The 14 Worst Corporate Evildoers
On issues like war crimes, torture, toxic dumping
and stifling freedom of speech, corporations like
Coca Cola, Chevron and Philip Morris are way out
ahead of the rest.

By A Global Exchange Report
AlterNet, December 12, 2005
www.alternet.org/story/29337/


Corporations carry out some of the most horrific
human rights abuses of modern times, but it is
increasingly difficult to hold them to account.
Economic globalization and the rise of
transnational corporate power have created a
favorable climate for corporate human rights
abusers, which are governed principally by the
codes of supply and demand and show genuine
loyalty only to their stockholders.

Several of the companies below are being sued
under the Alien Tort Claims Act, a law that
allows citizens of any nationality to sue in US
federal courts for violations of international
rights or treaties. When corporations act like
criminals, we have the right and the power to
stop them, holding leaders and multinational
corporations alike to the accords they have
signed. Around the world--in Venezuela,
Argentina, India, and right here in the United
States--citizens are stepping up to create
democracy and hold corporations accountable to
international law.

Caterpillar

For years, the Caterpillar Company has provided
Israel with the bulldozers used to destroy
Palestinian homes. Despite worldwide
condemnation, Caterpillar has refused to end its
corporate participation house demolition by
cutting off sales of specially modified D9 and
D10 bulldozers to the Israeli military.

In a letter to Caterpillar CEO James Owens, The
Office of the UN High Commissioner on Human
Rights said: "allowing the delivery of your ...
bulldozers to the Israeli army ... in the certain
knowledge that they are being used for such
action, might involve complicity or acceptance on
the part of your company to actual and potential
violations of human rights..."

Peace activist Rachel Corrie was killed by a
Caterpillar D-9, military bulldozer in 2003. She
was run over while attempting to block the
destruction a family's home in Gaza. Her family
filed suit against Caterpillar in March 2005
charging that Caterpillar knowingly sold machines
used to violate human rights. Since Corrie's
death at least three more Palestinians have been
killed in their homes by Israeli bulldozer
demolitions.

Chevron

The petrochemical company Chevron is guilty of
some of the worst environmental and human rights
abuses in the world. From 1964 to 1992, Texaco
(which transferred operations to Chevron after
being bought out in 2001) unleashed a toxic
"Rainforest Chernobyl" in Ecuador by leaving over
600 unlined oil pits in pristine northern Amazon
rainforest and dumping 18 billion gallons of
toxic production water into rivers used for
bathing water. Llocal communities have suffered
severe health effects, including cancer, skin
lesions, birth defects, and spontaneous
abortions.

Chevron is also responsible for the violent
repression of peaceful opposition to oil
extraction. In Nigeria, Chevron has hired private
military personnel to open fire on peaceful
protestors who oppose oil extraction in the Niger
Delta.

Additionally Chevron is responsible for
widespread health problems in Richmond,
California, where one of Chevron's largest
refineries is located. Processing 350,000 barrels
of oil a day, the Richmond refinery produces oil
flares and toxic waste in the Richmond area. As a
result, local residents suffer from high rates of
lupus, skin rashes, rheumatic fever, liver
problems, kidney problems, tumors, cancer,
asthma, and eye problems.

The Unocal Corporation, which recently became a
subsidiary of Chevron, is an oil and gas company
based in California with operations around the
world. In December 2004, the company settled a
lawsuit filed by 15 Burmese villagers, in which
the villagers alleged Unocal's complicity in a
range of human rights violations in Burma,
including rape, summary execution, torture,
forced labor and forced migration.

Coca-Cola

Coca-Cola Company is perhaps the most widely
recognized corporate symbol on the planet. The
company also leads in the abuse of workers'
rights, assassinations, water privatization, and
worker discrimination. Between 1989 and 2002,
eight union leaders from Coca-Cola bottling
plants in Colombia were killed after protesting
the company's labor practices. Hundreds of other
Coca-Cola workers who have joined or considered
joining the Colombian union SINALTRAINAL have
been kidnapped, tortured, and detained by
paramilitaries who are hired to intimidate
workers to prevent them from unionizing.

