The
top 10 corporate criminals of 1999.
By Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman
CHARLES DICKENS, where are you when we need you?
Never has "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times" served
as a more apt commentary on society than today.
The NASDAQ just broke 4,000, nearly doubling in 1999. The Dow is at
near-record heights as well. Internet, computer, and communications technologies
are evolving at a stunning velocity. A lot of people are becoming incredibly
wealthy through, and a lot are having fun on, the Internet.
If you want, you can look at this state of affairs and say that everything
is fine.
Or you can look at it a different way and ask these and many other probing
questions:
Why does the United States, the richest nation in the history of the
world, warehouse its elderly in what are euphemistically called nursing
homes, permitting many to live out their last years in social isolation
and sometimes filth and neglect?
Why are profitable and fast-growing corporations permitted to expose
their workers to dangerous and life-threatening conditions that could be
avoided with minimal investments?
Why are the poor, undereducated, and unsophisticated subject to a host
of financial scams that empty their small savings accounts or throw them
into debt?
Why are workers in the United States who try to organize unions regularly
subjected to threats of firing and plant closure, harassment, intimidation,
and managerial refusal to bargain with duly elected unions?
Why does the United States permit massive concentration of economic
and political power through mergers and acquisitions?
Why do rich societies permit their corporations to engage, directly
or indirectly, through contractors and subcontractors, in brutally exploitative
practices in developing countries - practices that have long been outlawed
in the rich countries?
Why indeed.
There is of course no one single answer to these and the many other
critical questions. Especially in a society such as our own that does so
much to generate wealth, at least as measured by conventional standards,
but so little to distribute that wealth - or justice - evenly. But there
is one connecting theme that serves, at least, as a partial answer to many
of these questions: concentrated corporate power.
Each year, to highlight the consequences of corporations and greed run
amok, Multinational Monitor publishes a list of the 10 worst corporations
of the year.
Here's this year's list, in alphabetical order:
Avondale: Good riddance
For more than half a decade, Avondale, which operates a shipyard in
New Orleans, waged a vicious campaign to block recognition of its employees'
desire for a union -- a desire springing in no small part from wages that
were way below industry standard and a gruesome workplace-casualty record
of at least one death a year. In August, Avondale was acquired by Litton,
which agreed to recognize the workers' union in November.
Citigroup: The standard in political corruption
Citigroup played the lead role in ushering the Financial Services Modernization
Act through the U.S. Congress, in the process joining with the rest of
the financial services industry to set a new standard in legalized
bribery. The act will tear down the regulatory walls separating between
banks, insurance companies, and securities firms, paving the way for the
massive concentration of financial wealth and a future of industry bailouts,
weakening the Community Reinvestment Act and permitting huge intrusions
on consumer privacy.
Del Monte: Banana imperialism into the 21st
century
In September, Bandegua, the Guatemalan subsidiary of Coral Gables,
Fla.-based Fresh Del Monte Produce (now a separate company from California-based
Del Monte Foods), dismissed 900 of its banana workers. When other unionized
Bandegua workers tried to organize a solidarity protest, the union leadership
was met with a 200-person, armed goon squad that chased the leadership
out of town, threatening to kill them if they returned. Del Monte and Bandegua
deny responsibility, but they have certainly benefited from the threats.
Guardian Postacute: Maggots everywhere
Guardian Postacute Services Inc., a San Francisco Bay Area nursing
home chain, permitted dirty feeding tubes to be installed into patients
who then became infested with maggots, permitted patients to lie for extended
periods in their urine and feces, and failed to take strong action against
an employee who sexually abused patients. Santa Clara County deputy district
attorney Randy Hey has filed criminal charges against the corporation.
Hoffman-La Roche: Take the market, pay the
fine
Earlier this year, the Swiss pharmaceutical giant F. Hoffmann-La Roche
Ltd. paid $500 million - the largest fine in U.S. antitrust history - as
a penalty for its attempts, with German chemical maker BASF, to allocate
market shares for certain vitamins sold in the United States and elsewhere.
The whistle-blower who inspired the case says Roche's response to the fines
was to redouble its efforts to gain total control of the vitamin market.
Tosco: Four dead workers
On Feb. 23, 1999, four workers at a Tosco Corporation facility in Avon,
Calif., were burned to death after they tried to replace a leaky oil pipe.
The San Francisco Chronicle reported that one Tosco employee, Anthony Creggett,
claimed shortly after the fire that plant managers had refused a request
by four workers to shut down the high-temperature distillation tower during
the repairs on the pipe.
Tyson Foods: Seven deaths in seven months
Maybe we should consider raising our own chickens. Clearly, relying
on multinational corporations to raise millions of birds for us in unsanitary
and dangerous conditions is not working out. Tyson Foods is a case in point.
Do you really want to buy your chicken from these people? Consider this:
seven workers have been killed at Tyson facilities this year. There have
been no reported job-related deaths at any other poultry company
in 1999.
U.S. Bank: Big Brother is watching
Earlier this year U.S. Bank agreed to stop selling its customers' personal
data -- everything from social security numbers to account balances, from
birth date to number of credit cards -- to a telemarketing firm. But that
came only after Minnesota Attorney General Mike Hatch filed a lawsuit against
U.S. Bank, alleging it violated the federal Fair Credit Reporting Act and
engaged in consumer fraud and deceptive advertising.
Whirlpool: Preying on the poor
Earlier this year an Alabama jury hit a recently spun-off Whirlpool
subsidiary, Whirlpool Financial, and one of its dealers with a $581 million
fine for targeting illiterate and poor people in a sales scheme involving
satellite television dishes. Lawyers representing the victims said that
Whirlpool had dealers all over the state going door-to-door soliciting
poor, unsophisticated, and elderly customers to purchase satellite television
dishes for $1,100 plus 22 percent interest. The same equipment could
be bought at an electronics store for $199. On appeal, an Alabama appellate
court knocked the verdict down to $301 million.
W.R. Grace: You can't eat enough of it
At least 192 people have died of asbestos-related disease from a mine
near Libby, Mont., that was owned by W.R. Grace for nearly 30 years, according
to a report that appeared in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. At least another
375 have been diagnosed with the fatal disease. For three decades Grace
mined enormous deposits of vermiculite in the earth of nearby Zonolite
Mountain. Under the vermiculite are millions of tons of tremolite, a rare
and exceedingly toxic form of asbestos. Community residents say Grace told
residents and workers for years that the dust was harmless. "When my father
was a young man they told him, 'You can't eat enough of that stuff. It
won't bother you. He's dead,'" Patrick Vinion, a Libby resident, says.
Now Vinion, who never worked as a miner, is himself dying from asbestos-related
disease.
January 2000
Russell Mokhiber is
editor of the Washington, D.C.-based Corporate Crime Reporter. Robert
Weissman is editor of the Washington, D.C.-based Multinational Monitor.
They are coauthors of Corporate
Predators: The Hunt for MegaProfits and the Attack on Democracy (Common
Courage Press, 1999). Their column appears weekly in the San
Francisco Bay Guardian. |