evidence new violations and false statements); (5) has failed to conduct audits in accordance with the audit program that required Argenbright to obtain independent verifications from third party sources that employee backgrounds were properly verified in accordance with FAA regulations; (6) failed to convene a meeting of its compliance management committee until nine months after the date of sentencing; and (7) has engaged in many new FAA regulatory violations at the following 13 airports throughout the United States: Washington, D.C. (Dulles International and Reagan National), Boston (Logan International), New York (Laguardia), Los Angeles, Trenton, Phoenix, Las Vegas, Columbus, Dallas-Ft. Worth, Seattle and Cedar Rapids.”

The October 2001 plea extended Argenbright’s probationary period from three to five years, and required the company to do new background checks, including fingerprinting, of its employees.

Hopefully, Argenbright will never have a chance to fill out its probationary period. Its desperate and aggressive lobby campaign to keep the screening jobs in the private sector failed. There are small loopholes in the federal aviation security bill that could again give the company a foothold in the industry, but the company’s future prospects in the U.S. airline screening business are now very, very bleak.

BAYER:
It’s Been a Bad Year
How’s this for a scam?

Secure a government monopoly to sell your product. When a competitor challenges the monopoly grant, alleging it transgresses the rules by which the government awards monopolies, pay the competitor off. Then use your monopoly power to price gouge consumers. When a public emergency suddenly compels the government to purchase a huge supply of your product, use your government-granted monopoly to overcharge the government — and reap the tremendous publicity value surrounding emergency use of the product. When the public complains, drop the price, and bask in the positive publicity — even as you continue to reap windfall profits.

That pretty much sums up the Bayer/Cipro story.

According to the Prescription Access Litigation (PAL) project, a coalition of more than 60 organizations in 29 states, an agreement between Bayer, Barr Laboratories and two other generic drug companies is blocking access to adequate supplies and cheaper, generic versions of Cipro, one of the leading antibiotics used to treat anthrax. PAL has sued to undo the agreement. PAL charges that Bayer has unlawfully paid three of its competitors — Barr Laboratories, Rugby, and Hoechst-Marion Roussel — a total of $200 million to date to abandon efforts to bring cheaper generic versions of Cipro to the market.

Bayer denies that its patent is invalid. At the time it settled the generic manufacturer Barr’s challenge to its patent, according to Bayer, “Bayer was convinced of the validity of the Cipro patent, but — like any other party involved in complex litigation — could not completely rule out all uncertainties of litigation.”

The anthrax outbreak created a public relations bonanza for the company.

Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) Tommy Thompson announced that he wanted to stockpile a supply for 10 million people. When Senator Charles Schumer, D-New York, and consumer groups called for the government to purchase generic versions of Cipro, and when it became known that Indian companies could produce the drug for less than a twentieth of Bayer’s drugstore price and less than a ninth of its price to the government, Thompson and Bayer entered into furious negotiations. They agreed on a price of 95 cents a tablet.

Dr. Wolfgang Plischke, President of Bayer Corporation’s Pharmaceutical N.A. Division, said, “We are grateful that our researchers developed a product that is crucial in this hour of need. The people of Bayer are very motivated and dedicated to playing an important role in assuring that the American people have adequate quantities of Cipro, which we pray are never needed.”

The Washington Post reported soon after that HHS pays Bayer 45 cents per Cipro pill for purchases under a separate government program (still more than twice the Indian generic price).

While Cipro made news like no drug since Viagra, it wasn’t Bayer’s only controversy of 2001.

With mounting concern that widespread misuse of antibiotics is contributing to rapidly rising antibiotic-resistant bacteria, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration last year proposed a ban on use of a class of drugs, fluoroquinolones, for poultry. This proposal followed a Centers for Disease Control finding that its use in poultry was making human versions of the drugs — used to treat severe food poisoning due to salmonella, among other purposes — less effective.

Abbott Labs, one of two U.S. poultry fluoroquinolone producers in the United States, subsequently voluntarily withdrew its product.

But Bayer has refused, instead asking for hearings that could delay a ban for years.

“By the time the hearing process is complete, the ban may be a moot point,” says Karen Florini, senior attorney with Environmental Defense. “As rapidly as resistance to fluoroquinolones is growing, the drug may be ineffective in humans by the time the FDA is able to issue a final ban on the use of these drugs in poultry.”

Bayer has responded to pressure on the issue by establishing an initiative called Libra to address overuse of antibiotics in humans. But it is refusing to concede on the animal use dispute.

In August, the company was hit with yet another controversy, as it was forced to withdraw Baycol, a leading cholesterol-reducing drug, from the market. Especially in combination with another cholesterol-reducing drug, gemfibrozil (Lopid), Baycol leads to a high rate of rhabdomyolysis, a severe muscle-weakening disease that can be fatal. Dozens of reported deaths have been linked to Baycol.

Upon withdrawing Baycol, Bayer said it would have to review its long-term commitment to remaining in the pharmaceutical business. It also is a world leader in agrichemicals (and its proposed purchase of Aventis Cropscience is now drawing U.S. and European Union antitrust scrutiny), chemicals and polymers.

Perhaps understandably, a company as bruised as Bayer is sensitive to criticism. But Bayer’s response has been to inappropriately and aggressively seek to stifle effective criticism. It brought suit against the German watchdog group, Coalition against Bayer Dangers, for maintaining a BayerWatch.com website. Although the group should have been able to successfully defend against Bayer’s trademark claim, it did not have enough money to litigate the issue.

It is going to take a lot more than legal intimidation tactics to rescue this company’s reputation, however.

Coca-Cola:
The Real Thing: Coke the Evil Doer
Coke. Where do we begin?

Let’s start with Harry Potter.

Earlier this year, Coca-Cola reportedly paid Warner Brothers (a unit of AOL Time Warner) $150 million for the exclusive global marketing rights to the first Harry Potter movie and possibly the sequels. “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone” opened worldwide in November.

Coca-Cola is aggressively marketing to children by featuring Harry Potter imagery on packages and in advertising for its carbonated (Coca-Cola, Minute Maid, and other brands) and noncarbonated (Hi-C, Minute Maid) soft drinks.

Coke’s Potter promotion, called “Live The Magic,” also uses contests, games and a web site to entice kids to drink more soft drinks.

“Children and adults worldwide are outraged that their beloved Harry Potter is being used to market ‘liquid candy’ to kids,” says Michael F. Jacobson, executive director of the Center for Science in the Public Interest. “Over-consumption of Coca-Cola and other sugar-laden soft drinks contributes to obesity and diabetes, reduced nutrient intake and tooth decay.”

The movie won’t include product placements and Coca-Cola says that its marketing program includes a literacy campaign. But, “the bottom line is that an adored literary phenomenon is being put to work to sell more junk food,” says SaveHarry.com organizer Jacobson.

“It is outrageous that Coca-Cola is using the magic of Harry Potter to lure kids to drink more soda pop. Consumption of soft drinks has soared over the past two decades, contributing to the doubling in the percentage of obese teenagers,” says Dr. Patience White, professor of medicine and pediatrics at George Washington University Medical Center. “That obesity epidemic is fueling a diabetes epidemic.”

According to U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) surveys, 20 years ago teenagers drank almost twice as much milk as soda pop. Today they drink twice as much soda pop as milk.

A recent study done at the Harvard School of Public Health found that increased soft-drink consumption was associated with increased obesity in sixth- and seventh-grade students.

How about race discrimination?

Late last year, Coke agreed to pay $192.5 million to resolve a federal lawsuit filed in April 1999 by African-American employees of the Coca-Cola Company.

The settlement requires Coca-Cola to pay the class $58.7 million in compensatory damages, $24.1 million in back pay, $10 million for promotional bonuses and $43.5 in pay equity adjustments, as well as make sweeping programmatic reforms costing another $36 million.

It also grants broad monitoring powers to a panel of outside experts jointly appointed by Coke and the plaintiffs’ lawyers — an extraordinary accomplishment.

Complicity with death squads?

Earlier this year, in Miami, the United Steel Workers Union and the International Labor Rights Fund filed a lawsuit against Coke and Panamerican Beverages, Inc., the primary bottler of Coke products in Latin America and owners of a bottling plant in Colombia where trade union leaders have been murdered.

The case was initiated by Sinaltrainal, the trade union that represents workers at the Coke facilities in Colombia. Sinaltrainal has long maintained that Coke maintains open relations with murderous death squads as part of a program to intimidate trade union leaders.

Union officials said that Colombia holds the “terrible distinction of being ranked number one in the world for the number of trade union leaders murdered each year, and that Coke plays a key role in maintaining that distinction.”

Other plaintiffs include the estate of Isidro Segundo Gil, a trade union leader who was murdered while working at the Coke bottling plant in Carepa, Colombia. The plaintiffs charge that the manager of that facility, owned by an American, Richard Kirby, who is also a defendant in this case, specifically threatened to kill the leaders of the union if they continued their union activities.