In India, Coca-Cola destroys local agriculture by
privatizing the country's water resources. In
Plachimada, Kerala, Coca-Cola extracted 1.5
million liters of deep well water, which they
bottled and sold under the names Dasani and
BonAqua. The groundwater was severely depleted,
affecting thousands of communities with water
shortages and destroying agricultural activity.
As a result, the remaining water became
contaminated with high chloride and bacteria
levels, leading to scabs, eye problems, and
stomach aches in the local population.

Coca-Cola is also one of the most discriminatory
employers in the world. In the year 2000, 2,000
African-American employees in the U.S. sued the
company for race-based disparities in pay and
promotions.

Dow Chemical

Dow Chemical has been destroying lives and
poisoning the planet for decades. The company is
best known for the ravages and health disaster
for millions of Vietnamese and U.S. Veterans
caused by its lethal Vietnam War defoliant, Agent
Orange. Dow also developed and perfected Napalm,
a brutal chemical weapon that burned many
innocents to death in Vietnam and other wars. In
1988, Dow provided pesticides to Saddam Hussein
despite warnings that they could be used to
produce chemical weapons.

In 2001, Dow inherited the toxic legacy of the
worst peacetime chemical disaster in history when
it acquired Union Carbide Corporation (UCC) and
its outstanding liabilities in Bhopal, India. On
Dec. 3, 1984, a chemical leak from a UCC
pesticide plant in Bhopal gassed thousands of
people to death and left more than 150,000
disabled or dying. Dow still refuses to address
its liabilities in Bhopal.

Dow Chemical's impact is felt globally from its
Midland, Michigan headquarters to New Plymouth,
New Zealand. In Midland, Dow has been producing
chlorinated chemicals and burning and burying its
waste including chemicals that make up Agent
Orange. In New Plymouth, 500,000 gallons of Agent
Orange were produced and thousands of tons of
dioxin-laced waste was dumped in agricultural
fields.

DynCorp

Private security contractors have become the
fastest-growing sector of the global economy
during the last decade--a $100-billion-a-year,
nearly unregulated industry. DynCorp, one of the
providers of these mercenary services,
demonstrates the industry's power and potential
to abuse human rights. While guarding Afghan
statesmen and African oil fields, training Iraqi
police forces, eradicating Colombian coca plants,
and protecting business interests in
hurricane-devastated New Orleans, these hired
guns bolster the security of governments and
organizations at the expense of many people's
human rights.

DynCorp's fumigation of coca crops along the
Colombian-Ecuadorian border led Ecuadorian
peasants to sue DynCorp in 2001. Plaintiffs
argued that DynCorp knew--or should have
known--that the herbicides were highly toxic.

In 2001, a mechanic with DynCorp blew the whistle
on DynCorp employees in Bosnia for rape and
trading girls as young as 12 into sex slavery.
According to a lawsuit filed by the mechanic,
"employees and supervisors were engaging in
perverse, illegal and inhumane behavior [and]
were purchasing illegal weapons, women, [and]
forged passports." DynCorp fired the
whistleblower and transferred the employees
accused of sex trading out of the country,
eventually firing some. None were prosecuted.

Ford Motor Company

Among automakers, Ford Motor Company is the
worst. Every year since 1999, the US
Environmental Protection Agency has ranked Ford
cars, trucks and SUVs as having the worst overall
fuel economy of any American automaker. Ford's
current car and truck fleet has a lower average
fuel efficiency than the original Ford Model-T.

Ford is also in last place when it comes to
vehicle greenhouse gas emissions. According to a
recent report by the Union of Concerned
Scientists, Ford has "the absolute worst
heat-trapping gas emissions performance of all
the Big Six automakers."

