The following was written back in 1995......and now look where it has led us in 2002...
"The corporate crime lobby rioted in Washington, D.C. this year, putting the torch to law-and-order restrictions on corporate America. Big corporations with recidivist crime records marched arm-in-arm with accountants and lawyers, swarming the marbled corridors of power, demanding protection for corporate and white-collar criminals caught stealing from investors, polluting the environment or injuring consumers.
When anyone dares challenge these corporate decriminalization and furlough proposals, their shameless proponents lash out with moral indignation.
At a press conference earlier this year, Corporate lobby poster boy House Speaker Newt Gingrich was asked why his "Contract with America" addressed street crime, while ignoring the more damaging corporate crime and violence. Gingrich said that probably 90 percent of the U.S. population is more fearful of being "blown away walking into a Seven-Eleven" than of dying from an occupational disease. "If I go around the country and say, 'vote for us and there will be no more white-collar fraud,' the average voter would say, 'I don't think he gets it.'"
This public perception is shaped by corporate media and tabloid television trash, which focus overwhelmingly on street crime. If these media devoted proportional time to the corporate muggings and homicides that are carried out through fraud, unsafe products, pollution and occupational accidents and disease, public perceptions would shift to more accurately reflect reality.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) reports that burglary and robbery combined cost the United States approximately $4 billion a year. In contrast, white-collar fraud, generally committed by intelligent people of means, costs 50 times as much -- or $200 billion a year, according to W. Steve Albrecht, a Brigham Young University accounting professor and co-author of the book Fraud: Bringing Light to the Dark Side of Business.
The FBI reports approximately 24,000 street crime homicides a year. More than twice that number -- 56,000 Americans -- die each year on the job or from occupational diseases such as job-related cancers and brown and black lung disease. This does not include the health costs to the general public of corporate pollution.
In their relentless search for campaign funds, Gingrich and many of his bi-partisan cronies overlook the need to deter crime by enforcing the law against society's most powerful lawbreakers. Yet, respect for legal authority is like a fish -- it rots from the head down. Why should street criminals respect the law when members of Congress give the green light to corporate America to plunder?
Gingrich says that the time has come to "reestablish shame as means of enforcing proper behavior." To help balance Gingrich's targeting of shame on the poor, Multinational Monitor presents the 10 worst corporations of 1995, to "reestablish shame as a means of enforcing proper behavior" -- in the boardroom.
ADM: FOOD STAMP KING
How does "America's supermarket to the world," which is fighting allegations of large-scale international price-fixing by a former executive, preserve its position as the biggest U.S. corporate welfare recipient even as Congress is removing millions of citizens from social welfare rolls?
What Decatur, Illinois-based ADM has that less fortunate welfare recipients lack is the money and savvy to buy political and media influence. There is no good policy reason to preserve the best-fed U.S. welfare recipient's place at the public trough. This is the conclusion of many welfare experts, including James Bovard, a fellow of the libertarian Cato Institute in Washington, D.C. Bovard's 1995 report, "Archer Daniels Midland: A Case Study in Corporate Welfare," found that ADM leads the corporate welfare pack.
"ADM and its chairman, Dwayne Andreas, have lavishly fertilized both political parties with millions of dollars in handouts and in return have reaped billion-dollar windfalls from taxpayers and consumers," Bovard wrote. "Thanks to federal protection of the domestic sugar industry, ethanol subsidies, subsidized grain exports, and various other programs, ADM has cost the American economy billions of dollars since 1980 and higher prices and higher taxes over that same period."
The Cato report also found that: every $1 of profits ADM earns on ethanol sales costs taxpayers $30; every $1 of profits ADM earns on corn sweetener costs consumers $10; the grain-export subsidies that line ADM's pockets in the name of alleviating Third World hunger have devastated the economies of recipient nations; and taken together, the agricultural welfare programs championed by ADM have cost the U.S. economy at least $40 billion over the past 15 years.