The other plaintiffs are Luis Eduardo Garcia, Alvaro Gonzalez, Jose Domingo Flores, Jorge Humberto Leal and Juan Carlos Galvis. All are leaders of Sinaltrainal. All, while employed by Coke, were subjected to torture, kidnapping, and/or unlawful detention in order to encourage them to cease their trade union activities.

The lawsuit alleges that Coke employees either ordered the violence directly, or delegated the job to paramilitary death squads that were acting as agents for Coke.

“This case is extremely important for trade union and human rights,” says Daniel Kovalik, assistant general counsel of the Steelworkers and co-counsel for the plaintiffs. “If we cannot get Coke, one of the most well known companies in the world, to protect the lives and human rights of the workers at its world-wide bottling facilities, then we certainly have a long way to go in making the global economy safe for trade unionists.”

“There is no question that Coke knew about and benefited from the systematic repression of trade union rights at its bottling plants in Colombia, and this case will make the company accountable,” says Terry Collingsworth, who is co-counsel on the case and general counsel of the Washington, D.C.-based International Labor Rights Fund.

A spokesperson for Coke at its headquarters in Atlanta referred Multinational Monitor to the company’s spokesperson in Colombia.

“We vigorously deny any wrongdoing regarding human rights violations in Colombia and are deeply concerned by these allegations against our company,” says Pablo Largacha, spokesperson for Coca-Cola de Colombia. “We have been and continue to be assured by our bottlers that behavior such as that depicted in the claim has in no way been instigated, carried out or condoned by these bottling companies.”

ENRON:
Executive Rip-Off
So your company’s stock goes from $90 to less than a $1 over the course of a year, and then your company plunges into bankruptcy.

And all of your fans desert you.

Even your old buddy, President Bush, won't acknowledge your problems. No bailout for your company, buddy.

On the other hand, things aren’t so bad, at least not for you. You did pull off one of the historic scams in major corporate history: your company has acknowledged overstating its earnings over the years, huge sums were spent on shady insider deals, and your puffing of company stock at one time had your company ranked among the 10 largest in the United States. And now that it has all crumbled, your lawyers are looking to protect you, so you do not have to pay one cent.

You got your multi-million dollar bonus. You are rich. If your workers lost their life savings, that’s no skin off your back.

You are an executive of the now-bankrupt Enron. Sitting pretty, looking for another gig on Wall Street.

Yes, the lawyers for the workers want to freeze your assets, alleging you made them on illegal insider deals.

They say that you reaped your huge profits during the past three years through a scheme that artificially inflated the price of Enron’s stock. They say you falsified the company's financial condition. But that’s what they always say.

One of the lawyers seeking to seize your assets called your company “a grotesque fraud — a financial monstrosity of manipulation and falsification.”

Amalgamated Bank, the trustee of equity and bond funds that invest the retirement savings of union employees, suffered losses of $10.3 million, part of a $20 billion loss for public investors.

The lawyer for the bank said that Enron cheated millions of investors out of billions of dollars. Countless lives and retirements have been destroyed.

“While lining their own pockets and setting themselves up financially for life, Enron insiders misled many investors who represent working men and women,” said an Amalgamated vice president. “It’s our intention to retrieve the ill-gotten gains of the Enron insiders and return it to the people who were ripped off.”

No one got hit harder than Enron employees. Enron used stock rather than cash to match employee contributions to their 401(k) retirement fund. And many of the employees, believing the company’s hype about its prospects, chose to put even more of their money into company stock. Sixty-two percent of the assets in the 401(k) were invested in Enron stock. Then, in October, following the company’s announcement that it was taking more than a billion dollars in charges to offset bad investments connected to insider deals — at the exact moment that Enron began to unravel –– the company “locked down” the pension plan so that employees could not sell off their Enron stock. The lockdown supposedly occurred because Enron was changing plan administrators. Trading at $33.84 when the lockdown went into effect, the stocks were worth less than $10 a share a month later, when employees were again permitted to sell the stock. In the process, many lost their life savings.

Enron says it does not comment on pending litigation.

Meanwhile, Enron board chairman Kenneth Lay, reported cashing in more than $200 million worth of stock options in the last several years — before share values started dropping like a stone. Lou Pai, chairman of Enron unit Enron Accelerator, sold stock in excess of $353 million.

Even Wendy Gramm, the wife of former U.S. Senator Phil Gramm, is reported to have sold $297,912 in stocks. She served, believe it or not, on Enron’s audit committee.

What were they doing at audit committee meetings, drinking coffee and eating donuts?

Anyway, these lawyers alleged that you guys set up limited partnerships that were used as strawmen for keeping debt off Enron’s books.

And your buddies at Arthur Andersen, who oversaw the bookkeeping procedures, are under the spotlight. Representative John Dingell, D-Michigan, and the lawyers want to know — what did Arthur Anderson know and when did they know it?

“How am I going to retire now?” Gary Kemper, 57, of Banks, Oregon, a maintenance foreman with an Enron affiliate, asked USA Today. “Everything I’ve worked for for the past 25 years has been wiped out. Meanwhile, the executives got out while the getting was good.”

ExxonMobil:
King of Global Warming Denial
You know a company is behaving badly when it starts getting cuffed around by the public relations industry.
That’s why it was so notable in May when O’Dwyer’s, the leading rag of the PR industry, criticized “ExxonMobil’s stubborn refusal to acknowledge the fact that burning fossil fuels has a role in global warming.”

Climate change, now accepted by scientific consensus as fact and acknowledged by virtually all reputable scientists to be underway, poses enormous environmental, human health and economic threats in coming decades. Among other consequences: rising tides due to polar icecap melting are expected to submerge entire island nations and vast swaths of coastal lands; changing temperatures are expected to contribute to the spread of deadly tropical diseases; extreme weather events are expected to become much more frequent; and countless species are facing endangerment due to rapid shifts in local weather patterns. Emissions of carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels such as oil are a leading contributor to the problem of climate change.

ExxonMobil, the gargantuan of the oil industry, is the world’s leading obstacle to remotely sensible approaches to address global warming.

It was the largest oil company contributor to George W. Bush’s presidential campaign/Republican Party — and has seen its investment pay off in the Bush administration’s resolute failure to sign the Kyoto Protocol, a global treaty committing countries to binding (though inadequate) reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, or to take any serious steps to combat climate change.

The company continues to fund public relations and lobby campaigns denying the reality and dangers of global warming. It continues to tout the greenhouse denialists — the handful of industry-backed scientists who have gained notoriety by their dissent from the consensus statements of more than 1,800 leading climate scientists on the risks of global warming.

ExxonMobil is discernibly worse on the global warming issue than other oil companies. BP/Amoco and Shell have been the most concessionary in the industry, acknowledging the seriousness of the issue, ending their hard-line resistance to Kyoto and other measures to address climate change, and beginning to invest in renewable energy technologies. The other leading company, ChevronTexaco, is more recalcitrant, but can’t match ExxonMobil.

Here’s the current ExxonMobil line, delivered by company CEO Lee Raymond.

Part One: We believe there could conceivably be a global warming problem: “We agree that the potential for climate change caused by increases in carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases may pose a legitimate long-term risk.”

Part Two: But we don’t know enough yet to take action: “However, we do not now have a sufficient scientific understanding of climate change to make reasonable predictions and/or justify drastic measures. Some reports in the media link climate change to extreme weather and harm to human health. Yet experts [he goes on to cite James Hansen, one of the handful of greenhouse denialists] see no such pattern. ... Although the science of climate change is uncertain, there’s no doubt about the considerable economic harm to society that would result from reducing fuel availability to consumers by adopting the Kyoto Protocol or other mandatory measures that would significantly increase the cost of energy.”

Part Three: So we should study more and rely on voluntary action. “This does not mean we favor doing nothing. We have redoubled our efforts in energy conservation at our own operations around the world” and are investing in fuel cells.

Meanwhile, while obstructing appropriate action on global warming, ExxonMobil continues with its plunder around the world. What is consistent is its reckless behavior and efforts to evade the consequences of its actions.

• An Australian jury in June convicted the company’s Esso Australia unit of 11 charges linked to a 1998 explosion at a gas processing plant which killed two people.
• ExxonMobil is the lead contractor in the World Bank-backed Chad-Cameroon pipeline, which threatens to replicate the devastating experience of Shell’s operations in the Niger Delta, where money flowed to a corrupt, brutal and repressive national government while local communities saw their livelihoods destroyed by pollution.
• ExxonMobil has continued to fight against the $5 billion punitive damage verdict in the Valdez case. In November, a federal appellate court ruled that the $5 billion award was too high. The appellate court agreed that Exxon’s conduct in the Valdez case was reckless, but held that precedent compelled it to reduce the punitive verdict, which was approximately 17 times the compensatory damages awarded to commercial fishers in the case.
• It has continued to push for opening of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling, which would threaten the ecology of the largest designated wilderness area in the U.S. National Wildlife Refuge System.
• The company is culpable for some of the mass atrocities committed by the Indonesian military in Aceh Province, in North Sumatra, a June lawsuit filed by the Washington, D.C.-based International Labor Rights Fund alleges. The suit charges that Mobil Oil contracted with the Indonesian military to provide security for its Arun natural gas project, and controlled and directed the units assigned to it. ExxonMobil responded in a statement saying it “condemns the violation of human rights in any form and categorically denies these allegations. We believe a lawsuit recently filed by the International Labor Rights Fund (ILRF) containing these allegations is without merit and designed to bring publicity to their organization.”
• A New Orleans jury in May ordered ExxonMobil to pay a Louisiana judge and his family $1 billion for contaminating their land with radioactivity. Exxon had leased the land, and an Exxon contractor used the land to clean radioactive Exxon pipes. The contractor allegedly did not know the pipes contained radioactive material. Exxon says remediation costs for the land are minimal, and is appealing the verdict. The punitive award “was clearly not justified by the evidence,” Exxon’s lawyer Gregory Weiss told the National Law Journal. “The only thing that I can conclude is that they hit Exxon because it’s Big Oil.”