Despite the company's recent greenwashing PR
campaign, its record has actually worsened.
According to Ford's own sustainability report,
between 2003 and 2004, the company's US
fleet-wide fuel economy decreased and its CO2
emissions went up. Ford has also lobbied against
lawmakers' efforts to increase fuel economy
standards at the national level and is also
involved in a lawsuit against California's fuel
economy standards.

KBR (Kellogg, Brown and Root): A Subsidiary of
Halliburton Corporation

KBR is a private company that provides military
support services. Notorious for its questionable
bookkeeping, dishonest billing practices with US
taxpayer dollars and no-bid contracts, KBR has
violated human rights on the U.S. dollar.

KBR's dubious accounting in Iraq came to light in
December 2003 when Pentagon auditors questioned
possible overcharges for imported gasoline. In
June 2005, a previously secret Pentagon audit
criticized $1.4 billion in "questioned" and
"unsupported" expenditures. In 2002 the company
paid $2 million to settle a Justice Department
lawsuit that accused KBR of inflating contract
prices at Fort Ord, California.

Many third-country national (TCN) laborers have
been hired by KBR to "rebuild" Iraq. Generally
hailing from impoverished Asian countries, they
have unexpectedly become part of the largest
civilian workforce ever hired in support of a
U.S. war. Once abroad, the workers find
themselves with few protections and uncertain
legal status. TCNs often sleep in crowded
trailers and wait outside in scorching heat for
food rations. Many lack adequate medical care and
put in hard labor seven days a week, 10 hours or
more a day.

Lockheed Martin

Lockheed Martin is the world's largest military
contractor. Providing satellites, planes,
missiles and other lethal high-tech items to the
Pentagon keeps the profits rolling in. Since
2000, the year Bush was elected, the company's
stock value has tripled.

As the Center for Corporate Policy
(www.corporatepolicy.org) notes, it is no
coincidence that Lockheed VP Bruce Jackson--who
helped draft the Republican foreign policy
platform in 2000--is a key player at the Project
for a New American Century, the intellectual
incubator of the Iraq war.

Lockheed Martin is not the only defense
contractor that goes behind the scenes to
influence public policy, but it is one of the
worst. Stephen J. Hadley, who now has Condoleeza
Rice's old job as Assistant to the President for
National Security Affairs, was formerly a partner
in a DC law firm representing Lockheed Martin. He
is only one of the beneficiaries of the so-called
revolving door between the military industries
and the "civilian" national security apparatus.
These war profiteers have a profound and
illegitimate influence on our country's
international policy decisions.

Monsanto

Monsanto is, by far, the largest producer of
genetically engineered seeds in the world,
dominating 70% to 100% of the market for crops
such as soy, cotton, wheat and corn.

Monsanto is the world's leading producer of the
herbicide glyphosate, marketed as Roundup.
Roundup is sold to small farmers as a pesticide,
yet harms crops in the long run as the toxins
accumulate in the soil. Plants eventually become
infertile, forcing farmers to purchase
genetically modified Roundup Ready Seed, a seed
that resists the herbicide. This creates a cycle
of dependency on Monsanto for both the weed
killer and the only seed that can resist it. Both
products are patented, and sold at inflated
prices. Exposure to the pesticide Roundup Ultra
is documented to cause cancers, skin disorders,
spontaneous abortions, premature births, and
damage to the gastrointestinal and nervous
systems.

According to the India Committee of the
Netherlands and the International Labor Rights
Fund, Monsanto also employs child labor. In
India, an estimated 12,375 children work in
cottonseed production for farmers paid by Indian
and multinational seed companies, including
Monsanto.

Nestle USA

The problem of illegal and forced child labor is
rampant in the chocolate industry, because more
than 40% of the world's cocoa supply comes from
the Ivory Coast, a country that the US State
Department estimates had approximately 109,000
child laborers working in hazardous conditions on
cocoa farms. In 2001, Save the Children Canada
reported that 15,000 children between 9 and 12
years old, many from impoverished Mali, had been
tricked or sold into slavery on West African
cocoa farms, many for just $30 each.

