The
ten worst corporations of 2002
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Deliver us from
finity:
Capitalism is
not even mathematically possible,
let alone biologically viable
By George Monbiot
With the turning of every year, we expect our
lives to improve. As long as the economy continues to grow,
we imagine, the world will become a more congenial place in
which to live. There is no basis for this belief. If we take
into account such factors as pollution and the depletion of
natural capital, we see that the quality of life peaked in the
United Kingdom in 1974 and in the United States in 1968, and
has been falling ever since. We are going backwards.
The reason should not be hard to grasp. Our economic
system depends upon never-ending growth, yet we live in a world
with finite resources. Our expectation of progress is, as a
result, a delusion.
This is the great heresy of our times, the fundamental
truth which cannot be spoken. It is dismissed as furiously by
those who possess power today -- governments, business, the
media -- as the discovery that the earth orbits the sun was
denounced by the late medieval Church. Speak this truth in public
and you are dismissed as a crank, a prig, a lunatic.
Capitalism is a millenarian cult, raised to the
status of a world religion. Like communism, it is built upon
the myth of endless exploitation. Just as Christians imagine
that their God will deliver them from death, capitalists believe
that theirs will deliver them from finity. The world’s
resources, they assert, have been granted eternal life.
The briefest reflection will show that this cannot
be true. The laws of thermodynamics impose inherent limits upon
biological production. Even the repayment of debt, the pre-requisite
of capitalism, is mathematically possible only in the short-term.
As Heinrich Haussmann has shown, a single pfennig invested at
5 percent compounded interest in the year 0 AD would, by 1990,
have reaped a volume of gold 134 billion times the weight of
the planet. Capitalism seeks a value of production commensurate
with the repayment of debt.
Now, despite the endless denials, it is clear
that the wall towards which we are accelerating is not very
far away. Within five or ten years, the global consumption of
oil is likely to outstrip supply. Every year, up to 75 billion
tons of topsoil are washed into the sea as a result of unsustainable
farming, which equates to the loss of around nine million hectares
of productive land. As a result, we can maintain current levels
of food production only with the application of phosphate, but
phosphate reserves are likely to be exhausted within 80 years.
Forty per cent of the world’s food is produced with the
help of irrigation; some of the key aquifers are already running
dry as a result of overuse.
One reason why we fail to understand a concept
as simple as finity is that our religion was founded upon the
use of other people’s resources: the gold, rubber and timber
of Latin America, the spices, cotton and dyes of the East Indies,
the labor and land of Africa. The frontier of exploitation seemed,
to the early colonists, infinitely expandable. Now that geographical
expansion has reached its limits, capitalism has moved its frontier
from space to time: seizing resources from an infinite future.
An entire industry has been built upon the denial
of ecological constraints. Every national newspaper in Britain
lamented the "disappointing" volume of sales before
Christmas. Sky News devoted much of its Christmas Eve coverage
to live reports from Brent Cross, relaying the terrifying intelligence
that we were facing "the worst Christmas for shopping since
2000." The survival of humanity has been displaced in the
newspapers by the quarterly results of companies selling tableware
and knickers.
Partly because they have been brainwashed by the
corporate media, partly because of the scale of the moral challenge
with which finity confronts them, many people respond to the
heresy with unmediated savagery. Last week this column discussed
the competition for global grain supplies between humans and
livestock. One correspondent, a man named David Roucek, wrote
to inform me that the problem is the result of people "breeding
indiscriminately. ... When a woman has displayed evidence that
she totally disregards the welfare of her offspring by continuing
to breed children she cannot support, she has committed a crime
and must be punished. The punishment? She must be sterilized
to prevent her from perpetrating her crimes upon more innocent
children."
There is no doubt that a rising population is
one of the factors which threatens the world’s capacity
to support its people, but human population growth is being
massively outstripped by the growth in the number of farm animals.
While the rich world’s consumption is supposed to be boundless,
the human population is likely to peak within the next few decades.
But population growth is the one factor for which the poor can
be blamed and from which the rich can be excused, so it is the
one factor which is repeatedly emphasized.
It is possible to change the way we live. The
economist Bernard Lietaer has shown how a system based upon
negative rates of interest would ensure that we accord greater
economic value to future resources than to present ones. By
shifting taxation from employment to environmental destruction,
governments could tax over-consumption out of existence. But
everyone who holds power today knows that her political survival
depends upon stealing from the future to give to the present.
Overturning this calculation is the greatest challenge
humanity has ever faced. We need to reverse not only the fundamental
presumptions of political and economic life, but also the polarity
of our moral compass. Everything we thought was good -- giving
more exciting presents to our children, flying to a friend’s
wedding, even buying newspapers -- turns out also to be bad.
It is, perhaps, hardly surprising that so many deny the problem
with such religious zeal. But to live in these times without
striving to change them is like watching, with serenity, the
oncoming truck in your path.