Philip Morris:
Still the Same. Still Killing.
We’ve changed. That’s the line from Philip Morris.

And evidence abounds.

The company is changing the name of its parent operation from Philip Morris to Altria.

The tobacco giant says it is spending $100 million in the United States to reduce youth smoking.

Go to the company’s web site and read this: “We agree with the overwhelming medical and scientific consensus that cigarette smoking causes lung cancer, heart disease, emphysema and other serious diseases in smokers. Smokers are far more likely to develop serious diseases, like lung cancer, than non-smokers. There is no ‘safe’ cigarette. … We agree with the overwhelming medical and scientific consensus that cigarette smoking is addictive.”

Ask company representatives about the efforts to negotiate an international treaty on tobacco control, the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC). Here’s what David Greenberg, senior vice president for corporate affairs of Philip Morris International told us: “It is time for regulation,” he said. Around the world, he said, the company is ready to embrace regulation whether by international institutions and/or at the national level. “We’d like to see a convention have as broad a reach” as possible, Greenberg said, “so we know what the rules are.”

The only problem: It is all a sham. Public health experts agree the company’s youth smoking prevention advertisements and programs are either worthless or harmful, because they portray smoking as an adult activity and thus make it more desirable to kids.

Despite the company’s new acknowledgement that the product it hawks is deadly and addictive, it continues to pioneer new ways of marketing cigarettes.

• Early this year, the company continued its longstanding seduction of women to the smoking habit with a Virginia Slims “See Yourself as a King” campaign. Women’s health and tobacco control groups rushed to denounce the new marketing effort.

“Philip Morris, the world’s largest tobacco company, insults and degrades women with its new magazine ad for Virginia Slims cigarettes,” says a statement issued by more than a dozen organizations including the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, the American Medical Women’s Association, the American Lung Association and the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids. “By once again suggesting that women are empowered by smoking, Philip Morris shows contempt for women’s health issues.”

“The Virginia Slims ads,” the statement rightfully concluded, “are the most recent evidence that Philip Morris’ attempts to portray itself as a socially responsible company are a sham.”

• Philip Morris and the rest of the industry continue to bombard kids in the United States with cigarette ads. A New England Journal of Medicine study found that, in 2000, magazine advertisements for youth brands of cigarettes (defined as cigarettes smoked by more than 5 percent of eighth, tenth and twelfth graders) reached more than 80 percent of young people in the United States an average of 17 times each.

• This holiday season, Philip Morris is selling a new cigarette, called M, with the slogan, “A Special Blend for a Special Season.” Comments Matthew Myers, president of the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, “Perhaps Philip Morris should change its slogan to ‘M is for murder.’ After all, they’re selling the usual blend of addiction, disease and death.”

At the negotiations of the Framework Convention for Tobacco Control, Philip Morris is working hand-in-glove with the Bush administration to obstruct a strong, enforceable treaty. In a November letter to the White House, Representative Henry Waxman, D-California, wrote that “my staff has identified 11 specific instances where Philip Morris recommended deleting provisions of the draft text. In 10 of the 11 instances, your negotiators proposed or prepared amendments advocating exactly what Philip Morris urged.”

These amendments included proposals to: lessen tobacco taxes; permit tobacco companies to use terms like “light” and “low-tar” that public health experts say are misleading; preserve duty-free sales of cigarettes; and impede the World Health Organization from developing standards for testing, measuring, designing, manufacturing and processing tobacco products.

More revealing than Philip Morris’s “we’ve changed” public relations line was a company-commissioned study from the Arthur D. Little consulting firm. Prepared in November 2000 and made public in the Wall Street Journal in July, the study argued that smoking saved the Czech Republic government money by contributing to the “early mortality of smokers.” When smokers die, society saves costs on healthcare, housing and pensions for the elderly, the report ghoulishly argued.

(But even this conclusion was deceptive, points out Clive Bates of Action on Smoking and Health (ASH) UK — the acknowledged costs of smoking in the study (including health care costs and lost income to society from early mortality) are about 13 times higher than the purported savings.)

The real difference between the new and old Philip Morris? Where the company would once have belligerently defended the study, the new company — once caught — is sophisticated enough to be contrite.

“The funding and public release of this study which, among other things, detailed purported cost savings to the Czech Republic due to premature deaths of smokers, exhibited terrible judgment as well as a complete and unacceptable disregard of basic human values,” the company said in an apologetic statement. “We will continue our efforts to do the right thing in all our businesses, acknowledging mistakes when we make them and learning from them as we go forward.”

Empty words from the global leader in an industry whose products are taking 4.2 million lives this year alone.

SARA LEE:
21 Dead, $200,000 Fine
Perhaps no prosecution in the history of corporate criminality can compare in its duplicity to the prosecution in the Ball Park franks fiasco.

Bil Mar Foods is a unit of the Chicago-based giant Sara Lee Corporation, the maker of pound cakes, cheesecakes, pies, muffins, L’Eggs, Hanes, Playtex and Wonderbra products — your typical food and underwear conglomerate.

Bil Mar makes hot dogs — Ball Park Franks hot dogs.

In July, Sara Lee pled guilty to two misdemeanor counts in connection with a listeriosis outbreak that led to the deaths of at least 21 consumers who ate Ball Park Franks hot dogs and other meat products. One hundred people were seriously injured. The company paid a $200,000 fine.

According to Kenneth Moll, a Chicago attorney representing the families of the victims, this is what happened:

Bil Mar has a hot dog facility in Zeeland, Michigan. The company shut down the facility over the July 4th weekend of 1998 to replace a refrigeration unit that was above the hot dog processing facility. The hot dogs are heated at one end and sent down a conveyer belt to the other. Moll’s theory is that the removal of the air conditioning unit and its replacement dislodged some dangerous bacteria in the ceiling. When the plant reopened, steam from the passing hot dogs went up to the ceiling, condensed and dripped back down with the dangerous bacteria onto the hot dogs.

In November 1998, Paul Mead from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) in Atlanta started receiving calls from the state health departments around the country that had isolated strains of a deadly bacteria, Listeria monocytogenes.

Mead looked at the bacteria and found that they were the same strain. He sent out questionnaires and discovered there was an open package of hot dogs in the home of one of the people who died. The CDC tested the hot dogs and isolated the same bacterial strain — a DNA fingerprint of the type of bacteria.

According to Moll, Mead went to the Bil Mar plant in Zeeland, Michigan, tested unopened packages of hot dogs and was able to isolate the same DNA fingerprint bacteria. In December 1998, Sara Lee ordered a recall of millions of pounds of hot dogs and deli meats.

According to a series of reports in the Detroit Free Press, plant workers were regularly testing work surfaces for the presence of cold-loving bacteria — a class of bacteria that includes the deadly Listeria monocytogenes as well as some harmless bacteria.

According to the Free Press, beginning in July 1998, after the replacement of the old refrigeration unit, workers recorded a sharp increase in the presence of cold-loving bacteria. The number of positive samples remained high until the company stopped performing tests in November 1998 — a month before the Sara Lee recall.

“Sara Lee was doing testing of the environment in the plant for cold-loving bacteria,” says Caroline Smith DeWaal of the Center for Science in the Public Interest. “Then their tests started coming up positive, so they stopped testing. They knew they had a problem with bacteria in the plant. But instead of solving it, they chose to ignore it.”

This is crucial, because if the company knew that it had a Listeria monocytogenes problem and ignored it, it could be hit with a felony conviction. And felony convictions have all kinds of collateral consequences, including possible loss of federal contracts — Sara Lee had a big hot dog contract with the Department of Defense.

In an interview, U.S. Attorney Phillip Green said there was insufficient evidence to bring a felony charge.

“There was simply no evidence that Sara Lee Bil Mar knew that the food product that they were producing and shipping out was adulterated with Listeria monocytogenes,” Green says.

When asked about the allegations raised by the Free Press that the company was testing for cold-loving bacteria, Green told us, “the testing that you are referring to is known as Low Temperature Pathogens testing — that is a very general test that does not necessarily indicate the presence of Listeria monocytogenes.”