Andreas and ADM do not defend themselves on free-market terms. "There isn't one grain of anything in the world that is sold in a free market," Andreas recently told Mother Jones magazine. "Not one! The only place you see a free market is in the speeches of politicians. People who are not from the Midwest do not understand that this is a socialist country." ADM did not return calls from Multinational Monitor.
In a celebrated whistle-blower case this year, former ADM executive Mark Whitacre alleged that, having helped itself to a huge slab of the corporate welfare pie, ADM got greedy and participated in a global conspiracy involving corporate espionage, technology theft and price fixing. ADM fired Whitacre in August 1995, accusing him of "the theft of at least $2.5 million from the company," allegations Whitacre denies.
Whitacre, a Ph.D. in nutritional biochemistry, joined ADM in 1989 to run a biochemical division producing lysine, an amino acid supplement for animal feed. After ADM made a large investment in the product, lysine prices plummeted. Whitacre alleges that ADM responded by getting the world's leading lysine makers to fix higher prices.
ENRON'S POLITICAL PROFIT PIPELINE
In early 1995, the world's biggest natural gas company began clearing ground 100 miles south of Bombay, India for a $2.8 billion, gas-fired power plant -- the largest single foreign investment in India.
Villagers claimed that the power plant was overpriced and that its effluent would destroy their fisheries and coconut and mango trees. One villager opposing Enron put it succinctly, "Why not remove them before they remove us?"
As Pratap Chatterjee reported ["Enron Deal Blows a Fuse," Multinational Monitor, July/August 1995], hundreds of villagers stormed the site that was being prepared for Enron's 2,015-megawatt plant in May 1995, injuring numerous construction workers and three foreign advisers.
After winning Maharashtra state elections, the conservative nationalistic Bharatiya Janata Party canceled the deal, sending shock waves through Western businesses with investments in India.
Maharashtra officials said they acted to prevent the Houston, Texas-based company from making huge profits off "the backs of India's poor." New Delhi's Hindustan Times editorialized in June 1995, "It is time the West realized that India is not a banana republic which has to dance to the tune of multinationals."
Enron officials are not so sure. Hoping to convert the cancellation into a temporary setback, the company launched an all-out campaign to get the deal back on track. In late November 1995, the campaign was showing signs of success, although progress was taking a toll on the handsome rate of return that Enron landed in the first deal. In India, Enron is now being scrutinized by the public, which is demanding contracts reflecting market rates. But it's a big world.
In November 1995, the company announced that it has signed a $700 million deal to build a gas pipeline from Mozambique to South Africa. The pipeline will service Mozambique's Pande gas field, which will produce an estimated two trillion cubic feet of gas.
The deal, in which Enron beat out South Africa's state petroleum company Sasol, sparked controversy in Africa following reports that the Clinton administration, including the U.S. Agency for International Development, the U.S. Embassy and even National Security adviser Anthony Lake, lobbied Mozambique on behalf of Enron.
"There were outright threats to withhold development funds if we didn't sign, and sign soon," John Kachamila, Mozambique's natural resources minister, told the Houston Chronicle. Enron spokesperson Diane Bazelides declined to comment on the these allegations, but said that the U.S. government had been "helpful as it always is with American companies." Spokesperson Carol Hensley declined to respond to a hypothetical question about whether or not Enron would approve of U.S. government threats to cut off aid to a developing nation if the country did not sign an Enron deal.
Enron has been repeatedly criticized for relying on political clout rather than low bids to win contracts. Political heavyweights that Enron has engaged on its behalf include former U.S. Secretary of State James Baker, former U.S. Commerce Secretary Robert Mosbacher and retired General Thomas Kelly, U.S. chief of operations in the 1990 Gulf War. Enron's Board includes former Commodities Futures Trading Commission Chair Wendy Gramm (wife of presidential hopeful Senator Phil Gramm, R-Texas), former U.S. Deputy Treasury Secretary Charles Walker and John Wakeham, leader of the House of Lords and former U.K. Energy Secretary. |
