Republican News · Thursday 14 March 2002

The Top Ten Worst Corporations of 2001

It was a difficult selection, but once again, the Multinational Monitor magazine has produced its annual listing naming the Ten Worst Corporations of 2001. This information has been banned by the British government, as obviously New Labour does not agreed with the continuous denunciation of corporate greed and lack of ethical values of Multinational Monitor, a Washington, DC-based monthly magazine that tracks the activities of multinational corporations which was founded by Ralph Nader.

d the 'winners' for year 2001 are: Abbott Laboratories, Argenbright, Bayer, Coca-Cola, Enron, Exxon Mobil, Philip Morris, Sara Lee, Southern Co. and Wal-Mart. "These behemoths have ripped off the public, polluted the environment, abused their workers and debased our culture," said Robert Weissman, editor of Multinational Monitor. "They appear in our lives everyday, disguised as 'respectable members of the community.' They deserve public opprobrium, and, in many cases, government sanction."

d as in any rat race, each of the selected corporations have very special characteristics that made their election unavoidable.

In alphabetical order:

Abbott Laboratories made the first of the Ten Worst list for its TAP Pharmaceuticals, a joint venture with Japanese Takeda Pharmaceuticals. TAP was forced to pay $875 million to resolve criminal charges and civil liability in connection with allegations of major Medicare reimbursement fraud. Among other alleged fraudulent activities, as a way of hooking doctors on prescribing Lupron, its prostate cancer drug, TAP gave doctors free samples and then encouraged doctors to bill Medicare for the free samples. It's a very nasty, but not uncommon practice in the pharmaceutical world.

Security company Argenbright was named to the list for repeated violations of regulations for airport security. Argenbright's appalling record helped convince the US Congress to federalise American airport security operations.

Bayer appears on the list for its overcharging of the US government and public for the anti-anthrax drug Cipro, based on a patent monopoly that may well be improperly maintained by virtue of a collusive arrangement with a generic manufacturer.

This corporation has refused to comply with a proposed US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) ban on the use of Bayer's antibiotic, Baytril(R), in treating chickens and turkeys. Baytril(R) is a fluoroquinolone antibiotic. Fluoroquinolones are considered one of the most valuable classes of antibiotic drugs available to physicians because of their effectiveness against a broad range of disease-causing bacteria and relative lack of side effects. They are the antibiotics most often used to treat severe cases of food poisoning caused by bacteria, but the FDA determined that using Baytril(R) in poultry farming contributes to the development of antibiotic resistance in bacteria that infect humans. Bayer's decision to put profits over public health is putting us all at risk.

To its curriculum, Bayer can add its harassment of a German watchdog group, Coalition Against Bayer Dangers, for maintaining a BayerWatch.com website.

The very-well known Coca Cola was named among the Ten Worst for its sponsorship of the first Harry Potter movie and possible sequels, using a children's favourite to hawk its product, and for its alleged complicity with death squads in Colombia, targeting union leaders who had tried to unionise its factories in the Latin American country.

That Enron made the Ten Worst list should not come as a surprise to anyone. The energy corporation refused to allow many of its employees to dump Enron stock from their pension plans. Their life savings and securities were lost as the company plunged toward bankruptcy.

But the Enron scandal is not merely a US affair. The rise and fall of Enron is very much the story of a model global corporation gone awry. Its business model, which until recently was taught in business schools around the world, did not respect boundaries. Its global reach, powered by as much as $2.4 billion in loans backed by US taxpayers and aided by barrier-breaking "reforms" pushed by the World Trade Organization, made the Houston-based corporation not merely the seventh-largest in the United States but the 16th-largest in the world. Enron was regularly featured on Global Finance magazine's annual list of the "world's best global companies", stretching from Houston to London to Bombay to Maputo to La Paz, trading in the world's natural gas, crude oil, metals, plastics, fertilizers, forest products, lumber, steel and, ominously, the weather.

As John Nichols mentions in his article Enron's Global Crusade, the corporation tentacles were omnipresent. "In Geneva, where the WTO is headquartered, Enron is known for its promotion of privatisation and deregulation of health, education, energy, water, welfare and postal services. In India, Enron was a partner in the decade-long, still incomplete development of a $2.9 billion power plant project so controversial that it spawned a nationwide protest movement. In Britain, Enron lobbied successfully for energy-policy shifts and, with approvals from Tony Blair's Labour government, recently took ownership of a huge privatised water utility, Wessex Water - moves that are now under intense scrutiny by that country's media and political opposition. In Germany, Enron swept in with schemes to corner newly deregulated electricity markets. In Mozambique, with the aid of a friendly US ambassador, Enron grabbed control of an oil pipeline project from a government under pressure from the International Monetary Fund to forge public-private partnerships. In Argentina, it brought high-level political pressure down on successive governments until, finally, Enron was granted approval to construct a natural gas pipeline from that country to Chile. The pressure included a 1988 call to a Cabinet minister from George W Bush, the son of the then-Vice President of the United States."

Enron is also a political story: Enron gave $6 million in political contributions over a decade. Its CEO, the largest career contributor to George W Bush's campaigns, has been exposed as having exploited his connections to name Bush Administration regulators, to shape its energy policies and to block moves to regulate the offshore tax havens Enron exploited. "If you want to know where economic globalization along the lines cheered on by the WTO, the IMF, the World Bank, George W Bush and Tony Blair is headed, look at Enron," says Tony Benn, Britain's former minister of industry. "Globalization has created an international no man's land where businesses survive by engaging in financial practices that no responsible nation-state would permit. When you allow corporations to write their own rules in the global marketplace, which is what has essentially been the case in recent years, you will see unimaginable abuses."

ExxonMobil earned a spot on the list for leading the global warming denial campaign - "burning fossil fuels has not a role in global warming"!!- and blocking efforts at appropriate remedial action, plus a host of other reckless activities.

Philip Morris asserted its claim to be among the Ten Worst by virtue of a "we've changed" marketing campaign - revealed to be a hoax by a Czech study it commissioned alleging the cost savings from smoking-related premature death. There was also the company's ongoing efforts to addict millions of new smokers.

Sara Lee was named to the list because of a scandal involving its Ball Park Franks hot dogs. Contaminated hot dogs due to company negligence killed 21 and seriously injured 100 in 1998. In 2001, with civil and criminal litigation around the case heating up, the Detroit Free Press reported that Sara Lee stopped performing tests for bacteria after it started recording too many positives. Extraordinarily, the US attorney who handled the prosecution of the criminal case, insists Sara Lee did not know about the presence of listeria in its hot dogs. The government attorney issued a joint press release with Sara Lee announcing settlement of the case. The final tally: 21 dead. A misdemeanour plea. A $200,000 fine.

Southern Co, the largest electric utility in the United States, grabbed a place on the list for its efforts to defeat sensible air pollution regulations. Southern is a heavy user of coal, and leads the fight to maintain a ridiculous "grandfather" clause in the US Clean Air Act exempting power plants built before 1970 from Clean Air Act standards.

Wal-Mart secured its place among the Ten Worst by continuing to source products from overseas sweatshops, for viciously battling efforts to unionise any fraction of its workforce (the largest in the United States, among private employers), and by contributing to the sprawl that blights the US landscape.

For a complete copy of Multinational Monitor's article naming the ten worst corporations of 2001, see www.essential.org/monitor