“The USDA regulations don’t require a plant to conduct testing on finished products for the presence of deadly pathogens such as Listeria monocytogenes,” Green said. “And Bil Mar was following accepted industry practices in conducting general testing for the low temperature pathogens.”

But Green refused to answer specific questions about evidence concerning a possible felony violation.

Moll — the attorney representing the victims — says that the evidence “does necessarily indicate the presence of Listeria monocytogenes.” The CDC’s Mead found studies showing that, had Sara Lee done further testing for the deadly strain of listeria, almost half of the cold-loving bacteria could have tested positive for Listeria monocytogenes.

But U.S. Attorney Green never read Mead’s report. He never called on Mead, perhaps the crucial expert in this case, to testify before the grand jury.

In fact, it is apparent that federal prosecutors were overpowered by Sara Lee’s outside lawyers in this case — the Chicago firm of Jenner & Block, led by former Chicago U.S. Attorney Anton Valukas.

Valukas refused, on advice of his client, to comment.

But the extraordinary degree of the collaboration between Sara Lee and the federal prosecutors in this case can be seen on Sara Lee’s web site where it has posted a “joint press release.”

No, that’s not a typo. The U.S. Attorney and Sara Lee issued a joint press release announcing the plea agreement in which no mention is made of Ball Park Franks hot dogs.

The issuance of a joint press release is an extraordinary event. U.S. Attorney Green can’t name another case where the prosecutor and convict issued a joint press release announcing their plea agreement. Neither can the current chief of the Criminal Division at the Department of Justice, Michael Chertoff. He calls it “unusual.”

In a number of ways, the Sara Lee prosecution brings home the double standards in the criminal justice system.

A company pleads guilty to a crime that leads to the death of 21 human beings. The company pleads to two misdemeanors. The company is fined $200,000. Think about that.

SOUTHERN:
Dirty Money and Dirty Air
One of the dumber provisions in U.S. environmental law is the “grandfather clause” in the Clean Air Act. This provision exempts power plants built before 1970 from Clean Air Act standards. At the time of adoption, it was viewed simply as a transition mechanism, with utilities arguing that old, grandfathered plants would rapidly be replaced. That hasn’t happened.

Instead, utilities like Southern Company — the largest in the United States — continue to rely on grandfathered facilities, especially dirty coal plants, to generate substantial portions of their electricity. According to the U.S. Public Interest Research Group (PIRG), grandfathered plants represent approximately 40 percent of Southern’s generating capacity.

By now, three decades after passage of the Clean Air Act, the grandfather clause is a major loophole in the U.S. clean air rules. Its persistence in the U.S. code is a prime example of the nexus between dirty money and dirty air. And Southern is at the center of this morass.

Southern was the most polluting utility in the United States in 1999, according to U.S. PIRG, emitting more sulfur dioxide, more nitrogen oxides and more carbon dioxide than any other power company. Sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides cause or exacerbate an array of respiratory ailments such as asthma and are associated with tens of thousands of deaths in the United States annually, and are the principle components of acid rain. Carbon dioxide is the most significant greenhouse gas.

Southern is the largest utility polluter not just because it is the largest company. It pollutes at higher rate than other utilities. For example, according to U.S. PIRG, it emits sulfur dioxide at a rate nearly 50 percent higher than the national average for utilities, and more than 400 percent higher than it would with new facilities. The company itself reports that it has the seventh highest sulfur dioxide emission rate in the country.

The company says it is doing everything it reasonably can to reduce emissions, alleging it has spent $4 billion on environmental improvements in the last decade. It says it is gradually shifting to natural gas and de-emphasizing coal. It brags that it has reduced sulfur dioxide emissions by a third and nitrogen oxides by more than 20 percent since 1990. (It admits major increases in carbon dioxide emissions, and even an increase in its carbon dioxide emission rate.) It says it is taking steps to reduce emissions in the future. And it touts its support for various environmental initiatives, notably sponsorship of the Nature Conservancy’s 2001 annual meeting, marking the group’s fiftieth anniversary.

(What is the president of the Nature Conservancy doing praising Southern Company’s “commitment to environmental stewardship”?)

It does not just happen that Southern can get away with polluting the U.S. skies and the atmosphere so badly. It takes a lot of work, and money.

Southern dumps more money into the political process than any utility, according to U.S. PIRG. In the first six months of the 2002 election cycle, according to U.S. PIRG, Southern has outdistanced every energy company in the United States, including the profligate political spenders in the oil and gas industry. The company spends millions on lobbyists, and employs nearly a dozen outside lobby firms. It runs a network of political action committees to funnel money to candidates, and is a major donor to political parties. Its campaign cash targets key members of energy and environment committees, who work hard to deliver the goods.

Using the leverage gained from its political investments, Southern has enmeshed itself in an array of legislative and administrative battles over air pollution rules. When it has faced enforcement actions for clean air violations, it has sought to change the clean air rules. When legislators have sought to tighten pollution rules and to eliminate the grandfather clause to protect public health and the environment, Southern has reliably been in opposition. It has fought against a global warming treaty and restrictions on mercury emissions.

Place Southern on the 10 Worst list for the swirl of campaign cash and toxic ash surrounding the company.

Wal-Mart:
Against Workers, Against Community
We have never understood why Wal-Mart was a darling of the socially responsible investment community.

Thankfully, this distasteful romance appears to be over. In February, KLD Research & Analytics, which maintains the Domini 400 Social Index — one of, or perhaps the, leading indices of supposedly socially responsible firms — ejected Wal-Mart from its list.

KLD focused on Wal-Mart’s hawking of sweatshop-made clothing, handbags and other products, and its refusal to take steps to ensure its contractors were sweatshop free. Following reports from the National Labor Committee, Business Week, the Interfaith Center for Corporate Responsibility and others, KLD reviewed Wal-Mart’s vendor contracting policies and practices.

KLD determined that Wal-Mart came up woefully short. “The company’s code of conduct for vendors does not stipulate that its vendors permit workers to bargain collectively, nor does it require them to pay laborers a sustainable living wage,” KLD concluded. “The company does not issue any public reports on the working conditions at its vendors’ factories. Other companies that have been similarly exposed to sweatshop and Myanmar [i.e., were found to be purchasing products made in Burma, despite calls from the country’s democratic forces for a boycott of such products] controversies, including The Gap, Liz Claiborne, Nike, Timberland and Reebok, have taken steps to improve their records on these issues. In contrast, Wal-Mart’s progress has been minimal.”

Here’s the Wal-Mart line on sweatshops: “Wal-Mart strives to do business only with factories run legally and ethically. We continue to commit extensive resources to making the Wal-Mart system one of the very best. We require suppliers to ensure that every factory conforms to local workplace laws and that there is no illegal child labor or forced labor. Wal-Mart also works with independent monitoring firms to randomly inspect these factories to help ensure compliance. In fact, we conduct more than 200 factory inspections each week to ensure these facilities are being run legally and ethically.”

In announcing that it was dumping Wal-Mart from the Domini 400, KLD emphasized that it preferred to negotiate with companies rather than remove them from the list. “However, Wal-Mart’s sub-par vendor contracting policies and practices and its unresponsiveness to calls for change, amplified by its role as the retail industry’s market leader,” convinced the socially responsible investment firm that further dialogue with the company offered few prospects for achieving change.

Of course, one does not need to look overseas to find fault with Wal-Mart (though sadly, as the company increasingly opens outlets in foreign markets, the harms it has caused in the United States are increasingly being replicated in other countries).

The nation’s leading retailer has certainly innovated an effective distribution and sales system. But its untrammeled expansion is leading to the homogenization of culture and the obliteration of small business competitors, and contributing to the sprawl that is a blight on the U.S. landscape and undermining the quality of life of millions.

And Wal-Mart’s tolerance of sweatshops abroad is matched by its vicious anti-unionism in its home country. The largest employer in the United States, Wal-Mart is completely union free.

That does not come just from the company’s warm relations with its “associates.”

“Wal-Mart is opposed to unionization of its associates,” reads a 1991 “Labor Relations and You” guide for company supervisors acquired and made public by the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) union. “You, as a manager,” the guidebook instructs, “are expected to support the company’s position and you may be asked to be a campaigner for your company. This may mean walking a tightrope between legitimate campaigning and improper conduct.”

Often, the company falls on the side of improper conduct. With UFCW efforts to unionize Wal-Mart facilities ramping up, the company has intensified its anti-union campaigns. Since Labor Day, the National Labor Relations Board has slapped the company with more than a dozen complaints, in connection with allegations of illegal firings, illegal surveillance of workers, and illegal threats to fire union supporters.

“It is a pattern of contempt for this nation’s labor laws that shows how low Wal-Mart will stoop to keep its workers from exercising their right to have a union,” says UFCW Executive Vice President Michael Leonard.

Leonard says Wal-Mart follows a two-track approach to block unionization efforts.

First, according to Leonard, is a “velvet glove” meeting with the workers to unlawfully try to find out why they want a union.