Nestle, the third largest buyer of cocoa from the
Ivory Coast, is well aware of the tragically
unjust labor practices taking place on the farms
with which it continues to do business. Nestle
and other chocolate manufacturers agreed to end
the use of abusive and forced child labor on
cocoa farms by July 1, 2005, but they failed to
do so.

Nestle is also notorious for its aggressive
marketing of infant formula in poor countries in
the 1980s. Because of this practice, Nestle is
still one of the most boycotted corporations in
the world, and its infant formula is still
controversial. In Italy in 2005, police seized
more than two million liters of Nestle infant
formula that was contaminated with the chemical
isopropylthioxanthone (ITX).

Additionally, violations of labor rights are
reported from Nestle factories in numerous
countries. In Colombia, Nestle replaced the
entire factory staff with lower-wage workers and
did not renew the collective employment contract.

Philip Morris USA and Philip Morris International
(a.k.a. The Altria Group Inc.)

Among tobacco companies, Philip Morris is
notorious. Now called Altria, it is the world's
largest and most profitable cigarette corporation
and maker of Marlboro, Virginia Slims,
Parliament, Basic and many other brands of
cigarettes.

Documents uncovered in a lawsuit filed against
the tobacco industry by the state of Minnesota
showed that Philip Morris and other leading
tobacco corporations knew very well of the
dangers of tobacco products and the addictiveness
of nicotine. To this day, Philip Morris deceives
consumers about the harm of its products by
offering light, mild and low-tar cigarettes that
give consumers the illusion these brands are
"healthier" than traditional cigarettes.

Although the company says it doesn't want kids to
smoke, it spends millions of dollars every day
marketing and promoting cigarettes to youth.
Overseas, it has even hired underage "Marlboro
girls" to distribute free cigarettes to other
children and sponsored concerts where cigarettes
were handed out to minors.

As anti-tobacco campaigns and government
regulations are slowing tobacco use in Western
countries, Philip Morris has aggressively moved
into developing country markets, where smoking
and smoking-related deaths are on the rise.
Preliminary numbers released by the World Health
Organization predict global deaths due to
smoking-related illnesses will nearly double by
2020, with more than three-quarters of those
deaths in the developing world.

Pfizer

Pfizer is the largest pharmaceutical company in
the world; it is also one of the worst abusers of
the human right of universal access to HIV/AIDS
medicine.

In addition to Viagra, Zoloft, Zithromax and
Norvasc, Pfizer produces the HIV/AIDS-related
drugs Rescriptor, Viracept and Diflucan
(fluconazole). Like other drug companies, they
sell these drugs at prices poor people cannot
afford and aggressively fight efforts to make it
easier for generic drugs to enter the market.

Pfizer also values shareholder profits over
safety standards. In Europe in 2005, it withdrew
from scientific studies of a new class of AIDS
drugs called CCR5 inhibitors, choosing instead to
rush its own untested CCR5 inhibitor onto the
European market without full information about
the drug's side effects.

Suez-Lyonnaise Des Eaux (SLDE)

The privatization of water has had a disastrous
impact on the human right to clean water, and the
French company Suez is the worst perpetrator of
this abuse. The company's billions of dollars in
profit come at the expense of poor people living
in countries where thousands lack access to
potable water, and, because of private water
contracts, are also facing skyrocketing water
prices.

Suez goes by many names around the world--Ondeo,
SITA and others--to mask its worldwide net of
controversial activities. In Manila, Philippines,
after seven years of water privatization under a
Suez company (Maynilad Water) contract, studies
showed that water rates increased in some
neighborhoods by 400 to 700 percent. These
studies also showed that the negligence of the
company resulted in cholera and gastroenteritis
outbreaks that killed six people and severely
sickened 725 in Manila's Tondo district.

In Bolivia, a Suez company (Aguas de Illimani)
left 200,000 people without access to water and
caused a revolt when it tried to charge between
$335 and $445 to connect a private home to the
water supply. Countless people were unable to
afford this charge in a country whose yearly per
capita GDP is $915.