Source: Guardian (UK)
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The ten worst
corporations of 2002
By Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman
The year 2002 will forever be remembered as the
year of corporate crime, the year even President George Bush
embraced the notion of "corporate responsibility."
While the Bush White House has now downgraded
its "corporate responsibility portal" to a mere link
to uninspiring content on the White House webpage, and although
the prospect of war has largely bumped the issue off the front
pages, the cascade of corporate financial and accounting scandals
continues.
We easily could have filled Multinational Monitor’s
list of the 10 Worst Corporations of the Year with some of the
dozens of companies embroiled in the financial scandals.
But we decided against that course.
As extraordinary as the financial misconduct has
been, we didn’t want to contribute to the perception that
corporate wrongdoing in 2002 was limited to the financial misdeeds
arena.
For Multinational Monitor’s 10 Worst Corporations
of 2002 list, we included only Andersen from the ranks of the
financial criminals and miscreants. Andersen’s assembly
line document destruction certainly merits a place on the list.
(Citigroup appears on the list as well, but primarily for a
subsidiary’s involvement in predatory lending, as well
as the company’s funding of environmentally destructive
projects around the world.)
As for the rest, we present a collection of polluters,
dangerous pill peddlers, modern-day mercenaries, enablers of
human rights abuses, merchants of death, and beneficiaries of
rural destruction and misery.
Appearing in alphabetical order, the 10 worst
are:
Arthur Andersen, for a massive scheme to destroy
documents related to the Enron meltdown. "Tons of paper
relating to the Enron audit were promptly shredded as part of
the orchestrated document destruction," a federal indictment
against Andersen alleged. "The shredder at the Andersen
office at the Enron building was used virtually constantly and,
to handle the overload, dozens of large trunks filled with Enron
documents were sent to Andersen’s main Houston office to
be shredded." Andersen was convicted for illegal document
destruction, effectively putting the company out of business.
British American Tobacco (BAT), for operating
worldwide programs supposedly designed to prevent youth smoking
but which actually make the practice more attractive to kids
(by suggesting smoking is an adult activity), continuing to
deny the harmful health effects of second-hand smoke, and working
to oppose efforts at the World Health Organization to adopt
a strong Framework Convention on Tobacco Control.
Caterpillar, for selling bulldozers to the Israeli
Defense Forces (IDF), which are used as an instrument of war
to destroy Palestinian homes and buildings. The IDF has destroyed
more than 7,000 Palestinian homes since the beginning of the
Israeli occupation in 1967, leaving 30,000 people homeless.
Citigroup, both for its deep involvement in the
Enron and other financial scandals and its predatory lending
practices through its recently acquired subsidiary The Associates.
Citigroup paid $215 million to resolve Federal Trade Commission
(FTC) charges that The Associates engaged in systematic and
widespread deceptive and abusive lending practices.
DynCorp, a controversial private firm which subcontracts
military services with the Defense Department, for flying planes
that spray herbicides on coca crops in Colombia. Farmers on
the ground allege that the herbicides are killing their legal
crops, and exposing them to dangerous toxins.
M&M/Mars, for responding tepidly to revelations
about child slaves in the West African fields where much of
the world’s cocoa is grown, and refusing to commit to purchase
a modest 5 percent of its product from Fair Trade providers.
Procter & Gamble, the maker of Folger’s
coffee and part of the coffee roaster oligopoly, for failing
to take action to address plummeting coffee bean prices. Low
prices have pushed tens of thousands of farmers in Central America,
Ethiopia, Uganda and elsewhere to the edge of survival, or destroyed
their means of livelihood altogether.
Schering Plough, for a series of scandals, most
prominently allegations of repeated failure over recent years
to fix problems in manufacturing dozens of drugs at four of
its facilities in New Jersey and Puerto Rico. Schering paid
$500 million to settle the case with the Food and Drug Administration.
Shell Oil, for continuing business as usual as
one of the world’s leading environmental violators —
while marketing itself as a socially and environmentally responsible
company.
Wyeth, for using duplicitous means, and without
sufficient scientific proof, to market hormone replacement therapy
(HRT) to women as a fountain of youth. Scientific evidence reported
in 2002 showed that long-term HRT actually threatens women’s
lives, by increasing the risks of breast cancer, heart attack,
stroke and pulmonary embolism.
What’s the lesson to draw from this year’s
10 worst list? Not only are Enron, WorldCom, Adelphia, Tyco
and the rest indicative of a fundamentally corrupt financial
system, they are representative of a rotten system of corporate
dominance.
Russell Mokhiber is editor of the Washington,
DC-based Corporate Crime Reporter.
Robert Weissman is editor of the Washington, DC-based Multinational
Monitor.
The full 10 Worst Corporations of 2002 list is available at
www.multinationalmonitor.org.
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