Then representatives from the company’s Arkansas headquarters try to explain why workers should oppose a union. If that approach is unsuccessful, he says, management resorts to the “iron fist.” The company identifies leaders in the organizing drive and, he says, seeks to bribe them with pay raises or promotions, or moves to fire them.

DECEMBER 1998 … VOLUME 19… NUMBER 12

by Russell Mokhiber

What did we learn in 1998?

Microsoft Chairman and CEO Bill Gates' net wealth -- $51 billion -- is greater than the combined net worth of the poorest 40 percent of Americans (106 million people).

Hundreds of hospitals are "dumping" patients who can't afford to pay.

The feds are criminally prosecuting big tobacco companies for smuggling cigarettes into Canada. (Never mind addicting young kids to smoke and thus condemning them to a certain, albeit, slow, death -- can't criminally prosecute them for that.)

There's a bull market in stock fraud.

Prescription drugs may cause 100,000 deaths a year.

Two Fox-TV reporters in Florida are fired for trying to report on adverse health effects associated with genetically engineered foods.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture proposes that genetically engineered foods be labeled "organic."

Coal companies continue to cheat on air quality tests as hundreds of coal miners continue to die each year from black lung disease.

The North American Securities Administrators Association estimates that Americans lose about $1 million a hour to securities fraud.

Robert Reich says that megamergers threaten democracy. Corporate crime explodes, but the academic study of corporate crime vanishes.

Three hundred trade unionists around the world were killed in 1997 for defending their rights.

Corporate firms lobbying to cripple the Superfund law outnumber environmental groups seeking to defend it by 30 to one.

Down on Nike? Chinese political prisoners allegedly make Adidas products.

Blue Cross Blue Shield Illinois is a corporate criminal. Chemical companies are testing pesticides on human beings.

Senator Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, questions whether the Pentagon's financial controls have suffered a "complete and utter breakdown."

Environmental crimes prosecution are down sharply under Clinton/Gore. Bush/Quayle had a better record.

Bell Atlantic buys Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are illustrations to sell telephone products.

Companies that have workers die on the job continue to be met with fines. Criminal prosecutions still rare.

This is the price we pay for living in Corporate America. Wealth disparity, megamergers and the resulting consolidation of corporate power, commercialism run amok, rampant corporate crime, death without justice, pollution, cancer and an unrelenting attack on democracy.

The 1998 market run-up might make plugged-in America feel good about itself, but big business is eating out the democratic foundation of the country, and when the empty shell crumbles, what kind of chaos might we anticipate?

If you have justice on your mind, herewith for the tenth consecutive year is Multinational Monitor's effort to pinpoint those responsible. It is, admittedly, a short list -- the Ten Worst Corporations of 1998. But it is a representative list, and as the damage becomes more apparent, as the outrage at, and contempt for, our fearless leaders grows, surely the list, too, will grow.

CHEVRON: OF DRILLING AND KILLING

COCA COLA: LIQUID CANDY

GENERAL MOTORS: ARSENAL OF FASCISM?

MONSANTO: PLAYING GOD WITH OUR FOOD

ROYAL CARIBBEAN: CORPORATE CRIMINAL

UNOCAL: DANGEROUS SCOFFLAW

WAL-MART: SPRAWL-MART

WARNER LAMBERT: 33 DEAD

CHEVRON
Of Drilling and Killing

The Ijaw people of the Niger Delta in Nigeria have a gripe with Chevron. The Delta produces 80 percent of Nigeria's export income, yet the people of the Delta wallow in poverty.

In October 1998, the Ijaw took over and closed down the Chevron production facilities in the Delta in protest.

"Our oil feeds this country, this corrupt government, the United States and Europe," said Daniel Ekepebide, president of the of the group that seized the oil platforms. "We don't move until something changes."

Throughout the year, the Delta has been the scene of pitched battles between local residents and the oil multinationals. In May, 121 young people from oil rich Delta communities occupied Chevron's Parabe oil platform to protest destruction of the environment by Chevron.

On May 28, after three days on the platform, helicopters arrived after Chevron finally agreed to meet with the protesters. Soldiers got out of the helicopters and began shooting. Two activists were killed instantly, others were injured, and many were arrested.

Chevron denies complicity in the killings. But The San Francisco-based multinational oil company helped facilitate an attack by the Nigerian Navy and Mobile Police (MOPOL), according to the report by Amy Goodman on Pacifica's Democracy Now.

In an interview with Goodman, a Chevron official acknowledged that on May 28, 1998, the company transported Nigerian soldiers to their Parabe oil platform .

The protesters were demanding that Chevron contribute more to the development of the impoverished oil region where they live.

In the interview with Goodman, Chevron spokesperson Sola Omole was asked about the operation.

Q: Who took them in, on Thursday morning, the Mobile Police, the Navy?

A: We did. We did. Chevron did. We took them there.

Q: By how?

A: Helicopters, yes, we took them in.

Q: Who authorized the call for the military to come in?

A: That's Chevron's management.

In San Francisco, Chevron spokesperson Mike Libbey said that Chevron did transport Nigerian soldiers to the platform, but only after Nigerian law enforcement officials "directed the company to do so."

"I suspect that we would do the same thing if the U.S. government authorized us to take [military personnel] to a U.S. platform," Libbey said.

"It's a complete distortion to imply from this that we were complicit" in the deaths of the protesters, Libbey said.

Libbey said that the government owns 60 percent of the oil operation, while Chevron owns 40 percent.

When asked why, given the brutal track record of the Nigerian military, Chevron continues to do business with Nigeria, Libbey said "we go to where the oil is."

"We operate in over 90 countries around the world, and we always don't agree with the politics of the government, but we must remain apolitical," he said.

But Goodman said that Chevron "facilitated the attack."

"It is one thing to bring in a group of cub scouts," she said. "But if you bring in these thugs -- the Mobile Police, the Navy -- they are feared throughout Nigeria. They fire first."

Goodman said the Mobile Police are known throughout the country as the "kill and go."

Chevron says that the two protesters were shot when they tried to disarm the soldiers. But the surviving protesters say that soon after landing in Chevron-leased helicopters, the Nigerian military shot to death the two protesters, Jola Ogungbeje and Aroleka Irowaninu, and wounded several others. Eleven other activists were detained for three weeks.

One activist told Goodman that during his imprisonment, he was handcuffed and hung from a ceiling fan hook for hours for refusing to sign a statement written by Nigerian federal authorities.

Nigerian activists charge that Chevron's oil operations pollute their water and land, severely hampering fishing and farming, their only means of livelihood.

Chevron is the third largest oil producer in Nigeria.

"It is very clear that Chevron, just like Shell, uses the military to protect its oil activities," Nigerian environmental attorney Oronto Douglas told Goodman. "They drill and they kill."

COCA COLA
Liquid Candy

America's children are drowning in soda pop. And Coca-Cola, the Atlanta-based junk drink pusher, with its worldwide domination of the industry and relentless marketing, is in large part responsible for an epidemic of oversugared kids.

Today, teenage boys and girls drink twice as much soda pop as milk, whereas 20 years ago they drank nearly twice as much milk as soda.

According to a report released last year by the Center for Science in the Public Interest, the average 12- to 19-year old male drinks 868 cans of soda pop a year.

The average 13- to 18-year-old male who consumes soda pop consumes more than three 12-ounce cans per day, while ten percent of those males drink seven or more cans a day.

The average 13- to 18-year-old female soda drinker imbibes more than two cans a day, and ten percent of females consume five or more cans a day.

Overall, Americans are consuming twice as much soda pop as they did 25 years ago. And they're spending $54 billion a year on it. That's twice what is spent on books every year.

"Kids are drowning in soda pop," said Michael F. Jacobson, executive director of the Center. "It's become their main beverage, providing many kids with 20% to 40% of their calories. Soda is squeezing more-nutritious foods and beverages out of their diets. It's high time that parents limited their children's soft-drink consumption and demanded that local schools get rid of their soft-drink vending machines, just as they have banished smoking."

Dr. Bess Dawson-Hughes, a bone-disease expert at the Jean Mayer USDA Human Nutrition Research Center on Aging at Tufts University in Boston, said she was particularly concerned about teen-aged girls.

"Most girls have inadequate calcium intakes, which makes them candidates for osteoporosis when they're older and may increase their risk for broken bones today," Dr. Dawson-Hughes said. "High soda consumption is a concern because it may displace milk from the diet in this vulnerable population."

Studies described in the report indicate that diets high in sugary foods like soft drinks may increase the risk of heart disease in "insulin resistant" adults. Other research links cola consumption to kidney stones in men.

Coca-Cola is a relentless pusher of its product. Coke and other soft drink companies have started paying millions of dollars for exclusive marketing rights in schools and other locations frequented by adolescents.

Coca-Cola, for example, is paying the Boys & Girls Clubs of America $60 million to make its company's products the only brands sold in more than 2,000 clubs.

Marianne Manilov, the executive director of the Oakland, California-based Center for Commercialism-Free Public Education castigated schools "for sacrificing their students' health by selling out to Coca-Cola."