Unfortunately, the IMF and World Bank are playing
a key role in pushing water privatization all
over the world. Many countries have been required
to open up their water supply to private
companies as a condition for receiving IMF loans,
and the World Bank has approved millions of
dollars in loans for the privatization of water
systems.

Wal-Mart

Wal-Mart is the biggest corporation in the world.
It owns 5,100 stores worldwide and employs 1.3
million workers in the United States and 400,000
abroad, as well as millions more in the factories
of its suppliers.

Many people have heard of the way that Wal-Mart
steamrolls its way into every possible town,
destroying local supermarkets and countless small
businesses. We have also heard about Wal-Mart's
long track record of worker abuse, from forced
overtime to sex discrimination to illegal child
labor to relentless union busting. Wal-Mart also
notoriously fails to provide health insurance to
over half of its employees, who are then left to
rely on themselves or taxpayers, who provide for
a portion of their healthcare needs through
government Medicaid.

Less well known is the fact that Wal-Mart
maintains its low price level by allowing
substandard labor conditions at the overseas
factories producing most of its goods. The
company continually demands lower prices from its
suppliers, who, in turn, make more outrageous and
abusive demands on their workers in order to meet
Wal-Mart's requirements.

In September 2005, the International Labor Rights
Fund filed a lawsuit on behalf of Wal-Mart
supplier sweatshop workers in China, Indonesia,
Bangladesh, Nicaragua and Swaziland. The workers
were denied minimum wages, forced to work
overtime without compensation, and were denied
legally mandated health care. Other worker rights
violations that have been found in foreign
factories that produce goods for Wal-Mart include
locked bathrooms, starvation wages, pregnancy
tests, denial of access to health care, and
workers being fired and blacklisted if they try
to defend their rights.


Visit Global Exchange to read the full report

of the Most Wanted Corporate Human Rights
Violators of 2005, and find out how to connect
with groups that are doing something about
corporate abuses.





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Message: 2
Date: Thu, 15 Dec 2005 11:56:49 -0800 (PST)
From: Scott McLarty
Subject: [usgp-dx] The CIA's 'enhanced interrogation techniques',
i.e., torture (Nat Hentoff, Village Voice)
To: usgp-media (at) gp-us.org, natlcomaffairs (at) green.gpus.org
Message-ID:
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1

CIA War Crimes
CIA has documented every use of its exclusive
'enhanced interrogation techniques'

by Nat Hentoff
The Village Voice, December 9, 2005
villagevoice.com/news/0550,hentoff,70898,6.html


"Nothing in the [Geneva] Conventions [on the
treatment of prisoners of war] precludes directed
interrogations. They do, however, prohibit
torture and humiliation of detainees, whether or
not they are deemed P.O.W.'s. These are standards
that are never obsolete—they cut to the heart of
how moral people must treat other human beings."
John McCain, in Torture: A Human Rights
Perspective, edited by Kenneth Roth and Minky
Worden (The New Press)

In a November 21 USA Today interview with Porter
Goss, the head of the CIA "declined to describe
interrogation methods exclusive to the CIA." He
thereby confirmed Attorney General Alberto
Gonzales's statement during his confirmation
hearings that the CIA has "special powers." Where
did the CIA get permission to overrule the rule
of law? The word came from a classified directive
by President George W. Bush soon after 9-11, and
was confirmed by Attorney General Alberto
Gonzales. (Emphases added.)

Therefore, whatever is increasingly revealed
about how the CIA uses its grant of cruel and
unusual exclusivity in dealing with prisoners
makes George W. Bush directly accountable for any
crimes committed.

This president is not going to be impeached,
except by history. However, historians will find
reams of evidence against him and other members
of his administration in such books as The
Torture Papers, edited by Karen Greenberg and
Joshua Dratel (Cambridge University Press), and
Torture and Truth, by Mark Danner (a New York
Review of Books volume).