"The marketing agreements virtually ensure that more kids will be drinking more soda -- while their health classes are discouraging consumption," Manilov said. "Taxpayers must provide school systems with adequate funds so schools don't become reliant on junk-food companies."

Jacobson said that commercials for high-caffeine products, like Coca-Cola Company's Surge, appeal to teens who are looking for legal stimulant drugs.

GENERAL MOTORS
Arsenal of Fascism?

For more than 25 years now, Bradford Snell has been researching and writing a mammoth history of General Motors.

Snell began digging into the crimes of the world's largest automobile company when he was a staff attorney with a Senate Judiciary Committee's Subcommittee on Antitrust and Monopoly. In February 1974, he submitted a paper that began: "This is a study of the social consequences of monopoly. It shows that excessive economic concentration can restructure society for corporate ends."

Snell's focus was on the auto industry and how the companies maximized profits by substituting cares and trucks for trains, streetcars, subways and buses. It short, the paper described how "General Motors, Ford and Chrysler reshaped American ground transportation to serve corporate wants instead of social needs."

One portion's of Snell's paper focused on the Big Three auto companies and World War II. At the time, the Big Three dominated motor vehicle production in both the United States and Germany. The contribution of these companies to the U.S. war effort was well documented. Less well known were their contributions to the Axis powers. As Snell pointed out, the companies "maximized profits by supplying both sides with the materiel needed to conduct the war."

Snell reported that during the war, both General Motors and Ford "became an integral part of the Nazi war efforts." But General Motors, with its acquisition of Germany's largest auto producer, Opel, in 1929, was more important in Germany than either Ford or Chrysler, "whose investments were substantially less."

Snell reported that "GM's plants in Germany built thousands of bomber and jet fighter propulsion systems for the Luftwaffe at the same time that its American plants produced aircraft engines for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers."

The outbreak of war in 1939 resulted in the full conversion of GM's Germany facilities to the production of military aircraft and trucks. According to Snell, during the last quarter of 1939, GM converted its 432-acre Opel complex in Russelsheim to warplane production. From 1939 to 1945, the GM Russelsheim facility built 50 percent of all the propulsion systems produced for Germany's most important bomber.

On November 30, 1998, almost 25 years after Snell wrote his paper, the Washington Post chimed in with a front page article by reporter Michael Dobbs titled "Ford and GM Scrutinized for Alleged Nazi Collaboration." In the article, Dobbs reported that lawyers who had demanded reparations from Swiss banks for storing Nazi loot, were now training their sights on the auto companies.

Snell, who has refused interviews about his book, which is scheduled to be published in mid-1999, told Dobbs that "General Motors was far more important to the Nazi war machine than Switzerland."

"Switzerland was just a repository of looted funds," Snell said. "GM was an integral part of the German war effort. The Nazis could have invaded Poland and Russia without Switzerland. They could not have done so without GM."

Documents uncovered by the Dobbs show that GM followed a conscious strategy of continuing to do business with the Nazi regime, rather than divest themselves of German assets.

Dobbs reported that less than three weeks after the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia in March 1939, GM Chairman Alfred P. Sloan defended the strategy as sound business practice, given the fact that the company's German operations were "highly profitable."

The internal politics of Nazi Germany "should not be considered the business of the management of General Motors," Sloan wrote in an April 6, 1939 letter to a concerned stockholder. "We must conduct ourselves [in Germany] as a German organization. . .We have no right to shut down the plant."

GM has issued vague denials of the 1974 report by Snell and the 1998 report by Dobbs. But Snell makes a basic and undeniable point about the power of multinationals.

"It may be argued that participating in both sides of an international conflict, like the common corporate practice of investing in both political parties before an election, is an appropriate political activity," Snell wrote in 1974. "Had the Nazis won, General Motors and Ford would have appeared impeccably Nazi. As Hitler lost, these companies were able to reemerge impeccably America."

LORAL
Year of the Rat

Former Congressman Cecil Heftel (D-Hawaii) believes we live in a political economy that has legalized bribery. Money goes in, favors come out. And it's all legal!

But it sure does stink to high heaven.

Throughout 1998, a highly offensive pungent odor wafted from the corporate headquarters of Loral Corporation and the executive suite of its CEO, Bernard Schwartz. (The case has been well documented by New York Times reporter Jeff Gerth and by Edward Timperlake and William Triplett II in their recent book The Year of the Rat: How Bill Clinton Compromised U.S. Security for Chinese Case (Regnery, 1998))

Loral makes satellites. In 1991 and 1992, Schwartz gave $12,500 -- a modest sum -- to help elect Bill Clinton president.

Schwartz had his eye on selling satellites to the Chinese and needed the new administration to waive human rights sanctions on satellites, to get around proliferation sanctions by ignoring Chinese missile sales to Iran.

According to The Year of the Rat, Schwartz began writing bigger checks to the Clinton/Gore campaign. In the election cycle of 1995-1996, Schwartz made $586,000 in campaign contributions. As of May 1998, Schwartz had contributed $421,000 to the Democrats' 1997-1998 election cycle. That made him the number one donor to the Democrats from 1995 to 1998.

In total, Schwartz has given more than $2.2 million since 1992 to the Clinton/Gore ticket, Democratic candidates, and Democratic causes.

So, that's $12,500 in 1991-1992, and $2.2 million since then.

Schwartz says that his contribution binge and his companies need for help from the Clinton administration was "coincidence."

And how exactly did President Clinton scratch Loral's back? First and foremost, Clinton approved a lucrative satellite deal for Loral Space and Communications Ltd. despite objections from federal prosecutors, who were at the time investigating whether Loral illegally helped the Chinese make their rockets reliable by passing along technology to the Chinese under the table. Clinton's approval of the satellite deal undercut the Justice Department's case.

NSC advisers warned President Clinton at the time that his approval of the Loral deal with China might be seen as letting Loral's space subsidiary "off the hook on criminal charges for its unauthorized assistance to China's ballistic military program."

As of this writing, Loral has been let off the criminal hook.

In addition, according to The Year of the Rat, the Clinton administration gave Loral an antitrust exemption for his spinoff of some parts of Loral to aerospace giant Lockheed. And in March 1996, Clinton transferred authority for satellite export licenses from the State Department to the corporate friendly Commerce Department.

On the cover of Cecil Heftel's book, End Legalized Bribery (Seven Locks Press, 1998), is a picture of President Bill Clinton shaking hands with then Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich.

The picture was taken on June 11, 1995 in New Hampshire. A citizen had asked that Clinton and Gingrich commit to appoint a panel on political finance and lobbying reforms. Clinton said "In a heartbeat, I agree." The two men shook hands on the deal to launch a bipartisan commission on lobbying and political reforms. Today, more than three years later, no such commission exists.

"They lied," Heftel says.

Gingrich is gone, Clinton on his way out. May a new generation of leadership sweep aside this system of legalized bribery. The money is stinking up the place, and that's no coincidence.

MOBIL
Indonesia and Mass Graves: "Sorry about that"

In 1971, Mobil Oil discovered one of the world's richest onshore reserves of natural gas, estimated at 14 trillion cubic feet, in Aceh, the Westernmost province of Indonesia.

Mobil and the Indonesian government formed a joint venture company, P.T. Arun, to reap the harvest.

But just then, the local population decided to declare independence from Indonesian Dictator-in-Chief Suharto. A three decade guerrilla war was launched.

In 1990, as the violence escalated, Suharto sent in thousands of soldiers, including the hated Army Special Forces, to crush the rebellion.

According to an investigative report in Business Week ("What Did Mobil Know?" December 28, 1998), the Special Forces set up shop amidst Mobil's gas operations in Aceh province.

And according to a coalition of 17 Indonesian human rights groups, Mobil and P.T. Arun were "responsible for human rights abuses" in Aceh. The coalition alleges that Mobil's Indonesian subsidiary, Mobil Oil Indonesia, provided crucial logistic support to the army, including earth-moving equipment that was used to dig mass graves. One grave excavated recently in the village of Bukit Sentang, contained at least a dozen bodies.

According to Business Week, officials have unearthed human remains in six of the 12 sites investigated so far. One human rights official estimates that 2,000 Achenese torture victims are buried around the Aceh area.

Mobil flatly denies that it knew of any human rights abuses in the Aceh area in the early 1990s. "I can frankly say that we have no knowledge of that happening," Neil Duffin, Mobil Indonesia's executive vice president for production and exploration.

But the Business Week investigative team puts forth damning evidence linking Mobil to the atrocities:

• Two contractors say they told local Mobil managers that they had found human body parts close to Mobil sites.
  
  
• A former Mobil employee says rumors of massacres and reports that Mobil equipment was being used to dig mass graves was being were frequently discussed at workplaces and in a company cafeteria.

Mobil admits helping the Indonesian military with excavators, food and fuel, but insists that it was used for peaceful purposes.

At a press conference in Jakarta on November 5, 1998, Mobil Chairman Lucio Noto told reporters that "if anything happened because somebody used the equipment in a wrong way, I'm sorry about that. Noto said that Mobil had "no control over that."

But residents of Aceh made clear to Business Week reporters that the military operation in Aceh "was too big and talk of killings too widespread for the company not to know."

"There wasn't a single person in Aceh who didn't know that massacres were taking place," said H. Sayed Mudhahar, a former top government official in Aceh. "From children, to the elderly, to the mentally ill, everybody was afraid."

Faisal Putra, an Indonesian attorney who intends to file a lawsuit against Mobil on behalf of the victims told Business Week that "the crimes occurred over a long period of time."

"Mobil Oil cannot utter the words -- 'We didn't know.'"

MONSANTO
playing god with our food

Monsanto likes to call itself a leader in the "life sciences" industry. That means that the St. Louis-based agrichemical company is now int he business of manufacturing and marketing genetically engineered foods.

Are you eating them? You may be. Most people don't realize that 45 million acres of American farmland have been planted with biotech crops.

As Michael Pollan reported in the New York Times Magazine in October 1998, "Though Americans have already begun to eat genetically engineered potatoes, corn and soybeans, industry research confirms what my own informal surveys suggest: hardly any of us knows it."

Genetically engineered foods have not been tested for safety. And they are not labeled, so you don't know whether the food you are eating has been tampered with, or not.

In Europe and Asia, consumers, farmers and citizens are up in arms over genetically engineered foods. They have destroyed test fields and are demanding that genetically engineered foods be labeled. As a result, Monsanto's genetically engineered products have been blocked from the European marketplace.

In the United States, however, Monsanto, facing little opposition, has aggressively sought to quash dissent.

For centuries, farmers have allowed certain crops to grow in their fields and have saved seeds from those crops for planting in the next growing season. According to the United Nations, roughly 1.4 billion people around the world are dependent on farm-saved seed for their food security.

Enter Monsanto. Monsanto is in the process of purchasing Delta & Pine Land Company, a Scott, Mississippi-based cotton seed company.

Delta & Pine has a patent on a seed that has the potential to strip self-sufficient farmers of the ability to save seeds. When you plant this seed into the ground, a plant grows, but its seeds are rendered sterile.

When activists at Rural Advancement Foundation International (RAFI) read about the Delta & Pine patent, they dubbed the technology "the terminator seed."

Now, Monsanto has hired Pinkerton detectives to crack down on farmers who "illegally" save and replant seeds containing "patented technology."

Monsanto's Kate Marshall said the biotech giant is "vigorously pursuing growers who pirate any brand or variety" of the company's genetically enhanced seed.

Monsanto has hired five full-time and a number of part-time investigators to follow up on all seed piracy leads it receives.

When asked what methods are being used to determine which farmers are saving seed, Marshall would not get specific. "They use standard investigative methods," she said.

To date, Monsanto has opened more than 475 seed piracy cases nationwide, generated from over 1,800 leads. More than 250 of these cases are under active investigation, Marshall said. And more than 100 cases have been settled.

And in early 1998, the company effectively pressured a Tampa, Florida television station into killing a documentary series on the company's controversial genetically engineered milk hormone (rBGH).

Monsanto's terminator seed, it's bullying of farmers and reporters, and its faith in manipulating the basis of life makes it a corporate bully for the ages. A new, yet undiscovered, form of activism will be need to grapple with the machinations of this biotech giant.

Prince Charles of Wales had it right when early last year, he wrote that "genetic modification takes mankind into realms that belong to God and to God alone."

We agree. The time has come to put Monsanto in its place.

ROYAL CARIBBEAN
corporate criminal

In preparation for this article, I searched Royal Caribbean Cruise Ltd. "newswire" (www.rccl.com) and found nothing about the company being criminally convicted of felonies for polluting the oceans.

But then again, why hang out your dirty laundry right there on the your web site when you are trying to sell tickets?

Royal Caribbean takes the prize for corporate criminal of the year.

In September, Royal Caribbean, the world's second largest passenger cruise line, plead guilty and was fined $9 million for dumping oil and lying to the U.S. Coast Guard about it.

In Miami, U.S. District Court Judge Donald Middlebrooks ordered the company to pay the $1 million fine for presenting a false oil record book for the Nordic Empress cruise ship to Coast Guard pollution investigators who had spotted the ship leaving a seven-mile long oil slick. When Coast Guard officials boarded the ship to investigate, they were presented with a false log designed to conceal the discharges.

During the sentencing hearing, the government introduced video tapes showing three Royal Caribbean cruise ships dumping oil as well as a "before and after" video showing the destruction of a secret bypass pipe used to make discharges aboard the Sovereign of the Seas.

The "before and after" video was taken during Coast Guard boardings on October 25, 1994, in San Juan after the ship had been observed by a Coast Guard aircraft dumping oil, and during a follow-up boarding on October 29, 1994 in Miami, Florida.

The company admitted that it engaged in the crime of obstruction of justice by destroying a bypass pipe, which was cut up in small pieces and placed in a dumpster in Miami, in order to prevent its discovery by the Coast Guard.

Judge Middlebrooks also placed the company on probation for five years, during which time the conduct of the company will be monitored, with periodic reports to the Court and the government detailing the company's environment compliance.

Yet only weeks after Royal Caribbean Cruises Ltd. was convicted of dumping oily wastes into the Atlantic Ocean, the company was caught doing the same thing.

Federal officials alleged that high-level company engineers, including the chief engineer for the Nordic Empress cruise ship, conspired to manipulate the oil detection sensors on the Nordic Empress in order to enable and conceal the discharge of oil contaminated bilge waste.

"The person responsible for directing this criminal activity was none other than the chief engineer aboard the ship," federal officials alleged.

The chief engineer was subsequently dismissed by the company.

The criminal case of Royal Caribbean was unusual in one key respect -- the wealth of criminal defense lawyers and experts the company procured in an unsuccessful attempt to convince federal judges that the prosecution was illegal under international law.

Royal Caribbean originally entered a plea of not guilty to charges brought in both Miami and Puerto Rico. The company argued that the case should be governed by the Law of the Sea Convention and tried in Liberia, where the ship is registered. A federal judge in Miami disagreed and the case was headed to trial when the plea agreement was negotiated.

For its legal defense, the company hired Judson Starr and Jerry Block, both of whom have served as head of the Justice Department's Environmental Crimes Section, and former Attorney General Benjamin Civiletti. All three lawyers are with the Venable, Baetjer law firm.

Hired on as experts on international law issues were former Attorney General Eliot Richardson, University of Virginia law professor John Norton Moore, former State Department officials Terry Leitzell and Bernard Oxman, and four retired senior admirals.

As the case proceeded to trial, Royal Caribbean engaged in a massive public relations campaign, taking out ads during the Super Bowl, putting former Environmental Protection Agency Administration (EPA) on its board of directors, and donating thousands of dollars to environmental groups.

All for naught. A small band of prosecutors in the Justice Department's Environmental Crimes Unit made sure the cruise line would plead guilty and pay for its crime.

Justice delivered.

UNOCAL
dangerous scofflaw

It isn't everyday that a corporation faces a petition to have its charter revoked.

But in September 1998, a coalition of 30 citizens' groups petitioned then Attorney General of California Dan Lungren to begin charter revocation proceedings against Union Oil Company of California (Unocal). Lungren refused, was defeated in a run for Governor, and his successor as Attorney General promises to revisit the petition.

Calling Unocal "a dangerous scofflaw corporation," the 127-page petition argued that Unocal has engaged in corporate law-breaking, was responsible for the 1969 oil blowout in the Santa Barbara Channel and numerous other acts of pollution, committed hundreds of occupational safety and health violations, treated workers unfairly, was complicit in human rights violations in Afghanistan and Burma, and has "usurped political power."

In just 1998, for example, the company paid $7 million to settle air pollution allegations in Alaska, paid $200 million to rip apart a California town contaminated by oil, and paid $43.8 million to settle oil contamination allegations in central California.

Claiming that the state of California routinely puts out of business hundreds of unruly accountants, lawyers, and doctors every year, the coalition called upon the California Attorney to begin a legal process that would result in the revocation of Unocal's charter.

"We're letting the people of California in on a well-kept secret," said Loyola Law School Professor Robert Benson, who drafted the petition. "The people mistakenly assume that we have to try to control these giant corporate repeat offenders one toxic spill at a time, one layoff at a time, one human rights violation at a time. But the law has always allowed the attorney general to go to court to simply dissolve a corporation for wrongdoing and sell its assets to others who will operate in the public interest."

If this authority exists, why is that only once this century -- in 1976 when a conservative Republican AG asked a court to dissolve a private water company for allegedly delivering impure water to its customers -- has the Attorney General sought to revoke a corporate charter in California?

"California attorneys general haven't often done it because they've become soft on corporate crime," Benson said. "Baseball players and convicted individuals in California get only three strikes. Why should big corporations get endless strikes?"

Benson argues that a single act of unlawfulness is enough to trigger charter revocation proceedings, although he admits that if an Attorney General acts against a major company, it will be for a pattern of wrongdoing, not for an isolated act of wrongdoing.