Also contributing to the immutable record are
such journalists as Dana Priest of The Washington
Post and Brian Ross of ABC News. Revealing why
the ratings of network television newscasts
continue to drop is the disgraceful decision by
the producers of ABC's World News Tonight to give
only three and a half minutes to the Brian Ross
investigation of some of the interrogation
techniques Porter Goss will not describe.

But Ross and Richard Esposito detailed them at
length on abcnews.com on November 18. (I believe
the late Peter Jennings would have given much
more than three and a half minutes to this
breakthrough story on World News Tonight.)

Last week, I quoted what Brian Ross had found
from present and former CIA officers and
supervisors about extracting confessions from
"water boarding." Ross also cited a description
of that "exclusive" CIA technique by John Sifton
of Human Rights Watch: "The person[s] believe
they are being killed, and as such, it really
amounts to a mock execution, which is illegal
under international law."

Indeed, what we are learning about the CIA's
"enhanced interrogation techniques" are also
violations of our own War Crimes Act (Section
2441 of the federal criminal code). This statute
also provides that:

"Whoever, whether inside or outside the United
States, commits a war crime . . . shall be fined
under this title or imprisoned for life, or any
term of years, or both, and if death results to
the victim, shall also be subject to the penalty
of death."

Our War Crimes Act criminalizes as a "war crime"
a "grave breach" of Common Article 3 of the
Geneva Conventions, which this country ratified.


As page 1160 of The Torture Papers explains:
"With respect to interrogation in armed conflict,
Common Article 3 requires humane treatment
generally, and specifically forbids 'cruel
treatment and torture' or 'outrages upon personal
dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading
treatment.'"

>From CIA sources, Brian Ross has cited six of the
"enhanced interrogation techniques." Among them
is "Long Time Standing": "This technique is
described as among the most effective. Prisoners
are forced to stand, handcuffed and with their
feet shackled to an eye bolt on the floor for
more than 40 hours. Exhaustion and sleep
deprivation are effective in yielding
confessions."

Another technique is "The Cold Cell": "The
prisoner is left to stand naked in a cell kept
near 50 degrees. Throughout the time in the cell
the prisoner is doused with cold water."

Now, here is a smoking gun from the Ross report:

"According to CIA sources, Ibn al Shaykh al
Libbi, after two weeks of enhanced interrogation,
made statements that were designed to tell the
interrogators what they wanted to hear . . . al
Libbi had been subjected to each of the
progressively harsher techniques in turn and
finally broke after being water boarded and then
left to stand naked in his cold cell overnight
where he was doused with cold water at regular
intervals.

"His statements became part of the basis for the
Bush administration claims that Iraq trained Al
Qaeda members to use biochemical weapons. Sources
tell ABC that it was later established that al
Libbi had no knowledge of such training or
weapons and fabricated the statements because he
was terrified of further harsh treatment."
(Emphasis added.)

Since these war crimes, including torture as
defined in international and American law, are
being done in our name, the following Brian Ross
discovery should lead to a congressional
investigation with subpoena powers all the way to
the top of the chain of command:

"According to the sources, when an interrogator
wishes to use a particular technique on a
prisoner, the policy at the CIA is that each step
of the interrogation process must be signed off
at the highest level—by the deputy director of
operations for the CIA. A cable must be sent and
a reply received each time a progres- sively
harsher technique is used . . . there are few
known instances when an approval has not been
granted. Still, even the toughest critics of the
techniques say they are relatively well monitored
and limited in use."

How "limited in use"? And what about those of the
techniques that are war crimes under the
definitions in law that I have cited? The CIA has
all the information about their use. Meanwhile,
around the world, and not only among our enemies,
this country is increasingly seen as a habitual,
egregious violator of human rights. Let's finally
put the CIA under the rule of law.

We can only begin to redeem ourselves in the war
on terrorism by holding publicly accountable
those who have authorized, as well as committed,
these "enhanced interrogation techniques." But
the Democratic Party leadership appears to be
afraid to make this a centerpiece of its
opposition to the Bush administration.