But Unocal's Barry Lane says that if this is true that one bad act can trigger revocation, then "any company that has ever been found guilty of anything," would face charter revocation proceedings and "the AG would be running every company in the state."

So, which is Unocal -- a sometimes criminal, or a corporate recidivist?

"We have committed misdemeanors in the past," Lane admits, "but then so have many companies. We have operated here for 100 years. Yes we have made some mistakes, but we have always taken responsibility for those mistakes and worked to correct them."

If an Attorney General were independent enough to file such a petition, a judge could appoint a receiver, so that the assets do not flee the jurisdiction. Then if the judge was inclined to strip the company of its charter, he or should would have the authority to make "such orders and decrees and issue such injunctions in the case as justice and equity and require."

If Benson were the judge, he'd transform the company into a renewable energy company, which would create more jobs and inflict less damage to the environment.

Ronnie Dugger, founder of the Alliance for Democracy, one of the groups that signed the petition, called the filing "an historic event."

"It is the first broad-based effort of this century to use the people's sovereign authority over a corporation chartered by one of our states to terminate its privilege to do business," Dugger said. "It is a step toward regaining actual democratic control over these giant corporations we've created."

One hundred and fifty years ago, the people created corporations to get things done -- build a road or dig a canal. If the corporation didn't do what the people said, their charters were revoked. In a fundamental respect, the corporation was a public institution.

Now, after years of tinkering by corporate lawyers, the corporation is a private institution beyond our control. Benson and his colleagues are seeking to change the public perception -- to drive corporate law back to the future.

No better place to start that with a giant scofflaw oil company like Unocal.

WAL-MART
sprawl-mart

What consumer in his or her right mind would gripe about Wal-Mart? It's open 24 hours in many locations. It sells relatively inexpensive, good quality goods. If you need to return an item, no problem.

In 1997 Wal-Mart had sales of $118 billion. If it continues to experience this degree of success, within 10 years or so it will be the world's largest corporation. It's already larger than all three of its main rivals (Sears, Target and Kmart) combined.

Wal-Mart now has 3,400 stores on four continents. "Our priorities are that we want to dominate North America first, then South America, and then Asia, and then Europe," Wal-Mart's President and CEO David Glass told USA Today business reporter Lorrie Grant recently.

Given the history of the steady rise of the Bentonville, Ark., retailer, who can question its ability to do just that?

Certainly not USA Today, which recently ran Grant's glowing review of Wal-Mart's worldwide operation under the headline "An Unstoppable Marketing Force: Wal-Mart Aims for Domination of the Retail Industry -- Worldwide."

But citizens around the country are rising up to slap down Wal-Mart's expansion plans. as Bob Ortega, a Wall Street Journal reporter, documents in Wal-Mart phenomenon in his new book, In Sam We Trust: The Untold Story of Sam Walton and How Wal-Mart Is Devouring America, (Times Business, 1998).

Ortega reveals how Sam Walton -- perhaps the most driven corporate executive ever to walk the face of the planet -- built his empire. Walton used Asian child labor to make blouses for sale under "Made in America" signs in his Wal-Mart stores. When he began his operation in Bentonville, he hired a union-busting lawyer to keep workers from organizing. Soon his outer-city Wal-Marts were ruining inner-city shopkeepers.

The result: an underpaid, unorganized workforce, a large percentage of whom qualify for food stamps.

Ortega spoke with Kathleen Baker, of Hastings, Minnesota who was fired after talking to other workers about asking for a pay raise.

He spoke with Mike and Paula Ianuzzo, of Cottage Grove, Oregon who blamed Wal-Mart for wiping out their photo-shop business.

In Guatemala he interviewed Flor de Maria Salguedo, a union organizer who arranged for Ortega to talk with workers making clothes for Wal-Mart and other giant retailers. Salguedo, whose husband had been murdered during an organizing drive in Guatemala City, was kidnapped, beaten, and raped shortly after Ortega's visit. After the attack, one of her attackers told her, "This is what you get for messing about with foreigners."

Ortega documents how communities around the country have revolted against Wal-Mart's plans to create giant superstores in their communities, ripping apart the fabric of small-town life.

In Oklahoma the owner of a television and record store forced out of business after a Wal-Mart moved into the area told reporters, "Wal-Mart really craters a little town's downtown."

Shelby Robinson, a self-employed clothing designer from Fort Collins, Colorado, told Ortega that she "really hates Wal-Mart." "Everything's starting to look the same, everybody buys all the same things -- a lot of small-town character is being lost," Robinson said. "They dislocate communities, they hurt small businesses, they add to our sprawl and pollution because everybody drives farther, they don't pay a living wage, and visually, they're atrocious."

James Howard Kunstler, an ardent Wal-Mart foe from upstate New York, described what he calls the $7 hair dryer fallacy.

Kunstler argued that "people who shop at a giant discount store to save $7 on a hair dryer don't realize that they pay a hidden price by taking that business from local merchants, because those merchants are the people who sit on school boards, sponsor little league teams, and support the civic institutions that create a community."

Kunstler calls Wal-Mart "the exemplar of a form of corporate colonialism, which is to say, organizations from one place going into distant places and strip-mining them culturally and economically."

In his book Ortega also documents how communities around the country are rising up to slap down Wal-Mart's plans for expansion. Still, he questions whether -- given the amazing popularity of Wal-Mart among consumers worldwide -- anything will stop this juggernaut.

The consumers who shop at Wal-Mart clearly outnumber the activists out to stop what they see as "sprawl-mart."

It is an unfair fight that raises fundamental questions about the nature of democratic action in a capitalist system run amok.

WARNER LAMBERT
33 dead

As director of Public Citizen's Health Research Group, Dr. Sidney Wolfe has been studying the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for more than 20 years. He is in a position to know how well or how poorly the agency is protecting the interests of consumers from the power of multinational pharmaceutical corporations.

Wolfe says that in this regard, the FDA has hit rock bottom.

In November, 1998, Wolfe released a report showing that FDA is routinely giving the green light to dangerous new drugs.

The Health Research Group surveyed FDA medical officers -- physicians responsible for the primary reviews of New Drug Applications for drugs -- to determine their opinions about recent changes in the drug approval process.

Nineteen medical officers identified 27 new drugs that they reviewed in the past three years and thought should not be approved but were approved anyway. Seventeen medical officers described the current standards of FDA review for safety and efficacy as "lower" or "much lower" compared to those in existence prior to 1995.

One medical officer told Public Citizen: "In the last two years, I recommended that two drugs not be approved. They were both approved without consulting me. This never happened before. In one case, the drug did not meet the standards set up by the division, so they nullified the standards."

Another medical officer wrote that a high-ranking FDA official had said: "Everything is approvable. We can use the label creatively to lower the problems."

One drug that the FDA approved over a medical officers objection was Warner-Lambert's diabetes drug Rezulin, which has been linked to at least 33 deaths due to liver injuries.

This case was documented in early December 1998 by Los Angeles Times reporter David Willman.

The Times reported that the FDA dismissed explicit warnings of danger posed by Rezulin.

According to the report, the FDA reviewed the Warner-Lambert drug Rezulin on a "fast track" while downplaying harmful potential side effects.

The paper reported that one medical officer who opposed the approval of Rezulin was removed as the chief reviewer of the drug. The drug has been pulled off the market in Britain due to health concerns.

The Times reported that:

• Dr. John Gueriguian, the veteran FDA medical officer assigned to evaluate Rezulin, recommended rejecting the drug after he documented its potential danger to the liver. After Warner-Lambert complained about Gueriguian's "behavior" at a meeting, he was removed from the review of the drug.
  
  
• After the first patient deaths surfaced in 1997, another FDA medical officer, Dr. Robert Misbin, estimated that more than 12,000 Rezulin users would experience some liver injury. Misbin also advised his superiors that 2,000 of those patients might die unless their liver functions were closely monitored.
  
  "I said to myself 'At this very moment as I am writing this, there are 2,000 patients that are going to die of this drug unless we do something,'" Misbin told the Times. "I mean, people were being treated with this drug and had no idea what was going on."
  
  
• A third FDA official, Dr. G. Alexander Fleming, suggested restricting the recommended use of Rezulin, but said he relented after encountering resistance from Warner-Lambert.
  
  
• In May, 1998, a 55 year-old high school teacher from East St. Louis, Illinois suffered sudden liver failure and died after volunteering to take Rezulin as part of a government study. The woman, who did not have diabetes, adhered to the strict precautionary liver tests the FDA says should prevent such deaths.

"How many more Americans will have to die or require liver transplants before Warner-Lambert and the FDA take action to protect people in this country by banning the drug?" Wolfe asked in a July 1998 letter to the FDA.

Warner-Lambert issued a statement saying it was "disappointed with the mischaracterization of its actions and intentions regarding the development and marketing of Rezulin."

"Warner-Lambert is particularly disturbed about recent media coverage of the drug that seems to focus primarily on risks but largely ignores the significant patient benefits that the medication provides," the statement said.